Bataille navale

The good parts of Battleship come very close to outweighing the bad, and remembering that grid-skipping board game section, or a splendidly shot hand-to-alien-hand combat scene, or that whole bananas sequence on the battleship, I find myself oddly affectionate toward a big dumb movie called Battleship.

Of course, director Peter Berg had fun blowing things up without regard for telling a cohesive story. Sure there are many that may simply be in the mood for the barrage of ammo, warheads and those giant alien bombs. In fact, this may be all they need. However, if you really want a good action movie and you'd like to be moved by the experience, this isn't worth wasting a Saturday afternoon over.

Mostly, Battleship is a noisy, overlong and numbing military-vs.-aliens saga with laughably bad dialogue.

Can you aim lower? Battleship is all noise and crashing metal, sinking to the shallows of Bay's Armageddon and then digging to the brain-extinction level of the Transformers trilogy.

Certainly the makers of Battleship, a cacophonous new special-effects extravaganza inspired (sort of) by a game youngsters once played with pencils and graph paper, have studied those old movies. You can tell because they seem to have borrowed rather a lot from them.