Although it was revealed a few weeks ago that the bad guys in the movie adaptation of the board game Battleship would be aliens, and that the film would see an international fleet of five ships going up against them, until now little more has been known than that. However Universal recently rounded up some bloggers and sat them down for a chat with the film’s director, Peter Berg, who revealed a lot more about his plans for the movie.
The aliens will be called The Regents, and they’re not actually trying to take over the Earth, but want to build a power source in the ocean, as well as to fix their broken spaceships (which also allows the film to keep the aliens on the ocean surface once they arrive on our planet). It’s while they’re doing this that they come across the fleet of ships mentioned in the film’s title. The plan is to make the aliens not too far ahead of us, so that it becomes about strategic warfare rather than just who has the biggest and most advanced guns, with Berg promising the movie will tell the story from both the human and extraterrestrial perspectives.
The director also says that the way they plan to create the aliens is similar to how Davy Jones was done in Pirates Of The Caribbean, although not as complex. So it’ll be real actors, with CG placed on top. However the main human protagonist will be the captain of a destroyer, who has a team of five trusted shipmates. Berg mentions how he liked Star Trek and plans to cast Battleship in a similar way.
He also seems keen to make it all feel credible, as while he wanted the aliens so it didn’t feel purely like a jingoistic American military exercise, he wants to base it all in real physics (as far as possible), and make the whole thing seem as if it’s really happening. He’s even tried to work out ways to bring the board game and films closer together, with each ship needing a certain number of strategic hits to disable it. To be honest, while we’ve been quite down on Battleship, as it seemed a stupid idea to turn such a simple game into a movie, Berg certainly makes it sound like it could be pretty good.
Elsewhere in the interview he talks about Hancock 2 and suggests it isn’t something that was likely to happen for a while, as getting all the main players back is like, “the Israeli peace process times a thousand”. He reckons it’ll happen eventually, but that we shouldn’t expect it for a few years yet.
He also mentions that both he and Dwayne Johnson are interested in a sequel to Welcome To The Jungle (known as The Rundown in the US), and that while he’d originally intended to shoot the Navy SEAL drama, Lone Survivor, next, Battleship has taken precedence, so Survivor will come next. And as previously reported, he confirmed that Dune was now completely off the table. (Info via Latino Review and CHUD)