Oh yeah, "Battleship." We kind of forgot about this $200 million dollar board game adaptation (good lord), but it's just around the corner and the marketing campaign is going to start heading up soon for the film. A handful of outlets, including Movieline and The Hitlist were invited to the editing bay to chat with director Peter Berg about this upcoming film, and a few new images have come along for a ride as well. And yes, in case you forgot, this is the movie where Rihanna plays a Naval officer, but Berg reveals she brought the uh, "urban swagger" he was looking for in the movie.
“I spent a lot of time in the Navy thinking about who would make sense and who would bring an urban swagger to this character,” Berg explained of his idea to cast Rihanna. “Put a call in, had a great couple of meetings, and she’s a great girl, really hard-working, very smart, wants to be good, really strong work ethic, no attitude, no diva nonsense. She was great.”
As you know, the plastic peg boardgame has been beefed up into an alien invasion tale starring Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgard, Liam Neeson and Brooklyn Decker, in which Earth is threatened by some aliens and five internatoinal naval fleets need to band together in order to stop them. Unimaginatively, the aliens are looking to harvest Earth's resources and have advanced technology (of course), and according to the early footage that was shown, Movieline draws a comparison to the big spectacle pictures of the '90s, most notably "Independence Day." Which isn't a bad thing at all. And just as Sony are looking to (finally) sequalize that movie, Berg is keeping the door very, very wide open to come back to the world that's been created by writers Jon and Erich Hoeber ("Red," "Whiteout").
“I never go done in one,” he said of returning for potential Battleship sequels. “I’m always thinking, let’s keep going. I love these characters; I love these two dudes [played by Kitsch and Skarsgard]. I love the world they come from, and I loved the idea of the goldilocks [alien] planets and the fact that if there is credible life out there, it’s probably going to be from a planet that shares a similar relationship to its sun that we do to ours, and it’s very possible that it is a form of life that's relatable to us, that has a neurological system, that has a respiratory system, that has emotion, that has thoughts, that has reasoning capabilities. That’s the tenor of the thread of Battleship. I’m certainly hoping that it’s something that we can explore for a long time.”
So will the "Battleship" be worth sinking more than once? We'll find out May 18, 2012.
