Battleship Review Thread (Spoilers)

[Lord_Stewie]

Hey,

I am washing my hands as I am typing.

Another Hasbro game is set to be turned into a live action flick. The bad news this will set back Hancock 2 for a few more years.

Universal has officially signed filmmaker Peter Berg (who was in talks) to direct a big screen adaptation of Hasbro’s board game Battleship. The big news is that Berg will be making the live-action film as his next project, part of a new two-picture deal with the studio. This also means we probably won’t see Hancock 2 go into production for a few years. Universal has announced a July 2011 release date for the sea-based action film.

Brother screenwriting team Jon and Erich Hoeber wrote a script, which is said to be “an epic naval action adventure” loosely inspired by the game. Berg calls the film “a contemporary story of an international five-ship fleet engaged in a very dynamic, violent and intense battle.” Details about the enemy force have not been revealed. Berg tells Variety that the project was inspired by the ship-bound stories told by his naval historian father:

I’ve been consumed with doing one of these since I tried to convince Tom Rothman at Fox to make a film about John Paul Jones, the founder of the American Navy,” Berg said. “As a kid, I was dragged from Navy museum to museum, and spent so much time on ships, listening to my father talk about the great battles of WWII, I did my high school thesis on the Battle of Midway. When this came up, it didn’t take me long to find a take for a film that is filled with raucous action-packed naval battles.

Actor turned filmmaker Berg has directed Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Light, The Kingdom and Hancock. The Hoeber brothers recently adapted the comic bookaction thriller Whiteout, Warren Ellis’ Red, and an adaptation of the video game American McGee’s Alice, which is likely in development heck.

UPDATE: FEB 24TH, 2O1O

BATTLESHIP WON'T BE IN 3D

MTV has learned that Peter Berg’s water based epic action adaptation of the board game Battleship will not be filmed in 3D. In this post-Avatar world, I think almost everyone assumed that it would be. A war between aliens and humans set on a Battleship seems like the perfect type of story to benefit from a 3D release. Of course, Universal could always change the plans before the Summer shoot, and they always have the option of creating the 3D in post production, like Clash of the Titans.

Also, producer and Hasbro CEO Brian Goldneralso says that the film “doesn’t begin as a fight” and “unlike a lot of those other alien stories this is really not about aliens that came here to do us harm.”

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THEY ARE MAKING BATTLESHIP THE MOVIE. SERIOUSLY!!!!.

Came across this article,

It says so right here in Variety. What's more, the movie based on the naval-combat board game has an honest-to-God good director attached, Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights). (Taylor Kitsch is in it! Riggins!)
OK, I had a snarky post all ready to go. (Imagining the tearful romantic scene before the climactic battle: "You sank... my heart.") And, you know I kid Battleship, but after all Shakespeare made a classic tragedy out of Othello! [Rimshot.] I can't wait to see Michael Moore's Monopoly! [Less enthusiastic rimshot. Awkward silence, and the clinking of waitresses collecting empty glasses.]

But it turns out that making movies of board games is already an honest-to-God thing. And has been for some time. Not just the '80s adaptation of Clue. There is (or was) a Monopoly movie: Ridley Scott's attached. There is a Candy Land movie project that does not involve Katy Perry and Snoop. You want more? Here's more.

So OK, I'll accept that this is a thing we do now, making movies from rides / toys / board games / things-you-remember-fondly-from-childhood. (I'm seeing Sir Ian McKellen as Cookie Jarvis in Cookie Crisp: Bowl of Destiny.)

But it must be asked: Is Battleship the board game to make a movie of?

Easy as the idea is to make fun of, a boardgame is potentially as good a source material for a story as, say, an amusement-park ride. (Or, of course, a videogame.) Games, of course, inherently have conflict, but more than that, good absorbing boardgames have themes and even implied narratives.

Monopoly, as I wrote a few years ago, is on one level a sly and even dark critique of capitalism (and was actually intended as such, at least in its ancestral versions). One of the first games kids encounter, Chutes and Ladders, depicts morals and consequences, describing a pattern of overcoming one's weaknesses to prosper, or—if the numbers don't go your way—returning to repeat your mistakes over and over again. Pay Day (a game the Tuned In Jrs. and I have rediscovered in its vintage edition) is a little snapshot of business and American mores among the high interest rates of the 1970s. Flesh that baby out and you've got an Ang Lee movie!
But Battleship. Freaking Battleship. Don't get me wrong; I've played and enjoyed it plenty of times. But Battleship is almost anti-narrative. There's strategy involved (in placing your ships and firing once you've scored a hit), but it is literally, at base, about random guessing. It's this thing and this thing and this thing until there's nothing left to torpedo.

Now obviously it's got the setting of a movie, what with the big hardware, guns and conflict. (Battleship the movie, unsurprisingly, is planned as a tentpole summer action flick, about an alien invasion, for 2012.) With a good script I'm sure you can make a good movie "based on Battleship" in the sense that any WWII movie set in the Pacific could be "based on Battleship."

Maybe this is simply the Project Runway principle of creation in action. That is: creativity just needs a starting point—any starting point, however arbitrary—and being constrained by silly-seeming source material is actually a spur to invention. Make an red-carpet dress using only materials from Aisle 37 at Home Depot—and, go! Why Battleship? Why not? It gives you a setting and a reason to start writing. And there's already merchandise.

Anyway, this is a TV blog, so I'll bring it back on-topic. What board games would be better adapted for the serial format of a TV series, as opposed to a two-hour movie? I'm thinking Life has Zwick-Herskovits written all over it.

Enjoy.