In a summer filled with sequels (The Dark Knight Rises, American Reunion) and reboots (The Amazing Spider-Man, Total Recall) it should be refreshing that a big budget action film is being released that doesn’t have a number or Roman Numeral at the end of its title. 

Should be.

This week sees the release of Peter Berg’s Battleship, a big budget (and by ‘BIG’ we mean $250+ million) CGI-fest that was released last month in Europe and Asia and finally gets the North American premiere treatment on May 18th. 

Loosely based on the Hasbro game of the same name, Battleship stars Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård and Rhianna in an action packed story about a fleet of naval warships who happen across an alien fleet while out on a Naval war exercise. 

Battleship opens with a straight forward explanation into the Beacon Project which has the human race attempting to communicate with another planet very similar to our own (bad mistake).  With the Beacon Project helping with the ‘whys’ of the film, Berg moves to the ‘whos’ and we are introduced to Alex and Stone Hooper (Taylor Kitsch and Skarsgård respectively). 

Alex is the younger and is assigned to the USS John Paul Jones as a Lieutenant and Stone is a Commanding Officer of the USS Sampson.  One is more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy (Alex) while the other is the career Navy-man who takes things way too seriously. 

We spend what will be considered eons of time in developing these cardboard characters until we finally get to sea and Alex heads out in a raft to investigate an alien object that seems to be floating without purpose. 

And then…BOOM!

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