Let’s get this out of the way, right up front: we all know “Battleship” is preposterously based on a plotless, characterless board game that involves yelling out random letters and numbers, so to expect a good movie out of this would seem to be a fool’s errand. With the whole thing reeking of “cashing in,” thanks to the ridiculous financial success of another film franchise based on a toyline, maybe it doesn’t even need to be said that “Battleship” is a dumb, spectacle-first, story-last, explosion laden, typical summer hunk of crap of the first order. But then again, who said it had to be this way?

Though Battleship: the Board Game is itself a truly iconic game, spanning generations and entertaining everyone with it’s simple yet addictive mechanics, there really is very little about the game that one would expect in a feature film. There’s the grid structure and guessing dynamic of the game, and the catch phrase “You sunk my battleship,” and that’s it. So theoretically, it would actually be pretty simple to come up with a naval based story that somehow incorporates these elements, and on paper, Peter Berg and writers Jon and Erich Hoeber’s approach of using an alien menace as the antagonists is fairly brilliant, allowing them to come up with alien technology in their story that would necessitate the use of the board game’s well known game play and also giving them plenty of room to come up with their own characters and story arcs; with such a blank slate to work with, these guys really could have told any story they wanted to, all dressed up in the guise of blockbuster entertainment.Continue Reading …