The Battleship movie just went from ho-hum board game to a Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay-esque epic battle between humans and aliens. And the details about our other-worldly foe are pouring out.


Thanks to Latino Review we now have a full report on what director Peter Berg is planning for his Battleship movie. It sounds wondrously epic and Independence Day terrible/awesome.

This is what we learned from Berg...

The aliens, called The Regents, came here looking for something, but they are not wholly evil bent on world domination. We did nothing to provoke them, but they still have an ecological interest in our world. Also they fire ballistics, not ray guns and will be half-CG half-"man in a suit" technology. But sadly, their ship is damaged somehow and that becomes another part of the plot:

"the enemy does come from another planet... We tried to keep it a secret, but it's our goal to make that as intelligent and logical, certainly as 'District 9' was able to do. But to provide a real intelligence to our opponent, a logic, a rationale for being there and not purely hostile, violent creatures bent on global destruction. They've got a much more logical agenda planned that happens to come into conflict with us. Then there's a chance for two relatively equal opponents to go at each other and you get a sense of some of the equipment you saw, the level and intelligence of that character of what modern sailors are today." "There's a group of life forms from some other planet have come to our planet for something. They've got a very specific agenda. That agenda is not global domination. It's an agenda and that agenda puts them into conflict with members of our military. Their technology is relatable. It's not incredibly far out and unbeatable. It's comprehensible. Hopefully it'll make for good fun and an intense ride."


There will be a battleship-esque screen in the game similar to the movie:

"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."

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And finally the film will be heavily research based when dealing with modern day Naval technology, and what happens when all of their high tech gadgets stop functioning:

"One of the things the film inspires is it takes us into this incredibly complicated world of communications, of radar, of GPS locators, of weapons systems, to show all of this state of art as cool as we possibly can. Somebody asked about backups? (If the computer systems go down) That's another thing we're going to sort of explore. Taking away some of the technology we have.... for example, you'll see there's a light out here [on the battleship the reporters were on]. This is an old fashioned Morse Code signal light. All of this state of the art technology in the world, if everything else goes, if you can't get a cell phone or walkie talkie signal, this can signal Morse code. And obviously in the game Battleship, being able to identity in the game where your enemy is, and locate and identify, is something, that is the core component of the game. Well, one of things we hope to do in this film successfully, is to take away some of this really incredible state of the art technology and have people communicating, and this is just one example, there's others, of using some sort of old-school communication."


To find out more — and there's lots more — check out Latino Review's entire report.