Last week, Latino Review broke a “scoop” about the identity of the villains in Peter Berg’s planned adaptation of the board game “Battleship.” The reason why we’re dancing around that scoop, which you can read about here, is because Devin Faraci of CHUD seemed to feel, from a protected source, that the identity of the villain constituted a spoiler. Read on if you wish to be spoiled.
Both CHUD and Latino Review are comfortable revealing the enemy of the film to be aliens, though Devin, who covered the story based on Latino Review’s coverage on the same day, is a little more reluctant to let the cat out of the bag. If CHUD is to be believed, “Battleship” was only going to reveal its main conflict late in the game, and the knowledge leaking out regarding the 2011 release suggests that the alien plot was going to be based in secrecy.
We’ve entered a curious period of internet nerd reporting where these giant tentpoles often rely on secrecy, and a tenuous relationship with the internet to preserve it. Earlier, sites like Aint-It-Cool-News would be in a rush to report whatever they could scoop about films, but we like the approach by CHUD, who put the information out there in a way that allowed us to choose whether we want to hear it or not. Then again, we’re still a year and a half away from the movie, wouldn’t we find out at some point in the future even if we didn’t want to? Probably a losing battle, we guess, but with the relationships internet movie journos have developed with studios, there does appear to be some agreement on what they can blab and what they should stay tight-lipped about. Didn’t help “Terminator Salvation,”which had its ending spoiled months in advance before a hasty last minute change, but in that case, we got a terrible McG movie from loose lips when we could’ve had a marginal-to-OK McG movie, so not a huge loss.
Anyway, what does this alien plot mean? It’s a win-win for Peter Berg and the studio. Berg gets to tell a fantastical story on his own terms without being married to the framework of the game, while Milton Bradley gets a chance to market a whole new version of the game for the current generation paying to see the movie. And the studio gets to market the film worldwide with optimal comfort, no longer relying on what seemed like the central story’s need for an international enemy. Frankly, we’d be enthused if Peter Berg was an interesting filmmaker and had a nose for quality, but he isn’t (“The Kingdom”) and he doesn’t (“Hancock”), so we can only hope for a marginal alien-attack movie in summer ’11.