I’m not going to dignify Battleship with a review. I could call it stunningly idiotic alien-invader CG sludge for gamers but what’s the point? What it is, boiled down, is yet another metaphor for the decline of civilization as it was once known and nourished by the likes of Norman Mailer, Anne Bancroft, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Seberg, Gunter Grass, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, William S. Burroughs, Francis Coppola, Sting, Gary Cooper and Jerry Lewis, et. al. Damn the ComicCon-ers for movies like this. Damn them all to hell.

I paid money to see it yesterday afternoon at the Cinestar plex inside Berlin’s Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz.

If Battleship is a state-of-the-art 2012 Hollywood popcorn movie then kill me now. Stab me in the chest with a screwdriver.

If Berg and the Universal and Hasbro executives responsible had any dignity or humility they would take out trade ads apologizing to the industry and to the world for the sub-moronic calculation and creation that went into Battleship. Compared to this Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin‘s deeply loathed Godzilla is a masterpiece.

It is truly astounding and confounding that a team of intelligent, well-paid adults made this thing with an idea that thousands would say “yeah, pretty good garbage!” And here I am on my fifth paragraph when I said I wouldn’t be writing a review.

Taylor Kitsch (John Carter) is a low-rent, zero-charisma washout of a leading actor. He’s playing a variation of that age-old cliche, the rascally, authority-defying, seemingly doomed-to-fail rebel whom the pretty girl loves but who will prove himself when the chips are down and win the begrudging admiration of the rule-following mainstream. Jimmy Cagney played one of these guys in The Fighting 69th. Kitsch is one of those plodding, heavy-lidded actors who seem utterly incapable of suggesting the presence of even a wisp of intelligence hiding somewhere within the folds. He’s truly nothing — an incarnation of Mark Damon when he broke out in the early ’60s.

The other suffering cast members include Alexander Skarsgard (too tall and descended from the wrong king of genes to be believable as Kitsch’s brother or vice versa), Rihanna (ridiculous, shamed for life), Brooklyn Decker (hot) and Liam “Paycheck” Neeson.

Battleship opened in Japan on April 4th, in mid April in Europe, and will debut in the States on May 18th.