There are always big dumb summer blockbuster movies, with lots of hype and merchandising tie-ins that invariably seem to disappoint when they hit the theaters, because they try way too hard to be AWESOME and end up being ridiculous. And not ridiculous in an awesome way either, like Expendables 2 promises to be, or say, Die Hard 4. Just ridiculous. Like the Godzilla remake with Mathew Broderick a while back, or various Transformers sequels, or Independence Day and Armageddon, but not as good. And with so many movies I am eagerly anticipating this year, I have been increasingly concerned that luck or irony or whatever would cause one of them, at least, to be a Big Dumb Summer Blockbuster. Avengers and GI Joe 2 looked like the most likely candidates, and I was cool with that because I was not as invested in them, but Avengers was surprisingly superior to the typical BDSB, which only made me more worried! There is no way Hollywood is going to pitch a perfect summer, so it seemed like I was doomed to be disappointed by Dark Knight Rising, or something else I was really hoping would be good.

Well now I, and those who share my perspective can relax! THE BDSB of all BDSBs is here. Battleship(TM) is perfectly made to order, and the gremlins who ruin movies in that very special BDSB way must have been putting so much overtime into this one, we can be sure that many other films have escaped their touch!

First of all, the movie is way too long. There is a romantic subplot shoehorned in around the action, for all you ladies who won't set foot in a theater without some kissing. Because hey! Why WOULDN'T any self-respecting woman not come see this film! They added a romance plot, and the romantic characters spend all of about 10 of the 130 minutes on screen together. That is TOTALLY what will be required to get all you sensitive chick-flick lovers into a movie about explosions and ships and space aliens, based on a board game, amiright? And of COURSE all you ladies want a woman you can identify with, a tall, very thin, leggy blond woman whose chest movements are among the more interesting action scenes in a highly kinetic film.

There is a video circulating among my father's friends of an idiotic burglar robbing a convenience store from a security camera viewpoint, featuring him falling through the drop-ceiling, then falling down again when he tries to leave the same way, that I would swear was a piece of viral marketing for the opening action sequence. And the guy is doing it to impress a chick he met in a bar, and it apparently works, except he has to join the navy with a commission as punishment. THAT is how we get the plot moving along into a film about the navy fighting aliens.

Now for some reason, at the start of the real story, the navies of the US, Japan & Korea are coming together for a joint naval exercise, soccer game and apparent rubbing-WW2-in-Japan's-face ceremony. I don't know why. I thought it was an excuse to amass a powerful naval fleet during these days when there are no big naval engagements going on, but it turns out that the entire war is fought by a trio of destroyers with a cameo appearance by an aircraft carrier.

The movie proceeds to be an advertisement for how awesome the US military, particularly the navy part, is, although if the jackass main character is at all typical of, or superior to, the general run of naval officer, I am thinking this is a military branch we can do without. Most of the battle scenes are designed for three purposes - put the idiot protagonist in position to take command and save the day, set up a rather short scene vaguely reminiscent of actually playing the old Battleship(TM) game, and ultimately, find a way to shoehorn a vessel of the titular class into the action portion of a movie set in 2012, about 70 years after it started to dawn on people that they were obsolete.

Also, the US Navy in Battleship(TM) seems to operate on the starship Enterprise org chart, whereby on a vessel with hundreds of crew members, absolutely everything interesting and shown on screen is done by a group of about five characters. Chase aliens through the lower decks? Those guys grab rifles and do it. Stand on the "bridge" and command the ship to fight? Same group. Check out the alien ship up close? Three of those guys get in a little boat and putt-putt away. Haul an oversized shell from the damaged gun to the gun that it has to be fired from? Guess which guys are in the hauling party? Even though the very skinny woman of that elite bunch cannot plausibly help carry it, she contributes by opening hatches along their way. When one of their forays away from the bridge makes the commanding officer realize they will need someone on the bridge to fire the guns, he sends his companion, one of those special five, to the bridge to do so, strongly implying that they leave the PLACE WHERE YOU RUN THE SHIP unattended, in a combat zone, whenever they go have their adventures!

The amusement of how they actually do their shout-outs to the boardgame is one of the few pleasures, along with that viscerally exciting feeling of watching firepower in action such as when you line up a bunch of siege tanks in Starcraft. The soundtrack is so loud and obnoxious that it frequently drowns out most of the dialogue that is not shouted. When you get the blond vampire guy from True Blood in such a film, and accustomed to saying all his lines in a low, sexy bad-boy voice, you end up loosing most of his speech, only coming away with a vague impression that he's not happy with the main character.

There are a few calculated attempts to appeal to old people and anyone else who buys into that "greatest generation" crap, and the utilization of a crippled war hero in a way I can't decide if he's being exploited or appropriately show-cased, but I'll let it pass, since I'm pretty sure he's the guy who hung with the Giants when they won that first Super Bowl against the Patriots, only he has legs now, which gives my two favorite sports teams each a mascot cameo in Battleship (the other is Matt Kemp's one-time girlfriend). This crippled guy and the cast-for-her-looks love interest were in a pretty-much-pointless subplot which appears to have been written to give them each something to do in the film.

I will say I was wiping away tears by the end, but was that out of a genuinely sentimental emotional connection forged by the storytelling, or because two hours of flashing lights and shrieking sound effects and pounding music had made one of my sinuses throb so much my eye was running over? Watch it for yourself and guess.

Oh, and a final note - as the ending credits roll, Fortunate Son by CCR comes on! That's right: they end a hoo-rah, USAUSAUSA, military-glorifying movie, with a song about an embittered draftee's resentment of a "patriotic" draft dodger.