With many bemoaning the lack of original ideas in Hollywood, the upcoming board game adaptation of Battleship has become somewhat of a whipping boy amongst film geeks.
This has only intensified lately with Battleship’s studio, Universal, turning down the Dark Tower Series, and Guillermo Del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness because rumor has it they spent a lot of money on Battleship, and churning out Fast and Furious sequels is obviously a much safer proposition.
It’s hard to imagine how this once popular board-game could be adapted into a movie, then again, before the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, how could you adapt an amusement park ride, right?
So the trailer finally comes out, and it’s not a collective groan from audiences, but more like a collective, “Huh?” Not only does no one say the classic line, “You sank my battleship!,” but it’s also got gigantic aliens attacking the ships. (Don’t worry, director Peter Berg promises the line is in the movie, and that “we aspire to be fairly original in how we deliver that line.”)
As fans and regular folks were Tweeting, compiled by the Hollywood Reporter, one fan wrote, “movie based on board game = aliens = Peter Berg trying to do a Michael Bay?,” and indeed, it looks somewhat like a cross between Pearl Harbor and Transformers.
James Gunn, who wrote the Dawn of the Dead remake, tweeted, “That Battleship trailer is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.” Another tweeter wrote, “Watch this trailer, and prepare to say WTF.”
Positive tweets included, “Ooooo Battleship looks gooood,” “Battleship looks like a good movie soo, I don’t get what all the fuss is about?,” and “better than expected?”
You may know Peter Berg as an actor who later turned to directing the movies Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom and Hancock.
Berg told Collider, “We broke some record for views [of the trailer] on YouTube… I think there’s been so much inherent curiosity, confusion, angry and excitement towards the film, like ‘How dare these people make a movie about Battleship?’
“It inherently feels like something people want to talk about. They want to cheer it and they want to attack it, but they want to talk about it, and that feels good.”
