Peter Berg Admits ‘Battleship’ Doesn’t Have Anything to do With the Game

By  · Published on March 23rd, 2012

When asked at WonderCon 2012 about the forthcoming Battleship, Peter Berg told The Hollywood Reporter what the world already knows: that the movie has nothing to do with the game it’s based on.

“It certainly doesn’t have any direct correlation to the game. That being said, it was a lot of fun to try to find way to reference the game. If you look at the ordinance that the enemies use, it looks a bit like pegs. Both of our ships’ radar systems have trouble seeing each other, so they gotta try and predict where the enemy is so that they can go after them. And there were some other things that were kind of fun,” said the director.

So there you go. Apparently a tiny, peg-based production design and the fact that radar systems are imperfect are enough to constitute name recognition. This is Hollywood at its most moronic, and it’s nice to see that Berg recognizes that. They should stick it in the commercial for Hasbro. Without sarcasm, it’s refreshing to see that the production isn’t falling all over itself to try to sell something that no one’s buying anyway. A little honesty can go a long way.

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.