Battleship -2012-2012
: Used to mark a "Miss" on your tracking grid to avoid calling the same coordinate twice. Where to Find Replacements
The film boasted a diverse and high-profile cast:
Hopper looks at a grid board and calls out coordinates like "E-11" to fire missiles, effectively gamifying the climax of the movie. It is a moment of literal adaptation that walks the line between clever and absurd. Battleship -2012-2012
: Despite its $209–$220 million budget, it only grossed about $303 million worldwide, failing to reach the "hit" status typically expected for such a high-budget production. Key Comparisons
The story follows Alex Hopper (Tom Cruise), a naval officer who unexpectedly becomes the captain of the USS Missouri, a guided-missile battleship. As Hopper tries to navigate his new command, a fleet of alien ships descends upon Earth, and the Missouri finds itself at the center of an intergalactic battle. The aliens, who appear to be hostile, are threatening humanity's existence. Hopper, along with his crew and a group of scientists, must find a way to defeat the extraterrestrial threat and save the planet. : Used to mark a "Miss" on your
Critics scoffed at how a game about grid coordinates could translate to film. The filmmakers addressed this with a clever, if cheesy, sequence. Using tsunami-detection buoys, the crew creates a grid map of the ocean. They cannot see the alien ships due to cloaking technology, but they can detect disturbances in the water when the aliens move.
Filming took place primarily in Hawaii and aboard actual U.S. Navy vessels. The production was granted unprecedented access to military assets, shooting on the USS Missouri (now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor) and active destroyers. To ensure realism, director Peter Berg embedded himself with Navy SEALs and visited ships in the Middle East. : Despite its $209–$220 million budget, it only
The sequence of the Missouri awakening is the film’s undeniable masterpiece. A retired veteran, who served on the ship in the 1980s, sneaks aboard to help. As the alien warships close in, the veterans start the engines. The camera pans over the massive 16-inch (406 mm) guns. An old sailor, played by real-life veteran and actor Gregory D. Gadson (an Army colonel who lost both legs in Iraq), orders: "Load the guns."
Given the film's epic scope, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was brought on as the lead visual effects house. The film presented a herculean technical challenge, requiring a complete overhaul of ILM's simulation pipeline for water and destruction. With over , the team developed a new "Battleship Water Project" to create photorealistic ocean waves, ship breaches, and complex water interactions for the alien vessels. The result was a visually impressive spectacle of naval warfare, even if the story beneath the surface was less robust.
Conversely, the aliens are the film’s weakest link. The search query excludes the year, so we can focus purely on design. The aliens are bipedal, humanoid, and wear exo-suits that make them look like rejected Halo villains. Their motivation is never explained. Are they vanguard scouts? Refugees? Terraformers? The film does not care. They exist to fire weird, bouncing projectiles that look like yo-yos. Interestingly, the film reveals they communicate through non-verbal gestures and have a form of honor: when a human saves an alien’s life, the alien hesitates to kill. It is a theme introduced and abandoned within thirty seconds.
(which focused on geological catastrophes and had a much longer runtime of 158 minutes), Battleship focused strictly on military-versus-alien combat. specific ships featured in the movie or more details on the alien technology