Battleship - Peter Berg talks about the Aliens in the water

A while back it was announced that Peter Berg’s adaption of the Hasbro board game, Battleship, would feature a human fleet going up against aliens. Everyone scratched their heads at that one.

Now Berg has spoken to a Latino Review (he flew a few journalists down to a proper battleship for the show and tell).

First of all the concept art of the alien ships shows they are black, and had legs that spread out sort of like water spiders you see on the top of lakes. They looked pretty H.G. Wells-ish and supposedly each ship matches up very well to our ships. Technologically, the two enemies are almost evenly matched.

Here is some of what Berg had to say about the film. Be sure to check out the rest of the interview though as there is a lot of info over there.

The goal was to put up something that could exist as a big, dynamic, entertaining summer blockbuster. That’s clearly what you aspire to make when you take on something like ‘Battleship’ and I think we’re well on our way. I want to share a few pictures with you guys of the enemy, pictures of what the enemy is going to look like. Nobody has seen these…but the enemy does come from another planet. That’s not news. It’s true, you guys uncovered it first. We tried to keep it a secret, but it’s our goal to make that as intelligent and logical, certainly as ‘District 9′ was able to do. But to provide a real intelligence to our opponent, a logic, a rationale for being there and not purely hostile, violent creatures bent on global destruction. They’ve got a much more logical agenda planned that happens to come into conflict with us. Then there’s a chance for two relatively equal opponents to go at each other and you get a sense of some of the equipment you saw, the level and intelligence of that character of what modern sailors are today.

He went on to talk about the aliens.

They’ve got a problem. Upon arrival one of their ships is severely damaged and that’s posed a real existing problem for them and they’re trying to deal with that.

You’ll understand and ILM is doing an extraordinary job of creating, they’re called the Regents, the folks who inhabit these ships. Some of them are very scientific and very intelligent and not violent at all. Others of them are more violent but they’re all concerned with the fact that they have a very real mechanical problem with one of their ships and they’re trying to deal with that.

Their craft are sea based. They don’t fly. But you can see sort of that there’s an equal number of American and there’s actually one Japanese ship involved in this conflict with the enemy.

They are actually able to fly, insert themselves through the earth’s atmosphere and make contact through the water. Once they get on the surface they don’t fly. They stay put. They’ve enabled moving in a fairly unique manner, along the different ways of the sea. They don’t have the standard propulsion but they have weapons systems and some of them are very violent. There are some that aren’t but there are some that are the equivalent of our destroyers.

Berg then went on to talk about the sequel to Hancock 2 and other projects he is working on.

It’s being written now and it’s an issue of everybody involved in ‘Hancock’. There are so many cooks in that particular kitchen that it’s so busy and Will [Smith] has kind of taken time off to be with his kids and his kids are now making all kinds of films. There are so many people involved in that, from Will to his partner James Lassiter to Akiva [Goldsman] to Michael Mann, myself and to get us all in the same room just like this where we can all talk and then agree on anything, you’ve never met a group of people that have a harder time agreeing on anything. It’s like the Israeli peace process times a thousand how tough it is to resolve. I think it’ll happen though. We just have to kind of get in the same room for some consistency.

Lone Survivor is what I want to do next. If you haven’t read that book it’s an incredible story and a really dynamic one, in the vein of like a ‘Black Hawk Down’. It’s a true story about seventeen SEALS that were killed in one gunfight in Afghanistan. It’s a great story. One survived.

The Battleship film is actually growing on me after hearing what Berg has to say about it. I like the sound of the aliens and their ships. Just a pity he had to pull out of the Dune remake to do it.

What are your thoughts on Battleship? Will it work? Who would you like to see leading the human fleet?

Go read the rest of the interview over at Latino Review as I’ve barely scratched the surface.