Battleship

[Lencho01]

http://io9.com/5894180/our-first-look-at-battleships-mysterious-aliens

Our First Look at Battleship’s Mysterious Aliens

BY ALASDAIR WILKINS MAR 17, 2012 4:15 PM

Universal's board game adaptation ditches the round pegs and plastic destroyers of the original Battleship for a high-seas skirmish between the US Navy and aliens. The Wonder-Con panel featured tons of new footage, showing us the movie's aliens and its zany sense of humor. And we heard Rihanna's answer to "Hasta la vista, baby."

Spoilers ahead...

Spoiler

In the first extended sequence, we find Taylor Kitsch's Alex celebrating his birthday with his older brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) in a Hawaiian dive bar). Alex is drifting through life, and Stone says he should either get a job or join him in the navy. Alex is distracted by Brooklyn Decker's character Samantha, who enters the bar trying to order a burrito. The kitchen, however, is closed, and Alex tries to win her over by getting her a burrito in five minutes.

Unfortunately, the convenience store next door is closed, so Alex decides to break in and get her the burrito anyway. We switch to security cam footage - complete with Pink Panther theme - to see Alex breaking into the store, getting the burrito, and subsequently wrecking most of the merchandise in his attempt to get back out. The scene ends in complete chaos, with Alex running away from - and getting tasered by — the cops, a sequence that causes multiple cars to crash into each other to avoid hitting him. But hey — he gets Brooklyn Decker the burrito, and a true love is born.

The sequence also offers a big clue as to why the aliens came to Earth, something director Peter Berg expanded on in the panel. The footage starts with Alex watching a TV report on NASA building a giant beacon on Hawaii meant to send out signals to other intelligent life. Berg says the aliens answered that call and initially came to Earth, with no real plans to invade. But then, as these things so often do, things went wrong, and the battle began, which leads us to the next sneak peek clip.

The second sequence skips a few years into the future and in the midst of the battle with the aliens, which director Peter Berg revealed are referred to as Regents. The senior staff has been killed and so Alex, now a lieutenant in the navy, has become acting captain. He examines a captured alien, who has cat-like eyes, tough spikes on his chin where a beard would be, and a pronounced nose ridge. Otherwise, the creature is essentially humanoid. We see some flashbacks to the aliens' previous battles on charred, bombed out worlds. We also get some POV shots inside the alien's helmets, which feature built-in computers that analyze objects around it from humans to weapons to nuclear reactors and assess their potential threat level.

In the middle of their investigation, a bunch of other aliens burst in to save their comrade. They fly away in a transport ship, but Alex realizes at least one alien is still on the ship. He and a team (including Rihanna's Petty Officer Cora Raikes) sweep the ship, and one of the men gets grabbed by an alien and thrown across an entire corridor. One alien bursts into the engine room and messes with one of the main reactors.

Alex interrupts him, and sends Cora to the control deck while he leads the alien out onto the deck. He gets the crap more or less beaten out of him, but he and Cora have a plan. He buys her time to aim one of the cannons point-blank at the alien's head. It turns around to see the cannon about to be fired. Rihanna quips, "Mahalo, mother****er" — and the cannon blows the alien away.

They also previewed the next full trailer, which will air before Wrath of the Titans. It featured a lot more of the carnage we've seen in the previous trailers and will give audiences at large the first good look at the aliens — or, at least, one of its eyes. It also confirms that Hong Kong is the city we see leveled in the other trailers. All the footage is pretty much what you'd expect — big, goofy action scenes that show a bit of sense of humor about the general ridiculousness of all of this, with the burrito theft a winningly silly bit. If this thing is going to work as a complete movie, I'd say a lot more of that ever so slightly self-aware sense of humor will be key.

During the panel, director Peter Berg explained that he had wanted to do a movie about the navy for a long time, but it was hard finding a project that the studio was willing to sign off on. The Battleship brand let him do his naval movie. He said that he completely understands the skepticism about how Battleship could possibly work as a movie. But he argued there's something about the idea of the game — in which you keep missing and missing, until you finally hit a target, at which point you try to kill as quickly and ruthlessly as possible without showing any mercy for the enemy. He said there's something about that idea that can be the DNA of a movie.

When asked what her character sees in Alex, Decker explained that she likes that he comes through for her, even if it ends with rampant property destruction and him getting tasered multiple times. She also pointed to her character's background as the daughter of Liam Neeson's admiral, which gave her a rebellious streak that might make her more attracted to less straitlaced heroes like Alex.

Decker explained there is a scene where her character hikes through the mountains of Hawaii and discovers a huge scene of horrendous carnage, which causes her to break down in terror — a feeling that director Peter Berg got out of her in her audition piece by actually firing a live machine gun near her, which she quite rightly observed was completely insane. Speaking of guns, she confirmed that her character isn't just a bystander, and that she gets to shoot some guns.

Battleship opens April 11 in the United Kingdom and May 18 in the United States.

 

[Lencho01]

http://www.slashfilm.com/wondercon-...awking-father-inspired-battleship-board-game/

WonderCon: Peter Berg Explains How Stephen Hawking And His Father Inspired ‘Battleship’, Not The Board Game

Posted on Monday, March 19th, 2012 by Peter Sciretta

I’ll be completely up front with you — I really have had no interest in the movie Battleship since it was announced. Even the recent action-packed Michael Bay-lite trailers didn’t win me over. I just didn’t see the point of making a big screen adaptation of the Battleship board game. And I also didn’t understand why an adaptation of that board game would involve an alien attack. It just didn’t make sense to me. Despite loving director Peter Berg‘s previous films and recently discovering the awesomeness of Friday Night Lights (the tvseries), I just didn’t care.

When Peter Berg stepped onto the WonderCon stage in Anaheim, you could tell he was on a mission. Why a movie based on a board game? Why aliens? Berg made his pitch and somehow was able to change my mind — I now am excited to see this film.

Peter Berg never wanted to make a movie based on a board game. He wanted to make a naval movie but Hollywood wouldn’t let him.

Berg’s father was a Marine and a big Navy enthusiast. As a child, Peter was brought from Naval museum to Naval Museum, visiting famous boats and battleships. His father often knew more than the people conducting the tours.

Berg wanted to make a movie based on In The Heart Of The Sea, a book about the Essex, a whaling ship which was sunk and was the basis for Moby Dick. Here is the official description for the book:

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with twenty crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than ninety days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents-including a long-lost account written by the ship’s cabin boy-and penetrating details about whaling and the Nantucket community to reveal the chilling events surrounding this epic maritime disaster. An intense and mesmerizing read, In the Heart of the Sea is a monumental work of history forever placing the Essex tragedy in the American historical canon.
​

Sounds like a great story which could’ve been the basis of a great big screen Hollywood movie, right? Well… as the description ab ove hints, the story ends with the survivors being forced to eat each other to survive, and Berg says that the studios weren’t interested in doing a story about cannibalism.

When the idea of doing a big screen adaptation of the Battleship board game was proposed to Berg, he saw potential for a fun popcorn movie. Berg described the tone of Battleship as intense, kickass and sometimes emotional but first of all, always fun — the number one importance was making a fun popcorn summer movie.

Berg explains that the reason they have aliens in Battleship was that he wanted to do something a bit more entertaining than the historic battleship military drama. So when the property was proposed to him, the filmmaker spent a lot of time trying to come up with an adversary which could incite a fun summer popcorn film.

One day Berg was watching a documentary featuring Stephen Hawking talking about the Goldilocks planets. In May 2011, a planet in the Gliese system was found capable of sustaining life.

Researchers predict Gliese 581 d, which orbits a red dwarf 20 light years away, not only exists in the “Goldilocks zone” where water can be present in liquid form, but is big enough to have a stable carbon dioxide atmosphere and “warm enough to have oceans, clouds, and rainfall,” according to France’s National Centre for Scientific Research.
​

Nasa has been using SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) to send signals towards those planets, and monitor the transmission of interstellar radio messages (IRMs) coming from that habitable zone of space. Berg says that Hawking thinks this is a horrible idea, as telling other possible aliens we’re out there would probably result in more bad than good.

In Battleship, Berg uses this idea: the Aliens don’t just show up randomly one day, they were invited — we contacted them.

The footage we saw revealed (watch video blog in the adjacent post) more about aliens. While most sci-fi movies these days feature computer generated creature-looking alien species, Battleship presents something closer to home. Inside the mech-warrior tech suits are creatures that don’t look that much different than humans.

Berg also defended internet criticism over casting R&B star Rihanna in the movie, listing a long history of singers-turned-thespians including Frank Sinatra and Whitney Huston. Berg said he “personally had great success in Tim McGraw”, who appeared in Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom), and added that “Rihanna asked for no special treatment, she stayed in the same crappy hotels we did, and she said ‘Treat me like an actor.’”
I’m not so convinced about Rihanna’s acting debut, but the footage they screened was enough to finally make me want to see the movie.

“Filming a film in the ocean is the stupidest thing you cold ever do,” Berg said.
​

A month before filming, Berg got a call from Kevin Costner who wanted to come in and give him advice based on his experiences on Waterworld. Berg explained that Costner’s talk helped them prepare for things they otherwise would have never expected.

But you can’t prepare for the unexpected: In the first two hours of production alone, their cinematographer got sea sick, they thought Taylor might have broken is leg, and one crew member stormed off, quitting the movie and vowing never to go on a boat again.

Berg also screened a new explosion-filled trailer for Battleship, which will be attached to Wrath of the Titans.

 

[Lencho01]

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2012/03/16/battleship-wondercon-poster/

 

[DACrowe]

All this arguing over the awareness over the existence of the game Battleship for the last page is hilarious.

I'm pretty sure most people in this country have played the game Battleship or at least know of it, given it dates back to the 1930s. However, does awareness equal popularity? When you're looking for a "cool" or "hip" new property, 80-year-old board games don't spring to mind. Most people know of the game, but that does not mean it it has the popularity of Halo, Zelda, Mario, Resident Evil, Gears of War, whatever that those franchises have with young people.

Anyway, it's moot. Most people seem to realize making a movie out of a board game is a pretty absurd idea. The 1980s Clue got away with it because it was a farce with an all-star cast. This movie is trying to get away with it by making it look like Transformers (the summer franchise that has been cleaning up for the last five years). But nobody is going to see this movie because they've waited their whole life to see a "Battleship" movie.

That's just silly.

 

[kickass]

I can't wait for this. I bet (and hope) it surprises some people. Unfortunately, a lot of people will never admit defeat haha.

 

[TheVileOne]

LOL, that blog post about Peter Berg is ridiculous. I'm not seeing any relation between In The Heart of The Sea and this movie.

 

[SWAT]

LOL, that blog post about Peter Berg is ridiculous. I'm not seeing any relation between In The Heart of The Sea and this movie.

... He wanted to make a movie about In the Heart of the Sea. So it's not that strange your not seeing any relation between the two.

 

[Still Wynning]

http://www.slashfilm.com/wondercon-...awking-father-inspired-battleship-board-game/

Great article. The information concerning "In The Heart of the Sea" and "Gliese 581 d" is actually very interesting stuff that I didn't know about before. It's nice to know that he's using all of this information that he gleaned as inspiration for this film, and not doing it just because. *coughcoughmichaelbaycoughcough*

It seems like he really wants to make a good, but entertaining, popcorn flick.

 

[TheVileOne]

... He wanted to make a movie about In the Heart of the Sea. So it's not that strange your not seeing any relation between the two.

The writer makes this big connection to that story from Berg and I'm not sure how the inspiration from that tale brings us to Battleship.

Also, Rihanna had to stay IN THE SAME BAD HOTELS AS WE DID! Lol, seriously? Am I honestly expecting to believe everyone was staying in ****** hotel rooms and Rihanna was not taken care of?

Just for example, when I met comedian Joey Diaz who only like a bit part in Spider-Man 2, he told me a story how Sony put everyone up for like a month in a nice living space when he was filming his work for that movie. And that's a $210 million movie. Someone like Rihanna probably gets a pimped out suite with two floors for a movie like Battleship which I imagine costs more than Spider-Man 2.

I've read the script for In The Heart of The Sea and it is nothing like this movie it's also not a very good script.

 

[ThePowerCosmic]

"Goldilocks Planets" Featurette

 

[Dark Knight]

I can't wait for this. I bet (and hope) it surprises some people. Unfortunately, a lot of people will never admit defeat haha.

Agreed. I think this film is going to better and more entertaining than most realize. The SVX/CGI look fantastic and the action will be probably surprise as well.

All Avengers fans can say it's "based on a board game?"!

Weak.

 

[kickass]

"Goldilocks Planets" Featurette

People can ***** about this being based off a board game all they want, that featurette was great. It takes a lot to expand and fill in all the blanks for a movie such as this. Why not give the creators credit for that? It's not like the film has no plot or story.

 

[zanos]

Agreed. I think this film is going to better and more entertaining than most realize. The SVX/CGI look fantastic and the action will be probably surprise as well.

All Avengers fans can say it's "based on a board game?"!

Weak.

All criticism and jokes should have been set aside the moment Rhianna's name was attached to this film.

 

[terry78]

That Goldilocks feature did showcase how it may be a little tongue in cheek at times with the "who talks like that" line. Berg does this in most of his flicks so I won't count him out.

 

[cloverfan98]

Agreed. I think this film is going to better and more entertaining than most realize. The SVX/CGI look fantastic and the action will be probably surprise as well.

All Avengers fans can say it's "based on a board game?"!

Weak.

Well beyond that crazy fact, is the fact that this film dosen't even resemble the board game its based on. That being said yeah it looks like a really fun SFX filled summer blockbuster.

 

[BrollySupersj]

"Goldilocks Planets" Featurette

Wow, I had no idea that was the plot of the movie. Aliens responding to a signal we sent? I thought they were already on Earth, and activated when we found them. Either way, this movie is looking fantastic. Can't wait to see it.

 

[Ultimatehero]

I have no idea why that Goldilocks Planets aspect isn't in the trailers. I was originally very dismissive of this film... then I saw that featurette and suddenly became interested in it. The marketing seriously needs to include that part, otherwise all it shows is - aliens are awakened, **** gets blown up, more explosions, jungles! That featurette though seems like it contains a really interesting grounded approach.

 

[Lencho01]

Here it is on YouTube...

[YT]HQ2TslEE_DU[/YT]

And...

http://io9.com/5895666/how-battleship-changed-the-way-our-navy-will-fight-alien-sea-monsters-forever

How Battleship Changed the Way Our Navy will Fight Alien Sea Monsters, FOREVER

By Meredith Woerner Mar 22, 2012 1:24 PM

Battleship doesn't just show the U.S. Navy locked in combat with alien monsters — it's also changed the way the Navy would respond to an alien invasion in real life.

In our interview with Peter Berg and actress Brooklyn Decker the director reveals a few of the battles he won while arguing with his Naval advisors on set. Also guess what lessons Berg learned from Kevin Costner's Waterworld. And were those alien cannon pegs made to look like the board game on purpose? Find out now in our exclusive WonderCon interview.

Did you meet with anyone from the Navy to see how they would handle an invasion of this type?

Peter Berg: Certainly, I have a great relationship with the Department of Defense starting with Admiral Dennis Moynihan, he's a big fancy Admiral at the Pentagon. And he put about five or six of his Destroyer Captains in touch with us, and they spent a lot of time on the ship. They made sure we got everything right, and we couldn't do anything wrong. But because we were fighting aliens they don't have a playbook for that. So I was able to kind of win a few arguments with some of the Navy Captains that we worked with because [I would say] "Well, how do you know what you do? You don't it's impossible, it's never happened!"

Could you share one argument you won?

Peter Berg: I argued that... the missiles that these ships fire have to be generally fired at a distance of over 20 miles. But I argued that in the event of an alien ship coming at you, you might break that rule and even fire at point blank. So we get to fire some missiles at very close range. It's a bit more dangerous than the Navy would like to see, but because of the extreme extenuating circumstances, they let us.

Did you design the alien cannons to look like the red pegs from the board game?

Peter Berg: I'm not telling you that! Why would I answer that question?

What advice did you get about filming on water?

Peter Berg:I got it from Kevin Costner, he called me about a month before we started shooting. I'd never met Kevin, and he was a great guy. He did Waterworld and he has a lot of problems with sets getting wiped out and stuff. He talked to me for two hours and he told me everything he did right and everything he did wrong, it was a great phone call.

What was the best piece of advice he gave you?

Peter Berg: Have three of everything. Because two will break. And be ready to go with three.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

Agreed. I think this film is going to better and more entertaining than most realize. The SVX/CGI look fantastic and the action will be probably surprise as well.

All Avengers fans can say it's "based on a board game?"!

Weak.

How about it looking just like Transformers? It looks like a unoriginal rip off of something already terribly bland.

 

[Ultimatehero]

How about it looking just like Transformers? It looks like a unoriginal rip off of something already terribly bland.

/\ This is why I think Goldilocks planets should be part of the focus in the trailer. That distinguishes it from looking like a second-rate Transformers and more it's own thing. That featurette won me over from thinking this way.

 

[ThePowerCosmic]

Wow, I had no idea that was the plot of the movie. Aliens responding to a signal we sent? I thought they were already on Earth, and activated when we found them. Either way, this movie is looking fantastic. Can't wait to see it.

I agree, that is a really cool idea. They should have explained that in the trailers but people are still going to watch this anyway. I know I am, at least. t:

 

[TheVileOne]

Don't see what's so interesting. Sending signals out into space to maybe contact alien life has been done. All those ideas have been done in movies before like CONTACT and SPECIES.

 

[SWAT]

You know, you don't have to see it... and you've made it quite clear you don't like it.

 

[Project862006]

Don't see what's so interesting. Sending signals out into space to maybe contact alien life has been done. All those ideas have been done in movies before like CONTACT and SPECIES.

everything has been done

 

[Dark Knight]

everything has been done

Yep!

Everything has been done and recycled in someway shape or form.