Berg talks Battleship

Still can’t quite wrap your head around just what the hell a BATTLESHIP movie is going to be like? Me neither, and I think Peter Berg understands this, which is why he spoke to Latino Review to try and clarify a few things about the incredibly easy-to-mock project.

He took El Guapo to a real life battleship to explain all of this to him, but I think that’s kind of cheating as you can’t exactly stand on the deck of a battleship and go, “Yeah, this is totally going to be lame.” First up, he explains why the hell he’s planning on making aliens the bad guys in the movie, rather than, you know, another country’s ships.

“The idea of a film where America goes to war against China, or a movie where America goes to war against England or Australia or Japan, one of the countries that has a credible navy, felt like it would border on some kind of jingoistic American military exercise I couldn’t get my head around. I liked the idea of something larger than life and the challenge it presented.”

Clearly he hasn’t played “Modern Warfare 2,” heard of the RED DAWN remake or watched “24” in the last five seasons. Though to be fair, I can’t really envision a modern war scenario where we’d literally have battleships shooting at each other.

Next he tackled just how all this ties into the board game. I’m still not quite sure as to why has to happen at all.

“This is a key set in the film. you put this screen on, it’s very easy to imagine this as a much more sophisticated Battleship screen from the board game. What they’re doing with this screen is identifying threats or identifying objects whether it be in the air, on the sea or underwater. Much the same way you would try to identify or locate your enemy in the game. You’re trying to find an enemy over here (at one station) and over here you’re killing an enemy. It’s very simple. they’ve got a bunch of ways to find and a bunch of ways to kill. But basically, the fundamental core principles of the game, are very easy to expand in a very easy, badass, very intelligent way when you see how these guys do what they do.”

All I keep envisioning is the scene in DOOM where it switches to first person shooter mode. There’s such a thing as paying homage to your source material, but there’s also such a thing as being stupid. I can’t see this project being anything but the latter at the moment.