It has rapidly become an old joke that based on impressions from the trailers, any resemblance between the movie Battleship and the Hasbro board game that it supposedly based on is strictly coincidental. And while the film’s director Peter Berg won’t go quite that far, he rather refreshingly does admit that the links between it and the game are rather tenuous.
It certainly doesn’t have any direct correlation to the game. That being said, it was a lot of fun to try to find way to reference the game. If you look at the ordinance that the enemies use, it looks a bit like pegs. Both of our ships’ radar systems have trouble seeing each other, so they gotta try and predict where the enemy is so that they can go after them. And there were some other things that were kind of fun. They were certainly never mandated, but anybody that’s of a certain age that knows the game will look at it and probably kind of smile to themselves. I guess they could say, “This is preposterous!” and storm out of the theater. I don’t think they will, but hopefully they’ll say its kind of a clever reference to the game.
So basically, this could have been titled any old thing, Aliens Vs Navy perhaps, and the movie would have been exactly the same. But by using the pre-sold name Battleship the studio’s marketing department has half their work cut out for them. And that’s pretty damn cynical if you ask me. But it nice to see Berg acknowledge what everyone else has been observing. At least he isn’t treating us like the idiots that the executives who greenlight this film seem to think we are. And for that, I am fa more inclined to see this picture than any amount of advertising or attempts at playing off my feelings of nostalgia for playing the game as a kid ever could.
Via Hollywood Reporter.
