Battleship ... The Movie?!

A 1957 film called The Enemy Below comes to mind here. It starred Robert Mitchum and is a very gripping film. I strongly recommend it to anyone who has never seen it. It shows up on TCM and AMC with some regularity.

Chances are, this movie won't even approach the quality of The Enemy Below. There aren't 3 filmmakers left in Hollywood that can produce movies of that caliber. But...ya never know.

Then we have the 1981 German movie Das Boot which was rather slow at times, but consistantly edgy. In the hands of a skilled director, a cat and mouse plot of this nature could work, but I'm not betting on Hollywood doing anything other than taking the low road.

Actually, as I noted in the last line of my post, I have very little confidence that Hollywood is capable of making anything of the cailber of The Enemy Below anymore. However, I'm sure it will please MWG to no end that there should be plenty of shots of shells hitting ships, with all the accompanying flying body parts, and sharks feeding on the left over chum. That stands in contrast to the aforementioned film, a classic of it's genre, in which we weren't subjected to actually seeing a single drop of blood spilled.

Actually, that sounds a whole lot more interesting to me that 90% of what is going to be released in the forseeable future.

I guess the cautionary note that I will toss out here is that we are doing a lot of speculating on the nature of this movie based on nothing more than a title, and in point of fact, it might not have much of anything to do with the board game. Do I think it will be any good? No. But I thought Rocky Balboa would suck canal water and it turned out to be an almost tolerable effort. Entertaining as this discussion has been, we are going on zero information here.

Okay, from the news article posted on the main page:

"Movie studio development slates are rapidly filling up with projects based on well-known toys and games. Some high-profile projects in the works include ones based on the classic video game Asteroids, Lego building blocks, the View-Master toy, dolls Barbie and Stretch Armstrong, and board games Battleship, Ouija, Monopoly and Candy Land."

Asteroids: Do we really need another "must blow up giant rocks in outer space before they hit the Earth and end all life" movie?

Legos: Unless it's an actual stop-motion "block-movie", I don't want to hear about it. But either way, I can watch any number of those Lego movies for free on YouTube.

View-Master: I can already see a J-horror like movie about the view finder that shows you the future, where everyone you know dies a horrible death, and you must stop it from happening! Yawn!

Barbie: Well, she's had a series of CGI straight to DVD movies, so it was only a matter of time before she made the jump to a live action theater movie. But will it suck as badly as "Bratz"?

Stretch Armstrong: I'd prefer a movie about DC Comic's Plastic Man.

Ouija: There have been countless movies, both studio backed and indie films, that have featured a Ouija board as a part of, or the center of, their plot. Do we really need another one? Not really.

Monoploy: A movie about a CEO who wants to buy everything in an entire city and then jack up the price value of living there? But Michael Moore has already made movies about such topics.

Candy Land: We've had two Willy Wonka movies within the past 40 or 50 years. That's enough movies about worlds made of candy, if you ask me.

Conclusion: H-Wood has officially lost any and all creative integrity.

Didn't Nathan Lane already make a movie like that? "MouseHunt", I think. All it lacked was the big, complex mouse trap ... which will probably be the studios' excuse to remake the movie.