American and Japanese battleships team up to fight space aliens
Chud.com reports some details about “Battleship,” a upcoming American movie inspired by the board game of the same name. Director Peter Berg has said that it will involve a fleet of battleships fighting against space aliens:
- This is more strategic warfare. Again, since the alien tech is not unbeatable or far beyond our own, and since Berg wants to reflect the game, the battle won’t be about our Navy fighting an unstoppable opponent but rather about two evenly matched groups out-thinking one another through strategy.
Berg: Some take more shots to sink and kill than do others. Just like our ships. But they’re killable.
- Someone will say ‘You sank my battleship!’ in the movie. In fact, Berg is adamant that it has to be there. He also said there will be other nods to the game.
Berg: Hells yeah!
- The hero fleet will be cut off from the rest of the world in some way. There will be a five ship fleet taking on The Regents, and for whatever reason, they cannot communicate with the rest of the Navy and so must handle the threat on their own.
- The hero fleet will have an international component. One of the ships will be Japanese. Will this Japanese ship be part of the WWII component? Unclear.
- There will be close quarters fighting. In the Navy they call it a ‘knife fight,’ when two ships are close enough to fire small caliber weapons at one another (keep in mind that in the Navy a small caliber weapon is a huge machine gun. That’s small when compared to the mammoth 5 inch rounds the destroyer’s main gun fires).
- Berg wants to make Battleship as realistic a look at naval battle as possible, considering the bad guys are aliens. Berg opted not to have any Earthly foe because he thought the plot gymanstics required to explain why the US Navy is at war with any of the comparable navies would be too much.
Berg: The idea of finding a credible context for that eluded me. The idea of a film where America goes to war against China, or a movie where America goes to war against England or Australia or Japan, one of the countries that has a credible navy, felt like it would borderline on some kind of jingoistic American military exercise I couldn’t get my head around. I like the idea of something bigger, larger than life and the challenge it presented.
Perhaps he can draw some inspiration from anime and have the Japanese revive the Yamato to battle against evil aliens.
[hat tip to Ryuganji]
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