The Game to Movie business has officially Jumped the Shark.

There is a Battleship movie coming next year.

Yeah you heard me. A hollywood movie based off the hasbro board game about guessing where the other player's ships are.

http://toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=278&itemid=17525

It has Liam Neeson, but I cannot see how this can possibly be good.

Hahahaha that's fukken stoopid. What's next a movie based on pong?

I figured out how to cheat with that game. If you have lots of pegs you can mark where the other guy shot on the bottom where you keep your ships. If it's a hit you can move your ship and say he missed. Haha.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs

suddenly this doesn't seem as wacky and random, eh?

Something needed to be good before it can jump the shark.

Then again, they've appeared to have gotten some sort of alien in my Battleship.

It seriously looks like Hasbro said "Transformers was popular, make it like that."

Just like they managed to ruin the Doom movie by replacing Hell with some sort of monstrous genetic down-syndrome twaddle, they've ruined Battleships by putting robots in it. The Battleships fanbasd (lol?) must be furious!

Also, how would a Connect-4 film work? What would be the plot?

I think Battleship first came out in WW1, they should just have made a film about Jutland, because that would have historical interest, actually happened and didn't involve aliens.

Could it be any worse than this movie, which degenerates into a game of tic-tac-toe?

Movies based on things that are not stories started in a condition of "jumped the shark." They can only get further from that.

Also, self-respecting humans don't ask fathers for permission to marry the girl. That's just wrong.

If game to film transitions entailed an absurdist element of some kind that literally incorporated the placing of pegs on a board,* aligning of blocks falling from the sky or, in the case of Doom, the firing of functionally identical BFGs at monsters with poor capacity for intellect, I would be mega excited for absolutely every transition made.

Obviously though such a move would "doom" the film's success at the box office, so I reserve these fascinations utterly:

*A couple of fishermen have run out of fuel on their return journey following an unsuccessful haul off the coast of Buenos Aires, and are playing battleships to pass the time. Their movements are literally causing enormous, plastic, peg shaped objects to spear into the various oceans at lightning pace and impale billions of fish and the occasional British vessel. One of the fisherman is concerned that the reason they never catch a better haul is because the other keeps targeting the South Atlantic instead. He then discovers the other fisherman to have a suicide pact after he deliberately destroys the rescue boat, and that the foreign ship the first fisherman thought the other was targeting is in fact their own.
Accused of cowardice recalling events at the Falklands War, Diego decides that he must discover and destroy using giant plastic pegs that which his former friend values most, or die trying.

Doom Dude said:

Hahahaha that's fukken stoopid. What's next a movie based on pong?

It could be like rocky, but set in the future and based around ping pong tournaments.

Ballbuster - The Movie

They jumped the shark at the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots film.

A movie on pong would just be a tennis movie. I think a much better horrible movie would be one based on pac-man.

AirRaid said:

It has Liam Neeson, but I cannot see how this can possibly be good.

The presence of a fine actor does not yield a good movie. Admittedly it's hard to think of a title that Liam Neeson has personally been in which stank, but I'm sure there's one or two out there.

The Phantom Menace!

I could see a Battleship movie about one fleet trying to overcome the other fleet's use of Doom Dude's cheat tactic. That might at least be funny.

Wow, It looks as if ideas for movies are running short now days.

Aliotroph? said:

The Phantom Menace!

No. It's just hip and cool to claim you disliked the prequel trilogy.

Captain Toenail said:

Also, how would a Connect-4 film work? What would be the plot?

A group of giant gorillas and kaiju monsters doing that to apartment buildings. I'm pretty sure I saw a Connect-4 commercial similar to this idea when I was a kid.

DoomUK said:

The presence of a fine actor does not yield a good movie.

I've made it a habit to select films for viewing based on the director rather than the actors involved. Peter Berg doesn't give me that much to go off, though, and seeing as I found Hancock so uninspiring a film I can't imagine he'd do that great in translating a game based on pegging plastic ships to the big screen without serving up a comically peppered, publicly catered action blockbuster that has nothing to do with Argentinean fishermen.

Well, at least a studio like Universal Pictures is not making a LOTR-styled Candyland movie...

@DoomUK: It isn't just hip to dislike the prequel trilogy, it's smart to dislike them. The writing in them is horrible compared to the original three when Lucas didn't know what people would think and actually gave a shit about the writing. And the actors he chose, except for a few, were even worse. Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, and Christopher Lee were the only three actors worth anything in that entire series when compared to the Rock Star cast they had for the original 3. Now he's become a cash whore and thinks his fan base will just like anything he makes because he's him. Look at the end of Indiana Jones 4, I liked it a lot up until the last 15 minutes.

Call me naive but I don't recall any of the events in this even remotely similar to my experience in playing battleship.

DoomUK said:

No. It's just hip and cool to claim you disliked the prequel trilogy.

You say that as if they have some cinematographic merit beyond being part of a cash-cow franchise. But they are actually, truly bad, in ways that the original trilogy wasn't.


Back in the 70s, Lucas was a young, ambitious movie-maker who had to overcome a lot of constraints and challenges to make these movies. That forced him to cut off a lot of crap and seriously work on creating the movies as best as he could. For the prequel series, however, he was a fat, old and rich guy who could just throw money on stuff to make problems go away instead of forcing his noggin to do serious work.

That's why there's a lot of excellent CGI but the actor direction is poor. And that's why there was no editorial oversight to tell him his script sucked and he had to rework it.

But at least, the prequel trilogy had the merit to spawn a lot of hilarious parodies and spoofs. You oughta watch the Plinkett reviews, they are great. This screencap webcomic is also comedy gold.

DoomHero85 said:

@DoomUK: It isn't just hip to dislike the prequel trilogy, it's smart to dislike them. The writing in them is horrible compared to the original three when Lucas didn't know what people would think and actually gave a shit about the writing. And the actors he chose, except for a few, were even worse. Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, and Christopher Lee were the only three actors worth anything in that entire series when compared to the Rock Star cast they had for the original 3. Now he's become a cash whore and thinks his fan base will just like anything he makes because he's him. Look at the end of Indiana Jones 4, I liked it a lot up until the last 15 minutes.

Gez said:

You say that as if they have some cinematographic merit beyond being part of a cash-cow franchise. But they are actually, truly bad, in ways that the original trilogy wasn't.


Back in the 70s, Lucas was a young, ambitious movie-maker who had to overcome a lot of constraints and challenges to make these movies. That forced him to cut off a lot of crap and seriously work on creating the movies as best as he could. For the prequel series, however, he was a fat, old and rich guy who could just throw money on stuff to make problems go away instead of forcing his noggin to do serious work.

That's why there's a lot of excellent CGI but the actor direction is poor. And that's why there was no editorial oversight to tell him his script sucked and he had to rework it.

But at least, the prequel trilogy had the merit to spawn a lot of hilarious parodies and spoofs. You oughta watch the Plinkett reviews, they are great. This screencap webcomic is also comedy gold.

Meh, I couldn't honestly care less if Lucas was milking the franchise as a lot of people seem to dismiss them as being as result of. I still enjoyed them.

Yeah, there's some clunky moments in the script and acting (the exchange between Anakin and Obi-Wan right before their climactic duel in Episode III literally makes me cringe whenever I watch it; the lines given to the actors are dumb, and Hayden Christensen wasn't a strong enough actor to pull off the kind of emotion that is mandatory for that kind of scene... at least Ewan Mcgregor looked like he was trying to make it work in the least hammiest way possible), but the original trilogy weren't exactly what I'd call masterpieces of screenwriting. Sorry guys. They're highly enjoyable pieces of entertainment, with some philosophical ideas tossed around and some political references thrown in, if you care to dig deep enough. But that's all.

In summary I liked all six Star Wars movies equally. All of them have their moments of greatness and failings. Now back to talking about this Battleship movie :p

This just goes to prove my theory 1 type of movie can't draw anymore and something has to keep all the special effects people on staff.

So Battleship combines Duke and General Hawk... on the water...
And it has transformers... and its a game movie.

You know how I would have made fucking Battleship the movie?
- Not naval exercises... 1950s naval era going into German with the muther fucking FOG OF WAR!!!! It would make sense to play a game of battleship with the fog of war.

But I guess that movie would only appeal to men... so the studio would have to pervert it somehow... like could the nazis be alien nazis? Something has to beef up this movie to 200 million dollars so kids will see it and luv it.

Oh and you know what my idea would draw men of a certain age who probably wouldn't download it for free or bash it the instant it comes out. But what do I know about making movies?

geo said:

FOG OF WAR!!!!

Me too, I was genuinely surprised at how clear the weather was during the trailer. I was expecting sunrise in winter with dense fog. I'm pretty sure not being able to see where your opponents ships were was the whole point of the game.

Gotta have clear weather to see the fucking transformer.

Transformers + GI Joe (Duke & General Hawk)

Maybe what the Transformer does is blind everyone on the ship, but not kill them... that way the audience can still see.

btw... U571 was awesome.
K-19 was hilariously foreshadowingly awesome.

Battleship movie sounded cool when I first heard about it three years ago. Trailer looks rather odd.

Maybe it won't be so bad if they use Bob Herzog's battleship house rules. :D