This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the film's origins. A big-budget naval action flick adapted from Hasbro's classic grid warfare game -- the first in a wave of board game movies to come from Hollywood, and the first to confront the natural viewer skepticism that they invite -- Battleship is a PG-13 tent pole that will face manifold challenges when it opens next summer, bookended by The Avengers and MIB 3. The first of those challenges? How to get beyond the banal "C-5... Hit!" association most adults still associate with the simplistic Battleship brand.
Click for Movieline's first look gallery of images from Battleship.
But Berg immediately saw the potential for tension, high stakes, and storytelling in the basic game scenario. "If you and I are playing Battleship against each other, we're calling out shots at random, and eventually something happens," he explained. "You go from being an unknown enemy to a known enemy. There's a point of discovery in Battleship which is a hook, and it's why the game's been around for so long. If you and I are playing, I have absolutely no idea who you are, and suddenly I start to realize who you are, it's very satisfying. 'Oh, that's where he is. That was his strategy.' What do I try to do as soon as I figure out where you are? I try to destroy you, as quickly and violently as I can before you kill me. There's something very inherently dramatic about that."
The story, courtesy of writers Jon and Erich Hoeber (Red, Whiteout), goes like this: One sunny day out in the Pacific Ocean a mysterious alien force begins an assault on Earth, leaving the defense of the planet in the hands of ships from five international fleets. Our hero, Lt. Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) -- a rebellious but promising naval officer, must learn to be a leader... and, of course, man up enough to ask commanding superior Liam Neeson for his daughter's hand in marriage.
In his editing suite, Berg played rough scenes from the film highlighting the characters of Battleship. One, in which star Kitsch (of Friday Night Lights and the upcoming John Carter) meets cute with Brooklyn Decker with comic results, proved Kitsch's likability factor. Berg credits his acting background with his desire to find an "emotional core" to peg the larger action around. "As big as all the effects get, as big and as true as it is that now we can pretty much do anything ... it won't work if there's not a fundamental attachment to the character, to human beings."
Meanwhile, footage featuring Rihanna as Petty Officer Raikes suggested that the pop star known for her sensual gyrations and piercing vocals might actually somewhat disappear into her role as Kitsch's naval sidekick. ("I spent a lot of time in the Navy thinking about who would make sense and who would bring an urban swagger to this character," Berg explained of his idea to cast Rihanna. "Put a call in, had a great couple of meetings, and she's a great girl, really hard-working, very smart, wants to be good, really strong work ethic, no attitude, no diva nonsense. She was great.")
But a rough montage featuring scenes from throughout the film, many of which could be seen in the first trailer, gave a better idea of the film's look and scope: Gorgeous wide-open waters, a comically ball-busting repartee between Kitsch and Neeson, the CG-created effects of the invading force, bringing to bear a literal imagining of what the most imaginative sci-fi nerds might have envisioned while moving pegs on a grid in their youth. The feeling it conjured was akin to Independence Day: Muscular '90s action paired with a patriotic streak tempered by a light comic touch. With aliens.
Oh yes, the aliens. Universal's keeping a tight wrap on the creatures themselves, though Berg offered glimpses at their technology (the force field seen in the trailer, which keeps everything inside in and everything outside out) and brought his own personal maquette out to display. Unfortunately, even descriptions are under wraps, but here's what we can say: The invaders of Battleship are recon experts scouting Earth's resources, and they have advanced technology. Berg offered the following real-world parallel. "We are targeting planets that we've identified as being potentially supportive of life," what they call Goldilocks planets... while we're sending beacon signals out to these planets, [Stephen] Hawking's the one who came out and said, 'Probably not a great idea.'"
Do the aliens and their motives carry deeper meaning within Berg's vision of Battleship? "No," he said unequivocally. "I don't view Battleship as a political film."
That said, Battleship intentionally acknowledges the legacy of Pearl Harbor, where some of the film was shot. The impetus for giving the Japanese fleet a higher profile in the story came from Berg's recon trip to the historic site, where he was surprised to see an American ship docked symbolically side-by-side with a Japanese ship. "If my grandfather would have been told that 2010 there'd be a Japanese warship and an American warship peacefully tied up and guys going back and forth exchanging information and sharing technology... this is where we are today. I thought it was fantastic. We're great allies with the Japanese now and our navies, our militaries work very closely together. I wanted to show that; that's why Japan is in the film."
But Japan's not the only international relation Berg is consciously appealing to with Battleship; he's keenly aware that in today's climate, his $200 million epic must find a global audience in order to succeed. "When you're dealing with films like this, you need to have an international footprint," he said. "All of these films are quadrupling the fiscal performance abroad versus America. America's becoming less important in the big picture, and my particular brand of humor or sarcasm doesn't necessarily translate to two 18-year-old kids in South Korea."
The solution is to universalize appeal, which is why Battleship's themes and story seem rather simplistic. "I think it's important to find universal themes," Berg said. "A father loving a son; a screw-up attempting to find his voice and find his inherent heroism -- themes that maybe I wasn't as interested in when I was young and acting and I wanted to break the rules. I was more subversive and sarcastic as an actor than you can afford to be as a filmmaker.
"I'm probably a bit less glib and less sarcastic and more aware of what universal reality is: the love of a parent for a child; the love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man; the desire to protect the innocent," he continued. "Those are themes that maybe sound corny and a bit grand, but if you can make that real, that's where these films want to live."
But the challenges of Battleship, along with its scope, were part of the appeal. "You're seeing studios willing to take these giant gambles and make these big, epic, four-quadrant films," Berg said. "When you look at what Michael [Bay] did with Transformers and what [Jon] Favreau did and what J.J. Abrams has been doing, we're seeing the appetite for the studios to make these big spectacle films and to give filmmakers like myself this incredible freedom to take something like a board game of Battleship, which is really an essence of a film about naval warfare, and say, 'OK, go. What can you do with that? Can you do something with that?'"
That's the thing; if Battleship succeeds, and on a global scale, it could elevate Berg's profile as a director closer to the company of the Bays, the Camerons, the Favreaus -- filmmakers who can deliver enormous-scale action and start franchises. The director has been graduating steadily to bigger and bigger budgets since his 1998 debut with Very Bad Things, and his next project will be the "violent" and "brutal" Lone Survivor, "a great story about a group of Navy SEALs who were killed in Afghanistan" based on Marcus Luttrell's memoirs of a 2005 Taliban-hunting mission gone wrong. But he's not counting out the possibility of more Battleship films. Actually, quite the contrary.
"I never go done in one," he said of returning for potential Battleship sequels. "I'm always thinking, let's keep going. I love these characters; I love these two dudes. I love the world they come from, and I loved the idea of the goldilocks planets and the fact that if there is credible life out there, it's probably going to be from a planet that shares a similar relationship to its sun that we do to ours, and it's very possible that the form of life that's relatable to us, that has a neurological system, that has a respiratory system, that has emotion, that has thoughts, that has reasoning capabilities. That's the tenor of the thread of Battleship. I'm certainly hoping that it's something that we can explore for a long time."
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