It's official: Aliens in Battleship are a good idea

He is currently prepping a film about war and militarism and fighting and all that macho malarkey, so it is no surprise that director Peter Berg has come out on an aggressive front foot to combat the negative buzz swirling around his Battleship project. Perhaps equally unsurprising is that now Berg has turned on the charm, the press have been largely converted to the wisdom of his vision.

Just over three weeks ago, Latino Review reported that aliens would play a prominent role in Universal's new movie Battleship (inspired by the board game in which you say “A5” and your opponent says “Miss”, then your opponent says “F4” and you say “Miss”, then you say “B6” and your opponent says “Miss”, then your opponent says “D2” and you say “Miss”, and then you say “Why in the name of all that is holy on God's green earth and unholy in the damnable pit of Lucifer are we messing around with this antiquated piece of bunk when we could be playing Medal Gears of Duty War 7: Deluxe Zombie-Butchering Kill-athon Edition instead?"). Anyway, this was our take on that story. The 'Aliens in Battleship' revelation seemed to exert a curious kind of effect on the online movie community. It didn't make anyone caps lockingly ANGRY in the way that a perceived HACK director being STUPIDLY attached to a comic book adaptation would. It instead seemed to foster a kind of all-encompassing existential sadness, as everyone realised that, yes, this was indeed the film industry for our age – a place where board games meet extraterrestrials in productions which cost enough to buy a snack and a drink for everyone in the People's Republic of China.

Sensing these great waves of gloom and depression rippling across the cosmos, Universal and Battleship director Peter Berg decided to act. To launch a, well, not quite pre-emptive strike, but certainly a barely post-emptive one, in order to win the hearts and minds of the online populace. Consequently, Universal flew representatives from several of the big film websites to San Diego by private jet two days ago, to tour an American Naval destroyer, the USS Sterett (Latino Review seems to have been a bit overcome just by the sight of the Sterett itself, describing it as 'one of the most awesome, most beautiful things I had ever seen' – which seems a curious way of thinking about a contraption built entirely with the twin purposes of international intimidation and real-life actual death-dealing in mind). And as part of their jaunt the journos also got the chance to speak to Berg, with the director outlining his plans for Battleship, as well as showing off some of the conceptual artwork for the film.

CHUD has delivered a particularly detailed account of what Berg said on the day, with the Hancock director seeming to have revealed most about where those maligned planet-hoppers will fit into proceedings. These are the six key bits of Battleship information apparently disseminated by Berg to the gathered hacks:

1. The alien aspect was introduced to the story as Berg thought that pitting the US Navy against another nation's fleet would have been too close to “some jingoistic American military exercise I couldn't get my head around.”

2. The aliens in the film are collectively known as 'The Regents', and on an individual level will be be portrayed by human actors, who will then have a bit of CG tinkering done to them (Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean was mentioned as a reference).

3. The Regents land on Earth and are in some way stranded. Once they touch down, their ships can no longer become airborne; they only can traverse across the water. They then commence work on some kind of great big McGuffin, for which they need a major power source. The ships themselves were depicted in the artwork shown off by Berg, with CHUD suggesting they 'look like giant water bugs, with giant hydrofoil legs that race across the surface of the sea. They're huge, black and scary looking'.

4. The hero of the film is the commander of a destroyer, and he has five sidekicks to help him out.

5. The Regents will in, some as-yet unspecified way, render the Navy's more advanced weapons and surveillance technology useless, thus facilitating the cat-and-mouse element of the board game.

6. Someone will deliver the line “You sank my battleship!”.

Er, yeah. To be blunt, the further details provided about Battleship still do not exactly mark it as one of the must-see movie events of 2011 (it is presently scheduled for a release on 5 August of that year). As described by Berg, it sounds like the film will exist in a land which is none too distantly situated from Transformersville or GI Joe Central, where military hardware fetishism and lots of shouty-shouty-bang-bang trample all over any tiny hint of subtler cinematic pleasures. Still, if the aim of the director and Universal was to quell a dissenting press then their PR gambit seem to have met with some success, with the tone of the latest Battleship coverage being far more sympathetic than it had been previously. So, even if the public are not yet inclined to kneel before any board game adaptations, they can still all happily hail the power of the press jolly. Are you hailing there? Hail harder!