Poor Taylor Kitsch. Two huge budget bombs in a single quarter. I thought he was great in JC, but here - not so good. He was shackled by an unappealing, poorly written character, but some actors can work with that. Taylor really couldn't. I also didn't like the jingoistic Valentine to the Navy that this film is either - I get it Peter, you like the military.
But all that aside - I enjoyed the movie. The action is cool and fun, the aliens aren't just cannon fodder (as in Avengers) and they managed to make a tie-in to the board game that is pretty ingenious.
The aliens were particularly interesting - I'm sure there is a complex backstory there that someone spent a lot of time with. The fact that they are fairly noble and act like we'd like to think our soldiers would act is probably tied to Berg's whole philosophy on warfare. This made them a bit more realistic than if they were out to slaughter widows and orphans.
I also enjoyed the whole Japanese angle - setting it in Pearl Harbor during RAMSIC (is this a real thing?) and
having a pretty significant Japanese character is kind of brilliant.
The girlfriend's story was a bit unneeded but the differently-abled actor did a fine job. I'm sure Berg was going for a "The Best Years of Our Lives" thing, but honestly he could have achieved the same results with CG. The whole story seems forced to just get this guy in the film.
Sure a lot of the movie doesn't make much sense, but I think the critics are being overly harsh because it's based on a board game. They were convinced that a game like that couldn't be translated to film, so they were predisposed to hate it. Unlike Transformers which has a narrative history, Battleship defies adaptation. What they did though, stands up pretty well.