Hacker Cinema
Battleship
2012 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Peter Berg
ThrillerActionAdventureScience Fiction
When mankind beams a radio signal into space, a reply comes from ‘Planet G’, in the form of several alien crafts that splash down in the waters off Hawaii. Lieutenant Alex Hopper is a weapons officer assigned to the USS John Paul Jones, part of an international naval coalition which becomes the world's last hope for survival as they engage the hostile alien force of unimaginable strength. While taking on the invaders, Hopper must also try to live up to the potential that his brother, and his fiancée's father—an Admiral—expect of him.
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24 comments on Hacker News
Did you see the movie Battleship? Or a good percent of recent and not so recent action movies, at least Matrix could be argued that it was about a virtual reality.
Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barbie-2023-7), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
Not going to lie, TikTok served me some clips of the Battleship movie and I ended up watching it. I never would have otherwise considered it.
Certainly not a good movie but an easy mindless watch. Exactly what I’d except from TikTok
It would have been a better bad movie on 1/10th the budget. And a different script. And a different premise. Oh well, the actors tried...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(film)
I think this was linked to on HN a couple of days ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-dictator-trap-russia-ukraine/627064/
> In Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, for example, the lies have gotten progressively more ridiculous. Once a lie becomes widely accepted, the value of that individual loyalty test declines. Once everyone knows that Kim Jong Un learned to drive when he was just 3 years old, a new, more extreme lie must emerge for the test to serve its purpose. The cycle repeats itself, and a cult of personality is born.
As for the propaganda films with martial arts fighting: I get what you mean, but it sounds a bit less silly when you realize that the US military has been effectively underwriting hollywood films for decades...and the absurd things they portray US military members doing (like, say, almost single-handedly re-activating a WW2 battleship and using its deck guns to blow up alien space ships.)
> Every war movie would have a "Vehicles and props kindly provided by the US Armed Forces".
There's a whole bunch of war movies that are absolutely NOT approved by the US DoD, because they show things in an unfavorable light. Generally this means no access to actual equipment like M1 tanks or 'real' aircraft, which must be substituted using somebody else's b-roll, or CGI.
It is generally pretty easy to tell the difference between movies that were filmed with DoD filming office cooperation (Battleship), and ones that might show something about the military in an unflattering or unprofessional light (Three Kings).
One very famous example is Apocalypse Now, the helicopter scene and a lot of the rest of it was filmed in the Philippines, after making a large payment to their military for use of the Hueys.
It depends. RPGs have a lot more character development than action games. Something like Mass Effect would be pretty straightforward to adopt into a movie (biggest question: Man or Woman Shepard?). If you're trying to adapt Space Invaders then yeah, the scriptwriter has their work cut out for them.
Could be worse, you could be adopting classic boardgames. The Battleship movie was gloriously dumb. Monopoly would come across as a critique of capitalism. Actually, the Clue movie was a lot of fun.
Any movie that makes use of military helicopters and other heavy military equipment is going to have at least some US propaganda in it.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/07/201271142016284778.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/21/entertainment/la-ca-military-movies-20110821
http://movieline.com/2013/02/06/military-entertainment-complex-hollywood-pentagon-relationship-battleship-zero-dark-thirty/
This is one of the most impressive film versions of a video game that I've seen, and I am counting Rihanna in Battleship. It really captures the essence of the game, and (spoiler alert) has a superb final lead into a sequel('Anyone want to play Hearts?').
// Ha Ha only serious. Hollywood has spent millions producing poorer quality game-derived films than this one.
They used the art. The difference here is that the CIA is actually painting the pictures.
While rare for a group like the CIA to actually create content, a great many movies have been influenced. The US military supports many productions, from StarTrek to Battleship, reducing costs and increasing accuracy. But when asked they have failed to support others, notably Independence Day. Influence and persuasion has always been there in hollywood. Zero-Dark is just that much closer to the line between legitimate art and propaganda.
ok, TopGun was pure propaganda, but USN wasn't actually writing the scripts.
Any species capable of interstellar travel would probably also be capable of harnessing enough power to reduce our entire planet to ashes on a whim. The legal implications would probably be that the concept of human law is no longer relevant if they turn out to be hostile.
Paraphrasing a comment on that site paraphrasing a line from the movie Battleship: "If aliens show up, it'll be like an atomic bomb against an anthill, and we're the ants."
You could say the same about LEGO, and the LEGO movie did great. In many ways Minecraft is just video game LEGO. Battleship is a board game some people like or at least know but that's about it.
Minecraft on the other hand has a giant fan base that loves it and will buy anything related to it. Just look at all the merchandise that's started coming out over the last few years and now is everywhere. It's basically Angry Birds 2.0, just 10 times bigger, and Angry Birds it's still making tons of cash.
Minecraft is huge right now, there's a lot of money to be made by someone who knows how to properly milk it for all it's worth and has no problem with doing so.
People keep bring up movies and books, so... honestly curious - about what? A Minecraft movie makes about as much sense as a movie about Battleship, and we saw how well that did...
Both of the HN links refer to Battleship: the Movie? I don't really understand - isn't this story about some guy at etsy figuring out how to do his job?
Another movie in the same vein is "Battleship." It "woooshed" a lot of people, but there are some controvertible clues that it was more than just an "America, fuck yeah!" movie. Most notably the song during the end credits which is Creedence's "Fortunate Son." I'm sure some people won't even be convinced by that fact, but then Reagan used Springsteen's "Born in the USA" during his campaign in 1984, so I guess some people just aren't wired for satire.
For me, the best thing about "Battleship" is how the director convinced the US military to donate the use of all that hardware to a movie with such an anti-military message. The DoD doesn't do that sort of thing lightly, they require script approval and have a strict policy that they won't help with a movie that is at all critical. Slipping that right under their noses like that was a real coup.
Was Gliese the one where the aliens from the Battleship movie came from? I think I read somewhere some scientist picked it for the movie.
"Iron Man originally used to be about fighting communism, now it is about fighting terrorism"
Uh? Let's look at the villains in the recent movies:
Iron Man 1: Terrorists, later revealed to be puppets of a corrupt American military contractor.
Iron Man 2: A Russian scientist with a personal grudge, later teams up with a corrupt American military contractor.
Iron Man 3: Terrorists, turn out to have been entirely made up by a corrupt American military contractor.
In every movie the real villain is a representative of the military-industrial complex. In two of the three, cutting-edge American military technology is publicly and embarrassingly subverted and used against American citizens. In the related Avengers movie, American military authorities order a nuclear attack on New York City.
There is a lot of American propoganda in American movies (oh God, Battleship), but Iron Man is a pretty poor example.
From paragraph one: "the hero dressed down by his mentor in the first 15 minutes (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship); ... the moment of hopelessness and disarray a half-hour before the movie ends (Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6)."
Paragraph 10: "Look at January’s Gangster Squad. After an opening image that sets up the conflict between Josh Brolin’s hard-charging cop, Sgt. John O’Mara, and the criminal forces of mob boss Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), O’Mara is called in to see his gruff police superior. “We got rules around here, smartass,” the chief growls. “Do yourself a favor. Learn ’em.” That’s Snyder’s second beat, theme stated. And it’s right at the seven-minute mark, almost exactly when it’s supposed to happen in a 110-minute movie....an all-is-lost moment—including a death—between the 75- and 80-minute mark..."
Did you guys read the article, or just skim it looking for a table of data? The examples are there, with the minutes. You actually have to read numbers written as words (gasp!).
> Recent films have started focusing more on the roller coster ride of the visuals, and will do any distortion of the story necessary to motivate a visceral impact on the audience. Good storytelling takes a second seat to putting the audience into the most intense situations possible.
I thought that all of the movies listed (Star Trek Into Darkness, Battleship, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Skyfall, Star Trek Into Darkness, Olympus Has Fallen, Oblivion, 21 Jump Street, Fast & Furious 6) had awful plots, but for some of those movies the visual spectacle made them tolerable.
None of the movies listed (well, I haven't seen 21 Jump Street) obeyed the rules of physics, which is a huge turn-off for me because it breaks the suspense. The best suspenseful movies they tease you into thinking that you can predict what is going to happen next, as if they were a puzzle.
I'm not saying that I don't enjoy every movie that can't be taken literally; I just don't like movies that are logically inconsistent. Star Wars doesn't follow the rules of physics, but at least it does so consistently; you understand the capabilities of the technologies that they use and can reason about how the characters might use them. I find movies that violate the rules of physics inconsistently to be intolerable; if you don't know what behavior characters are capable of, you lose your sense of immersion because you can't relate to the characters, and can't predict what they are going to do at all.
That's just my opinion, though, and obviously enough people don't agree with me because those movies (listed in article) made lots of money.
That must've been one of the best scenes I've seen in a movie. Or, well, until Battleship.
IMO quite good is an understatement, it has become the best any LotR fan could have ever hoped for. And about Silmarillion: Think about how good some TV screenwriters have become in recent years - IMO they turn out more high quality TV scripts than movies nowadays, mostly because the big budget movie industry needs to always take the safe bets (and so you get stupid flicks like battleship et al.)
> we can donate the resources to support roughly 3 average size families for a year to a "pop culture critic"
At least she is attempting to advance society. If you want to feel depressed, 209 million USD was spent on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleship_(film).
209 million.
Hard to argue with anything Ebert says in that article. As a kid I loved going to the theater. I tried to see a movie every time I had a free weekend.
However, these days going to the movie theater gives me an immense amount of anxiety. Despite the cost going up, my moviegoing peers seem to care less and less about actually watching the movie they paid to see. If it's not blinding cell phone screens, it's people talking way too loud and way too often.
As a result there are very few movies I'm not willing to wait for watching it in my own home.
Plus, most of the movies I hear about are ridiculous sequels or odd sounding takes on old properties. A Battleship movie? Really?
An attempt at a viral marketing campaign for the movie Battleship?