'Battleship' loud, dumb but stays afloat

“Battleship” is big, dumb fun that knows it’s big, dumb fun and enthusiastically embraces its big, dumb, fun nature.

Director Peter Berg has crafted an almost fetishistic homage to Michael Bay — like Bay’s “Transformers” series, this is yet another action extravaganza inspired by a Hasbro product — with its epic set pieces, swaggering bravado, panoramic skies and cheesy romance. It doesn’t lean all the way into parody, but rather feels more like a faithful and knowing approximation of a very specific, muscular genre: one of those the-world-is-ending-we’re-all-gonna-die movies. And because it’s a little cheeky and doesn’t seem to take itself totally seriously, it’s more enjoyable than one might expect from a movie based on a board game created in the 1960s.

Yes, it can be deafeningly noisy between the crunch and shriek of giant metal objects fighting each other and the blaring rock anthems meant to pump up the crowd even further. No, it’s not subtle between the annihilation caused by alien invaders and the rousing sense of patriotism that’s the real weapon in this battle.

Then again, would you really expect (or want) subtlety from this type of big-budget summer escape? At least screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber showed enough restraint to avoid including the famous line from game’s TV commercials: “You sank my battleship!”

Taylor Kitsch is our hero, Alex Hopper, slacker and troublemaker who joins the Navy. A certain gorgeous blonde named Sam (Brooklyn Decker) also provides some inspiration.

Flash forward and Alex is a lieutenant on one Naval destroyer and answers to Admiral Shane (a withering, well-cast Liam Neeson) who happens to be Sam’s father. They’re all taking part in some international war games off the Hawaiian coast when — oops! — a friendly satellite signal sent to a newly discovered planet that looks a lot like ours in a neighboring galaxy provokes some angry extra-terrestrials.

“Battleship” consists of an increasingly intense but ultimately repetitive back-and-forth between our military might and the aliens’ more sophisticated ships. The action sequences are impressively glossy and detailed and not inscrutable like some of the protracted “Transformers” showdowns; the bad guys mean, circular doodads that resemble giant tires with vicious metal teeth and are especially cool. What we lack comparatively in weaponry we make up for in heart and moxie, by golly.