As we all know by now, the movie Battleship has somehow failed to live up to the huge
blockbuster status we all expected it to achieve. Now, since it’s not possible
that the movie is to blame for this underperformance at the box office, it must
be the manner in which the film was promoted that’s at fault here. And this
could easily have been avoided had they simply strategized to market the movie
with language appropriate to the film’s heritage: the exciting board game Battleship!
In the much-loved game Battleship, we all know two players try to guess the location
of their opponent’s battleships by guessing letter-number combinations until
they finally happen upon a “hit”, and then extrapolate the rest of the ship’s
position from the first hit. And then, of course, they go back to the most
thrilling part/aspect of this game: guessing letter-number coordinates! This is
the thing that made the game Battleship such a huge phenomenon in the past, and leaving it out of the movie
and the marketing of the movie is obviously what sank Battleship!
Yes, if they were going to ruin the movie version of Battleship by leaving out the number-and-letter guessing part of the story, the least they could have done would have been to incorporate these letter-number hybrid coordinates into the language of the marketing/promotional materials, just to remind us all, if only subliminally, of what we all loved so much about Battleship! So for example, they could have said something like:
“We’ve got a wonderfully exciting film in 3-D 4-U 2-C! There’s no D-9 it’s A-4 star movie all the way; come C-4 yourself! U-2 will love it! You’ve never seen a movie like this B-4!”
And that way, we’d all be reminded of the edge-of-your-seat excitement of the game-play, and we’d all pack in like sardines 2-C it! But they’ve dropped the ball on this, so rather than being a “hit”, it’s “bombed”. But, fortunately for the cable movie channel and home video markets, both terms (“hit” and “bomb”) are wonderfully appropriate for this title (Battleship, that is), based as it is upon the old board game, so the ads and promo materials will simply write themselves! So it’s sure to cash-in big once the next phase of distribution has arrived! They can turn a “miss” into a “hit” for sure by then!
Here’s the story of how this Battleship “bombed”:
I wrote a piece last year on this very blog* where I predicted this movie would sink if the filmmakers failed to incorporate this wonderful guessing-locations aspect to the story, and it indeed appears as though this is what went wrong with the box office of this movie. You see, people are tired of these Transformers-esque alien-invasion Earth-threatening summer blockbusters, with their ubiquitous vapid flash of giant robot CGI effects overwhelming the storyline, when what they really want is that wonderful sense of mystery and anticipation putting them on the edge of their seats while everyone tries to figure out the question we’ve all been asking ourselves since the introduction of the game Battleship: where’s that battleship, and what quadrants shall we guess? You see, it’s not the peril of Earth or humanity’s struggle against advanced alien civilizations threatening mankind’s survival that’s compelling so much as it’s a combination of two critical elements that keep gamers and moviegoers fascinated and wanting more. And what are those two elements? Are they sex and violence? Could they be love and death? Are they action and romance? Or are they even more basic than that? Yes, they are even more rudimentary than all of these movie tropes, for it goes all the way down to basics here.
You see, what makes something like Battleship so compelling is the combination of letters
and numbers! And that’s why this game has
remained so popular for so many years, so much so that a major motion picture
was made of it: combining letters and numbers together in a groundbreaking and
Earth-shattering way as never before or since! (Well, perhaps that’s a bit of
an exaggeration. But let’s just act like it’s not, okay? Thanks!) And by
leaving these letter-number combinations out from center stage where they
belong, it simply made everyone lose interest in the whole story. And the funny
thing is, they probably can’t even put their finger on what it is that they
were missing, just like they couldn’t find the battleship in the game without
these number-letter combinations, but you might not know what you were missing
then either, so much as you would realize that you couldn’t find the
battleship, even if you didn’t know why you couldn’t find it.
Yes, mankind has for generations been obsessed with letter
and number combinations. We name our most bitchin’ cars after them: Z-28, 280Z,
300ZX, 250 GTO, 745i, 500K, 300SL, IS 350, etc. These, our most prized sports
cars and dream machines, are all christened with simple combinations of letters
and numbers, and it’s a good thing too: for even the most exciting sports cars are merely boxes on wheels, and until they become associated with letter-number nomenclature, they’re really nothing special, and everybody knows it. (You see, it’s associating them with letter-number combinations that make them attractive and exciting to begin with; it’s just that nobody consciously realizes this fact {except for maybe Mathematics and English teachers or professors, and nobody ever listens to them anyway}!) And one of our best-loved intellectual games, Scrabble, has game-play based entirely upon a system of
letters with corresponding numerical values (some people think it has something to do with word-knowledge or whatever, but they’re just ignorant!). And why, pray tell, is that? Well,
obviously this is all inspired by the incredibly exciting game-play of the
classic board game Battleship,
with its scintillating letter-and-number combinations! (What other reason could
there possibly be?) So when the moviemakers leave this critical element out of
the movie, we forget what always made this favorite of our pastimes so unique
and enjoyable: letter-and-number combinations!
* And here are my previous posts on this subject (sorry, there are more than I thought!), although I suppose after the flop of Battleship, Sub Search in 3D is probably out-of-the-question, huh? (Unless... Maybe we could all send sunk battleships to the movie studio {like people do to try to save TV shows they love, by sending in socks and such}, and then they'll have to relent and give us Sub Search, lest we all send in sunk nuclear submarines and they all have nuclear meltdowns on their back lots!):
http://unconditionedresponse.blogspot.com/2011/07/battleship-movie.html
http://unconditionedresponse.blogspot.com/2012/02/battleship-super-bowl-movie-ad.html
http://unconditionedresponse.blogspot.com/2012/02/sub-search-in-3d.html
