^ A Regent Stinger ^
First up: the alien ships.Called the Regent have five different vessels, each of which the production team has named after a Beatle (just for behind-the-scenes purposes; they're not called by these names in the movie!). Ringo is the mothership, or the aircraft carrier equivalent. John, Paul and George are the Stingers, which are the Regent equivalent of the human's destroyers. And the fifth ship takes a bad turn at the beginning of the film, with the result apparently being that bits and pieces of it come hurtling from space over Hong Kong, France and other places. These are not airships, but are specifically designed for the sea. They've come to Earth as a scout team, but they also have advanced weapons capabilities.For example ,one of their weapons "the Shredders".Are truck-sized balls that, in the art that we saw, look like morphing chainsaw blades and are used to take out enemy resources -- communications, weapons, etc. Another weapon is the peg-like ordnance that resembles the pieces from the actual Battleship board game .just larger in size and are more lethal.
SHIP DESIGNS
"Pete spent a lot of time with the production designer and was looking at a lot of things in the animal kingdom and the insect kingdom and the things that they're able to do," says Stuber. "So if you look closely, [the Stingers] have a little bit of the water bug in them. … Water bugs can almost hover a little bit on the water. They have these kind of spindly legs, and then they jump and move. So we use that a little bit." The result is (and you can see this in the trailer) that the Regent ships move in a very unorthodox way as opposed to a normal vessel that just cuts through water. The Stingers also have a pretty light crew complement -- about 30-50 aliens on each, whereas a destroyer has several hundred aliens aboard.
ALIEN DESCRIPTION
The Regent appear to be cyborgs.But what's really interesting about them is that, just like humans, they won't all look alike. Most aliens in movies all look the same.The plan is that this will make them feel like individual characters and hence more threatening. There are also Marine-type aliens, called Thugs, aboard Ringo who have multipurpose appendages that can morph into different kinds of tools and weapons. The Regent characters will be all CGI, created by ILM. (But is it motion capture?)
SMALLER ALIEN SHIP DESCRIPTION
There's also a Regent transport vessel that kind of looks like a giant View-Master, which is ironic since that particular toy comes from Hasbro's competition, Mattel. And the Stingers are capable of creating something called an Isolation Dome, which is a giant force field that isolates them -- and THEIR foes -- from the rest of the world, preventing any other military from intervening in the battle (including nukes). This renders the combat more old-school, and was a mandate from the outset so that the film could tie into the game better. It's meant to be less about computers and more about strategy and intuition.
HUMAN SHIP
the human ships aren't actually battleships.Battleships are no longer in service in the U.S. Navy, despite the name of the movie and the game. Although having said that, the USS Missouri -- the last battleship built by the U.S. -- will appear in the film, apparently early in the proceedings when Liam Neeson's admiral character makes a speech to an assemblage of Navy officers and enlisted men who are about to head out into the Pacific for training maneuvers. Now a museum ship, the Missouri remains an amazing and fearsome machine of war (and peace, as it is the site where the Japanese surrendered at the end of World War II).
SO as an alternative the producers agreed with destroyers as the hero vessel. Described as the "bodyguards of the fleet," the destroyers in the film will be made up of a mix of American and Japanese ships. Originally out for something called RIMPAC, or the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (a real-life event), these vessels -- two U.S., one Japanese -- encounter a downed alien ship which soon leads to an all-out sea battle between human and alien.
^The Isolation Dome^
official synopsis:
Peter Berg (Hancock) produces and directs Battleship, an epic action-adventure that unfolds across the seas, in the skies and over land as our planet fights for survival against a superior force. Based on Hasbro’s classic naval combat game, Battleship stars Taylor Kitsch as Lt. Alex Hopper, a Naval officer assigned to the USS John Paul Jones; Brooklyn Decker as Sam Shane, a physical therapist and Hopper’s fiancée; Alexander Skarsgard as Hopper’s older brother, Stone, Commanding Officer of the USS Sampson; Rihanna as Petty Officer Raikes, Hopper’s crewmate and a weapons specialist on the USS John Paul Jones; and international superstar Liam Neeson as Hopper and Stone’s superior (and Sam’s father), Admiral Shane.
Battleship hits theaters on May 18, 2012
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