You sunk my movie!!....and erection!!!
It has to be difficult to adapt an intellectual property for film when the original wasn't a conventional narrative. The presiding idea when making a movie out of a book or TV show is to take framilur charactors and locations then rework them so they fit into the world of the film....or don't. It seems that most addatpations get as far as the "trying" aspect but never fully integrate the two distinct forms of the property. A good example of this is the Harry Potter franchise where several of the movies are almost scene-for-scene recreations of the books. It's almost like reading but just not as much imagination required, so natureally less Luna Lovegood and Herrminie mid-movie scissoring. Another good example would be the Christopher Nolen Batman movies. While not strictly adaptations of any particular Batman storylines, they feature many of the prominaint charctors and loctions but reamagining them in novel ways. Transmuting the established with the new while still retaining the overall themes and tones. What i'm saying is that there is several ways accross the river and a skillfull dirctor can safely ferry the movie from conception to boxofice. What i'm also saying is that there are more than a few ways to sink the nasty bitch and to carry this metiphore just a little futher, Battleship just explosively decompressed in the Marianas trench and bio-luminescent fish just ate the crew.
If I were to try and recreate the experince that I associate with Battleship the game, the movie would have been twenty minutes long and consisted of me and my cousin sitting in front of plastic clamshells pretending to fire ordinence at one another until he accuses me of cheating. Then I call him gay. And then we both get pissed and do something else. Roll credits. Now this is not what i saw. Using my logic, the movie must have been the most errenst attempt to recrerate the expreence of having serveral sticky late term back-ally abbortions preformed into my open mouth mere seconds before i sneeze. But even thats not totally apt. I mean, I strongly support abortion! True maybe not the kind that would be preformed over my gapping maw, but as a concept I can't find much fault with it. However, Liam Neison chewing out his best American accent is a pipebomb wrothy sin. Is it coming through effectively? I DIDN'T LIKE THIS MOVIE VERY MUCH! DON'T GO SEE IT!
Thats unfair. You at least deserirve to know why i didn't like it. And the bulk of the issue can be largely described as conceptual. Batman, Harry Potter, even Transformers, they all have establiched charactors. Go as far out as you want to but at the end of the day Batman is still an interesting charactor. You could have him solving child molestations in pre-columbian central america and it would conteniue to work if for no other reason than the strength of the charactor. Transformers may have a just been a souless cash-in based on toys but Optimus Prime was in the broudest since a hero with relateable quailites. Even the two racsest Transformers with gold robot teeth had their own charms if your into that whole ironic Amos 'n' Andy type thing (I can't be the only one!).
Battleship contains zero charactors. None. Its a board game about navel warfare. It's not even like monoploly where I can pretend to be a senitant boot who's trying to make it in the unreliable housing market! Boats don't have personalies, at least not since we stopped carving large breasted mermaids into the fronts of them. And while a film about advanced self-aware warships blasting holes in one another is arguabley a fantastic idea, thats not the one they went with! They decided to populate the ships with people. Lots of people actually. And when you go from something that contains no charactors to something that does, it would help if you employed someone to write these characters for you. Writers I think they're called. And you can sort of tell that all of these people were bore out the mind of an exectuive or producer.
"Commercially" is the best word for it. Not in the since that it contains a heeping helping of branding and promotions, though it does. Everyone seems to be drinking a Coke Zero, or has a conspicuously present Underarmor logo on their shirt. Lots of movies have that. No I mean commercailly in the since that all the characters and dialoge seem to be there not because a writer thought it would be a good idea, but becasue they needed someone to fill the space. Placeing a product on a three story screen for two hours and establishing the hell out of it smacks more of modern art. Like if Andy Warhoul and Claes Oldenburg had a baby and it kept kicking the back of your seat. Think along the lines of a commercial. There are people. They say things. You may even listen to some of those things but its no more a story than the words on Salad Dressing bottles are trying to tell you about their hometown of hidden valley.
I even rummaged through my closet to find my Battleship game. I thought i had completely missed something. Maybe the back of the box featured an as of yet undiscovered peice of text explaining the backstory.