Battleship is not a good film. It is, on the other hand, a ridiculously awesome one.
I realise this is something of a contradiction in terms. Bear with me.
It doesn’t open promisingly. To be honest, one could skip the first ten or twenty minutes of the film and lose very little by it. In the first scenes, we learn that our protagonist, Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), is a dudebro screwup with an ego who’ll do anything to impress a girl, whose brother (Alexander Skarsgård) inveigles him into joining the U.S. Navy — at which point, we learn that Mr. Hopper also has a temper and some impulse control issues. Meanwhile, scientists are sending out signals to a newly-discovered planet in the Goldilocks zone, far, far away. If someone chooses to stop by Earth in answer to such signals, says one scientist — who seems to have a greater sense of self-preservation than the others — it’ll be “like Columbus and the Indians. And we’re the Indians.”
[That sound you hear in the background is the Ominous Foreshadowing Drumbeat of Doom.]