BATTLESHIP TRAILER APPROPRIATES MORE THAN JUST THE GAME’S TITLE (+HD STILLS)

Tim Riggins, Landry and Liam Neeson fighting aliens with Battleships? With Berg directing? I'm on board. (Sorry). Looks ridiculous, but in a good way.

I'm so used to seeing Kitsch with long hair that he looks WEIRD in this.

It is neither GI Joe levels of insanity, nor is it even hilariously bad. it's just kinda there. Which accentuates the pointlessness of it all.

 

My love of Liam Neeson only goes so far.

The script was so dull and boring. i can't even say it was awful, it was just mediocre and even reading it you could see the plot points coming up. I really was disappointed in Berg when I read the script. I know they did a bunch of extra shooting and reshoots, but unless they rewrote the script after principal photography this is going to be a dull film.

 

The trailer does look better than the script, but I am not holding out hope for a great film.

Someone tell Liam Neeson that there's a limit to how much he can elevate cheesy material. Taken? The A-Team? Yeah, sure. Sam Worthington fighting Greek CGI? A movie based on Battleship that actually insists on the audience remembering the sheer preposterousness of the logline by making yellow pegs a plot point? Orson Welles couldn't save that, and he made Transformers: The Movie work.

If Liam Neeson does not say, "You sunk my battleship!" at some point in the movie, I'm gonna be super pissed.

It's everything you hated in Pearl Harbor plus knockoff Transformobots. This reportedly cost $200 million.

 

At this point, I just wanna give Neeson a hug & say "It's gonna be alright. You can say no to projects now".

Berg is one of the few guys who can direct action well.  A hell of a lot better than Michael Bay.

 

And I've heard Berg did this to get a shot at directing Lone Survivor, about the team of navy Seals in Afghanistan.

The US Navy vs Aliens!  Nuff Said!  Of course there is more to say.  Liam Neeson as an Admiral battling Alien Super Robots is like crossing Battleship with War Of The Worlds...The All Kinds Of Awesome Edition, not the Spielberg one!  I just hope there is some kind of...Super Battleship, or something after Neeson says...You Sunk My Battleship!

Despite the presence of Liam Neeson and Brookly Decker, I think I'll pass on this one.

Edited by Anger Management - 7/27/11 at 12:02pm

I'm pretty sure we've seen this movie already, right?

 

Peter Berg's not enough of a genius to make a xeroxed product like this worth seeing. Given the cinematography and rah-rah feeling of this thing, I wouldn't be surprised if audiences thought it was a trailer for another Transformers movie.

Maybe it's because I only saw it for the first time last week, but the movie that sprung to mind while watching this trailer was Battle: Los Angeles (minus the shakey cam of course).  As if this movie depicts what was going on off the coast.

I know some Transformers stuff was set in the sea, but not a whole bunch of it. So with that said, at least this looks like a really nice change of scenery for this kind of fanciful military movie. I'm use to seeing sand and M-16s and shit.

 

Plus, this looks really cool. "Cool" as in there's a lot of water onscreen, coupled that with the air conditioning in the theatre, I'm going to see this film for that alone. Bonus if I fall asleep. I seem to be having problems doing that nowadays.

 

Liam Neeson and ALIENS? Didn't see that coming.

 

Call me a little intrigued.

Yet another guy who never saw Friday Night Lights.

 

My main beef with the trailer is we don't get to see the aliens them selves.

 

Kitsch looks a bit like Jan-Michael Vincent circa Big Wednesday in some of those scenes.

 

Hancock?

 

oooh that trailer has SPEED RAMPING! COOL!

What about it?

I always scoffed at someone of Berg's talent tackling a board game movie.

 

The truth is you could put any filmmaker with this kind of thing and they come off smelling bad.

 

It really looks a lot like Michael Bay Pearl Harbor/Armageddon all over again. A shame.

 

Hancock was butchered by the studio its written on the wall but nobody said anything.

 

Its a great movie until Theron pushes Will Smith through that house and from there total shitsville.

What Johnny said about it. 

 

I DO love Friday Night Lights though.  The TV series more than the movie.

 

I love both the TV show and the film FNL. This film is no Friday Night Lights thats for damn sure.

No.  Hell no.  Pass.

No JD, but Berg has the chops to make this fun, at the very least.  Not sure why everyone's calling this dead a year before its release.  But that's what folks tend to do these days.

 

I guess people don't like THE KINGDOM?

I should give The Kingdom another watch.  I remember enjoying well enough until its unearned 'meaningful' ending left me a little sour on it as a whole.  Of course, that and Jennifer Garner's ass-kicking moment is about all I remember from the movie (and its cool opening graphic).

 

If Berg can make this something as fun as The Rundown...

The Kingdom's good.  Nick and Justin talked it up on a CHUDcast a few years ago.  The thing is with these Transformer comparisons, Berg can direct action, and Bay can't.  Not to save his life.  Even if Battleship is a piece of pocorn fluff, I bet it'll be more fun than most of its blockbuster ilk.  I'm sure he can do great stuff with those destroyers in action.  And Berg will have paved the way to do Lone Survivor, which is more worthy of his skills.

or the rumoured FNL feature flick.

I liked 'The Kingdom' quite a bit and was looking forward to see what Berg could have done with 'Dune' but after seeing this....it looks like he repeatedly watched an infomercial  of  "How to Blow shit up and make movies the Bay way"

  

forget "Battleship" just call it what it appears to be.... "The Rock Boys visit the Island of the Pearl Transformageddon: Revenge of the Dark Harbor "

There's a difference between retarded and fun. Yeah, they can throw money at the fx houses, but so what?

Guess I'll say this here:

I don't think I'll ever watch the Friday Night Lights tv series just because it isn't set in Odessa(where I'm from). I know I'm missing out, but that seriously bugs me.

Someone needs to scan me with one of those Men in Black memory wipe things so I can hunker down and give it a go.

Edited by Walker - 7/27/11 at 10:10pm

Was there a particular reason that a fictional town (Dillon) was created instead of using Odessa as the film did?

This looks like a retarded ten year old smearing his shit into his hair while jerking off and eating his cum.

When the book FNL came out, Bissinger took a bit of heat from some of the town's residents, but the real reason is it just gave the show's creators more freedom.  Berg wanted to make the series more than an expanded version of the film.  You can build your town from scratch and not worry about a thing.   

 

Walker, if you do decide to watch FNL, try to catch the original episodes rather than the DVDs.  The series used Explosions in the Sky and other Texas bands to terrific effect; unfortunately the music was mostly replaced by generic scores on the DVD.

 

I imagine the Netflix Instant Watch version has replaced music as well?  Does it play in syndication?

 

So, did the guys that designed the Transformers stuff design the aliens in this?  Because from a pure design standpoint, I want to say that it looks similar.  Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

The alien ships fire PEGS!!!!!

This is now a must-see.  Now excuse me while I start apologizing to my brain ahead of time....

I would hope that those pegs explode a millisecond later, or those weapons would seem to kind of suck.

 

 

To be honest, I don't know. I didn't think to wiki it until just now, and the only answer I got was pretty much "just because".

 

The only snap theory I would have, and it's reaching hardcore, is that FNL started the same year as Heroes. The cheerleader lived in Odessa(and where they shot the show looked hardly anything like Odessa). Maybe NBC didn't want two shows goinig that were set there? Again, I don't know. Probably just a coincidence.

 

The Friday Night Lights movie was kinda surreal for me. My sister knew those guys, and the character Jay Hernandez played(Brian Chavez, whose law office was seen in the film) grew up to be the divorce lawyer for my then-girlfriend's parents. What's interesting, and I don't begrudge this, is that the film decided to omit Chavez' history with cocaine while practicing law. He has since done other criminal activities.

 

The second weirdest thing is seeing my Vice Principal have a speaking role in the film. He's the guy who clowned on Tim McGraw about Billingsley not having his A-Game during practice.

 

That part where Boobie Miles tears his ACL wins the prize for making me pinch myself the hardest.  One of the spectators in the front row watching is a former classmate of mine, Joe Beene. I know there's a parapelgic character in the TV show, and I'm pretty sure Berg used Beene's story as inspiration.

I've watched seasons 2 through 4 of FNL on Instant and I never got the impression that the music sounded generic.  It sounds like Explosions in the Sky and the songs sound fitting.  But aside from that, I don't know for sure.

 

 

Looks like Subotai provided an answer.  Basically, the answer seems to be: in order to have more creative freedom.  I'm sure the legal freedom doesn't hurt either. 
 

 

When this is available on HBO On Demand, I will be kind of excited to finally get around to it. Yup!

 

Is the Taylor Kitsch thing going to happen?

 

 

Thanks for the head's up, Subotai.

 

And yeah, the book was reviled in Odessa when it got published. However, that reactionary attitude has since disappeared. The town anticipated the movie HEAVILY, despite being mainly shot in Austin. Between the time the book/movie took place, and how Odessa really was at that time, are totally different. The city isn't as podunk as people think it is nowadays. Shooting away from that, with the exceptional second unit shot here and there, was the right call. Odessa, back then, was just about as podunk as people think it is.

 

If anyone is curious to see what Odessa really looks like, I'd recommend watching The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. The mall parking lot where January Jones is just chilling was filmed in the city's Music City Mall. Which made me do a double take because I had no idea the movie was filmed there before hand(and I hadn't lived in Odessa for quite a bit when I watched that). 

 

Berg's too good for stuff like this. I'll probably watch it to support him but what I really want out of him is another movie as fun as The Rundown.

I will never understand why The Rundown didn't end up being huge.  Such an awesome little action-comedy.

 

Anyway, I have to admit this looks about two billion times better than I thought it would when I first heard they were making a "Battleship" movie.

 

Is Ridley Scott still going to do the Monopoly movie once he's done with Prometheus?

 

 

Is it wrong I'm hoping for an AVENGERS-style Hasbro crossover event where Transformers, Battleship, Monopoly, Candy Land and the rest join forces in a super-grim-n-gritty three hour epic?

 

Trailer seems interesting enough, and it would look exactly as interesting with or without the name BATTLESHIP.

 

Buzz Bissinger has often spoken, but never specifically, of the troubles those guys have been through.  Actually, scratch that - when speaking on the Bill Simmons podcast some months ago, he did mention that Boobie Miles was in prison and that he stays in touch with him. 

 

Yeah, Berg was watching Texas high school games to prep for the FNL feature film when a player was hit and his spinal cord injured during the game.  It's also what got him and some of the folks in the show to do that annual charity that supports the Buoniconti fund.
 

 

Boobie Miles is in prison? I didn't know that. Damn shame. If it wasn't for that knee injury...who knows what would have happened. On the FNL movie doc he seemed content, albeit extremley fat.

I didn't know the FNL tv dvds had new music. The reviews I read didn't mention it. Weird. Are the rights to Explosions in the sky that expensive?

I don't know if he intends on it being his follow-up to Prometheus, but as far as I can tell he still fully intends on making a Monopoly movie.  Honestly, I'm looking forward to see what kind of crazy flick he can make out of it.  Here are his thoughts on it back when he was doing press for Robin Hood.....

 

A classic '80s comedy came to Scott's mind when thinking about the Monopoly movie.

 

"I always liked films like 'Trading Places' with Eddie Murphy," he said. "I'm not saying it's like that, but it's somewhere around that route. It has to be a comedy. You know, if you hover above Central Park at night in a helicopter, and you look down below, when you're right in the middle of the park, it looks like a Monopoly board. It's green, it's lit, it's got the most expensive real estate in the world around the edges — and that is where we start."

 

As for the film's plot, Scott said it will largely revolve around a Donald Trump-esque character, battling with other greedy wannabe real-estate titans.

 

"It's about some horrible property scam guy," Scott explained. "I'm not saying Donald Trump is horrible — he's quite amusing, actually.

 

"It's about greed," he added. "Greed becomes, hopefully, hysterically funny."

 

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1637799/monopoly-movie-will-be-all-about-greed-ridley-scott-reveals.jhtml

 

 

 

Anyway, Sir Ridley still has quite a few pots on the backburner:

 

- The Wolf of Wall Street (with him directing and Scorsese producing or vice versa.  They can't seem to decide.  DiCaprio stars either way.)

- Monopoly

- Gucci

- The Forever War (sci-fi adaptation)

- Brave New World (sci-fi adaptation)

- Red Riding (remake of the Brit trilogy)

- Untitled Reagan Project

- Untitled Werewolf Project

 

He usually speaks of the top four the most often so, barring a new project coming along, his next film will probably be one of those.  There is also the possibility that he might be involved with the Blade Runner follow-up that is in the conceptual stage or that he might revive Tripoli or his potential Gladiator follow-up at some point.  He doesn't own the rights to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian anymore, but if it doesn't get made by someone he'll probably just buy them back again like he did the last time.  Keep in mind that he tends to end up producing projects when he loses interest.  Out of the Furnace, 47 Ronin, The Passage, The Stones, The Kind One, and Child 44 are all projects that Ridley was going to do at one point and is now producing for other directors.

 

Man, I'm not counting on anything from Ridley after Prometheus. He's well into his seventies and Prometheus looks as much like a swan song as anything.

Ridley Scott will probably die in production on a film.  I can't see that man ever stopping until Death come a callin'.