I'm going to continue posting my reactions to watching the movie Battleship. Today I want to talk about a startling thought I had when it ended:
It could have been a good movie.
In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it began as a much better movie than it ultimately became. I don't have any way to see a copy of the original screenplay, but there are some odd bits which survived into the final version which hint at better things.
What's the focus of the movie? What's it about? Specifically: what's the title? It's called Battleship, and yet mysteriously the actual battleship Missouri gets much less screen time than the AEGIS destroyer John Paul Jones. How come? Pirates of the Caribbean has pirates doing stuff in the Caribbean. Citizen Kane has Charles Foster Kane in almost every scene. But Battleship doesn't have much battleship in it.
There's also the curious presence of a Japanese warship, which gets sunk by the aliens, and her captain, who teams up with the boring young hero of the film. I owe my daughter a dollar because I bet her that the Japanese guy was in the movie so that at some point he could fight one of the blade-wielding aliens with a katana. I believed that because the movie was so blatantly dumb I couldn't think of any other reason they'd include a Japanese character. And yet, against all odds, he never once picked up a sword. Don't all Japanese guys in action movies use swords? What's the world coming to?
I'm going to advance the thesis that the Missouri and the Japanese guy are the last traces of a much better original screenplay. In this hypothetical Battleship, the focus isn't on Taylor Kitsch's irresponsible jerk of a junior officer. He's either a minor character or doesn't appear at all. Instead, the focus is on an elderly Navy veteran who serves as one of the volunteers aboard the museum ship Missouri. He's starting to feel as though he's lived too long -- most of his friends are gone, his family are off somewhere else, and the tourists who come to visit the Missouri don't seem to know or care anything about the ship and its history. The world apparently has no use for either the man or the ship.
Cue the aliens. They surround Hawaii with their forcefield and annihilate the remaining navy and National Guard forces inside the bubble. Our Japanese commander and his ship go down fighting but are rescued. A rag-tag bunch of surviving sailors from half a dozen countries converge on the Missouri as the only chance to stop the aliens. The Japanese officer must work with the elderly veteran to get the Missouri seaworthy in time. Instead of a two-minute montage set to AC/DC this would be the entire middle act of the film. We would see the desperate improvisations and know that the Missouri is underarmed, undermanned, and barely seaworthy. When the ship sets sail the audience and the characters know it's probably a one-way trip.
That story has actual conflict among the characters. We can have some characters trying to preserve the historic Missouri while others are eager to see the last battleship do what she was built for. We can have our elderly protagonist take the chance to do something meaningful again, even if the physical strain may be too much for him. We can have the historical irony of a Japanese commander on the flag bridge of the Missouri as humans put aside their differences to fight a common enemy.
This idea even dovetails nicely with the film's existing subplot about the legless soldier who's the only one near the radiotelescope when the aliens take it over. It's all so tidy I can't escape from the suspicion that this was the original idea for Battleship, but at some point someone said "We can't have a summer blockbuster about a guy in his eighties! Make the hero a young guy -- kind of reckless and irresponsible so the morons in the audience will be able to identify with him."
Writing fiction has given me a bad habit: I can't resist going "under the hood" of just about every story I read or film I watch. It's particularly depressing when the story I write in my head is better than the one I'm reading or watching. I think that's one reason why I found Battleship so annoying in its badness: the sheer waste involved. With just a little originality it could have been a good movie.
So the second lesson from Battleship is this: don't be wasteful. Don't scrap a decent idea just to stay within the safe template of your genre.
Did the Japanese guy at least karate someone?
Posted by: Chuk | 04/11/2013 at 03:13 PM
Now you may be getting an inkling of my attitude toward movies with "aliens" in them.
Posted by: leslie cambias | 04/13/2013 at 02:15 PM
This is probably true, because that was probably going to be the plot of the in-development American live action Starblazers/Space Battleship Yamato movie, the one where they were going to fictionally raise the Arizona and turn it into a spaceship instead of the Yamato.
(Sanity triumphed when people proved to know way too much about the Arizona's structural problems, and be way too squicked by raising a previously consecrated cemetery ship. Dead bodies on the Yamato was never really dealt with in the original anime series, except through handwavium, IIRC.)
Anyway, turning an existing Starblazers script into a Hasbro Battleship script would have been pretty easy.
Posted by: suburbanbanshee | 05/16/2013 at 11:34 PM