"Battleship"

The big misconcpetion that most of the public has right now about every movie needing to be "based on" something, even old toys and board-games, is that Hollywood is "out of ideas." Not the case. What they're "out of" - or at least percieve themselves to be out of - are things that garauntee an instant "connection" with an audience in the marketing sense. A Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts rom-com BOMBED this summer. That scares the shit out of industry people - if name-stars can't "register," what the hell can? Well, brand-names - of ANY kind - that've been burned into the collective unconscious, for one.

Hence, "Battleship," which basically takes the name (and probably the "you sank my Battleship!!!" line at least once) and packaging-font of the old naval-warfare game and slaps it onto a (technically) original story about a navy fleet versus water-based aliens...

Take away the "oh, gawd... the BOARD GAME!?" aspect, and I don't think it looks half bad. Peter Berg is an interesting director; and we haven't seen a wholly ocean-set genre film in awhile. I'll admit I'd be exponenially more interested if it didn't look like they were just regular space-aliens hanging out in the water - when did science-fiction decide that the "undersea invaders from Atlantis, Mu, etc." bit wasn't "cool" anymore?