Movie review: Battleship **

Stars: Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Liam Neeson, Rihanna
Director: Peter Berg
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Speciality Cinema week of Friday, June 1. For more information call 292-2135.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 128 minutes
Sci-fi/action

There will be bigger movies this summer, and better ones and worse ones. But there will not be a dumber movie than Battleship.

Ponderous and pandering, shameless and head-slappingly silly, this Navy vs Aliens epic delivers a few thrills and a few laughs.

A pointless prologue establishes that NASA has sent signals to a distant Earth-like planet. Warnings from one scientist that this is like the Incans inviting Conquistadors to visit are ignored.

Meanwhile, a reckless repeat offender (Taylor Kitsch) gets a bit buzzed on his birthday and commits a grand gesture (and very funny) break-in, just to fetch the fair Brooklyn Decker a microwave burrito. It's jail or the Navy, declares his Navy officer brother (Alexander Skarsgard).

That sets the table for the Hopper brothers' Navy service, and for the day the aliens come - in big, cumbersome, gear-and-shape-shifting ships which they use to encase a corner of Hawaii and the Pacific in a shielded bubble that means only three guided-missile destroyers (two American, one Japanese) can halt the coming invasion.

The folks we follow here are the brothers, on different ships; a couple of enlisted sailors, including the obligatory pop-star-as-actress (Rihanna); and Decker in tight jogging shorts as she motivates legless vet Gregory D. Gadson through rehab and back into action because America needs him.

And the folks we don't follow include Liam Neeson, admiral of the fleet and leader of a mass joint exercise that is going on at the time of the attack, a fleet that can't pitch and is thus irrelevant to the plot and forgotten for much of the picture.

The basic set-up owes a lot to Independence Day, the effects play like Transformers: The Next Generation, and the banter occasionally rises to the level of amusing. Erich and Jon Hoeber, who wrote the script, set up rules for this universe, and then break them. They commit great gaffes of logic in the name of convenience.

Actor-turned-director Peter Berg (The Rundown, the original Friday Night Lights movie) had a tough job, ignoring the holes in the plot, staging one clever cat-and-mouse-with-missiles scene to play like the Hasbro board game this is based on, shooting the whole thing like a slick, gray steel-and-sea-spray Navy recruiting film.