If you’ve watched the trailers for Battleship and wondered, “Why are there aliens in there?,” director Peter Berg has an explanation.
“So we’re going to do Battleship, and we know that it has some very intense violence in it. With that said, I wanted to make a film that felt fun. I didn’t want to make a movie for those of you who are familiar with your World War II history. So I started to think about who our enemy could be,” he says.
As he was contemplating this, Berg watched a documentary by Stephen Hawking that talked about planets we’re targeting in our universe that have the greatest potential for life. “We are targeting these planets [we really do this] with high-frequency signals. The purpose of these signals is to basically say, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re Earth.'”
Berg continued, “I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if at the beginning of the movie we identify a planet that is a Goldilocks planet and we send a signal out? That’s how Battleship opens.”
For the film, Berg took familiar elements from the game and kicked them up a notch. “… as simple as it is with me calling out D1, you say miss. You say D5, I say miss. When I say hit, something kind of interesting happens. I try to kill you as brutally and quickly and mercilessly as possible. That’s actually really good DNA for a movie.”
Then don’t call it Battleship. Also why is there a battelship in it, they have all been retired, what is their justification for getting one underway?
Because it would make a great tourist ride?
There is no realistic justification for getting any of the Iowa’s underway so I would have to say this movie’s plot takes place in an alternate universe where aircraft carriers never came into being. At least that would make sense.
He didn’t want to do a movie for those of us that know our WWII history because that would force him to think & research before writing anything down. Critical thinking is not a vast resource in Hollywood. The aliens are there because aliens = special effects which they think will = big profits…John Carter anyone?