Battleship Game Piece Found in Trailer

I feel dirty just embedding this new trailer. The last thing I wanna do is promote what will undoubtedly end up in the lower teens of the Tomatometer on RottenTomatoes.com when it releases later this year. I feel bad too, because as awful as Battleship looks, Liam Neeson is a fantastic actor, Taylor Kitsch wasn’t bad in John Carter and I really wanted to see Alexander Skarsgård break out of his True Blood role because I think the guy has potential. I’m immediately brought back to the simple truth that this is a movie based on a board game. A simplified plastic metaphor for naval hunt-and-peck strategies has become an action movie about an unmotivated naval officer, his brother (a more motivated one), the father of a woman he’s dating (who happens to be the admiral) and an alien attack, mostly at sea.

So yeah, Michael Bay’s Wet Transformers, minus the Michael Bay. Just as many pointless moving parts, lens flares, sound effects and terrible dialogue. Now, the reason I post this: I commented a while back to a friend when the first trailer came out that there were these piston looking things on the alien ship that kinda looked like pegs from the board game. We laughed, that there’s no way they’d be so blatant as to work the little plastic pegs from the board game into the film. Frames around 1:46 prove otherwise.

Really?

Aliens aren’t using advanced plasma weapons or aerodynamic warhead projectiles. They’re throwing plastic pegs. Well, okay, maybe not plastic, but did the filmmakers really feel like they were paying some sort of lip service to the board game fans? I hate to be the one to break it to them, but when the only other thing tying the movie to the Hasbro toy is the name, you’ve already insulted anyone who’s ever called out “you sank my battleship”.

Battleship, starring Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch, Alexander Skarsgård and Brooklyn Decker floats into theaters May 18, 2012