Alright, I know I made fun of this movie over last summer, but I can’t resist ribbing it again after seeing that Super Bowl commercial! It looks like it has nothing whatsoever to do with the game Battleship anyway, so why did they bother licensing the game to make into a movie? It’s ridiculous! It’s like if a movie studio paid a huge chunk of change to license the old video game Pac Man, and then the movie just ended up being some generic gunplay revenge movie about some guy getting even with people who double-crossed him, and they just have the main character’s nickname be “Pac Man” for some unexplained reason.
Seriously: if the movie is unrelated to the game, then why license the game and name the movie after it? What’s the point? It’s not even like people really play Battleship anymore, do they? It’s such a boring game! But since they did license it, and make a movie about it, then shouldn’t they have stuck at least a little bit close to the conception of the game? Here’s what I mean:
Battleship is a board game where you have to guess coordinates to aim your shooting at, in order to try to hit the other player’s battleship(s). So for the movie, I really was expecting them to do something like this: They could have some top secret nuclear battleship with nuclear weapons on board stolen by terrorists or a rogue nation or something, but it has a cloaking device which makes it invisible to both radar and the human eye (!). So basically, they have to try to guess where it is to find it, or use other means to detect it (like satellite images, heat signatures, water displacement, etc.) so they can fight it. Now that would at least have kept the spirit of the game, even if it’s not exactly the same as how the game is actually played. And if they’re not going to do something like that, then why call it Battleship?
Here’s the silly Super Bowl spot for Battleship:
