A few weeks back, Latino Review broke the news that the villains in Peter Berg’s naval actioner and board game adaptation “Battleship” would be extra-terrestrial in nature, a scoop that CHUD followed up on, revealing that it was a actually a fairly large, third act spoiler, meant to be kept under wraps. As a result, the two sites were invited on a tour of the USS Sterett in San Diego, and talked to Berg about his plans for the movie, and the director revealed pretty much everything.
Berg spilled on the beans on the alien antagonists, which are called ‘The Regents,’ and are described as looking like giant water bugs. These’ll be brought to life with a combination of actors in practical make-up and CGI – Berg names Davy Jones from the “Pirates” sequels as the inspiration. The central character will be the Commanding Officer of a destroyer, and there’ll be five major supporting characters, although we’ll also see events from the aliens’ point of view.
So, yeah, we see why Berg’s gone for the alien villains – as he points out, major naval battles in a realistic setting are a rarity, so it makes sense to bring in this aspect. What we don’t quite get is why he seems so keen on keeping the movie close to the game. The director tells Latino Review: “We’ll be able to take a component of the game, which is someone trying to guess where this thing is, and when they see a TRAC they’re going to get smoe coordinates where they think that TRAC is, they’re going to then lock into these coordinates, they’re gonna fire, they’re gonna put a ping on those coordinates and hope it’s a hit.” So, essentially, the film will be presumably made up of some Ryan Reynolds/Bradley Cooper type yelling out co-ordinates, and then being told whether it’s been hit. Probably with a stirring Harry Gregson-Williams score underneath.
Berg even seems to be insisting on including the line “You sunk my battleship,” which already seems to be a disastrous misjudgement, considering the realistic tone he appears to be aiming for. It’s not that we think naval combat can’t be interesting, cinematically – submarine movies are almost invariably tense, and Peter Weir did a storming job on “Master and Commander” – but there seems to be a painful over-literalism in place here, like making a “Pirates of the Carribean” movie where Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley sit in a metal cart and get taken around a track for ten minutes, because it’s “faithful to the original ride”.
We’ll be happy to be proven wrong – casting is underway, so hopefully we’ll get some interesting people on board, and Berg is a talented director, even if he’s been off form somewhat of late – but this sounds, to be honest, expensive, bombastic and dull.