By JOE MORGENSTERN/ wsj.com, May 18, 2012

There comes a time in "Battleship," a board game gone megabudget-ballistic, when the fate of our planet has seemingly been sealed by an attack from outer space. "We're looking at an extinction-level event," an astronomer declares, and it's hard to disagree, what with the invaders' stupendously powerful vessels, and the impenetrable force fields that protect them. Around this time, you may feel you're looking at another extinction-level event, one that threatens the end of logic, storytelling, characterization, hearing and maybe even the movie business as we know it. Still, the planet is saved by a U.S. Navy lieutenant, backed up by the Pacific fleet, while the movie is enlivened now and then by lines that rise above intentional stupidity into inspired idiocy, and by occasionally stunning imagery that cuts through the computer-generated clutter.

The Earth's savior, Lt. Alex Hopper, is played by Taylor Kitsch; he helped save Mars as John Carter in the recent misfortune of the same name. As a gifted young man who's made a mess of his life, Alex is long overdue for redemption. When opportunity knocks, however—he's suddenly asked to command the only ship inside the invaders' force field—he first says "I can't," and thereby triggers a choice idiocy from a shipmate, who responds plaintively, "If you can't, who can?"

Like "Transformers," which it rivals in relentlessness, "Battleship" comes with its own force field, a furious energy that renders criticism irrelevant. It's still worth noting that something odd is going on in the sketchy story. One example involves an early sequence, and an entertaining one, about Alex's efforts to fetch a burrito for a beautiful woman who turns out to be the admiral's daughter. (She's played with flawless plasticity by Brooklyn Decker.) Next thing we know, a few minutes later, Alex is nervously preparing to ask the admiral (Liam Neeson) to approve their marriage. Conventional notions of development and continuity have been replaced by a narrative technique best likened to sampling discrete events along a timeline.

Is that intentional? Surely not. Movies like this one, directed by Peter Berg from a ragtag script by Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, are such huge industrial enterprises that no one can keep track of all the pieces. And will the core audience care, or even notice? Probably not; nuance isn't the main attraction. But the same disjointed approach applies to the production design, where serious short-changing takes place. "Battleship" contains some beautiful effects: the devastation of Hong Kong, the raising of the force fields and, most notably, the form and function of the alien vessels, which suggest deranged Olympians doing the breast stroke. Yet those effects are sampled too, in slices too thin to give sustenance.