The first glimpse we got of Peter Berg’s upcoming board game adaptation (it hurts me somewhere deep to have to type those words) played a little coy with us, and at first made it look like the film would be sticking to the Battleship board game’s naval battle roots. Once a spaceship popped up and the whole thing turned into an alien invasion movie, it was kind of a surprise.
This second look at Battleship, however, doesn’t bother to take any time tying this movie to the board game at all. It’s all alien invasion from beginning to end. And with a color palette very reminiscent of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, a bunch of elaborately techno ships and weapons that look like they’re right out of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, sound effects that seem to be ripped from Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and a big ol’ headline that says this movie is from the company that brought you Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, I think it’s safe to say that Universal is aiming this thing less at fans of grid based strategy games and more at fans of Michael Bay’s big, dumb Transformers movies. It leaves me with a question: if this movie isn’t going to have anything to do with naval battles at all, why even attach it to the Battleship name? Why not just admit what you’re doing and call it Gobots?
Check out the new trailer below.
There was one big surprise that came out of this trailer for me though, and that was that the kid who’s starring in this thing isn’t Josh Hartnett attempting some sort of comeback like I thought he was throughout the whole first trailer. It’s really Taylor Kitsch, the kid from Friday Night Lights with a haircut. Once I realized this and another one of the kids from Friday Night Lights popped up, things started to make sense to me. I thought this was going to be a case of Berg getting the band back together and using this movie as a spotlight to push his small screen actors onto the big. But then…is that Rihanna? What a weird cast this weird movie has. I hope Liam Neeson gets to trade some dialogue with Brooklyn Decker, that will really confirm what a strange, too many cooks in the kitchen, corporate abomination Battleship is going to be.
Battleship gets sunk on May 18, 2012.