I was walking along and all of a sudden I saw a poster for Battleship. I had heard about it and
seen the posters before, of course, but this was the first time it really hit
me: there is a movie coming out based on the game Battleship. I’ll admit, this complete revelation came out of
nowhere, walloped me a good one, knocked me on my ass, and, just to make sure
it really sunk in, hit me with a lead pipe. As I lifted my bruised self from
the pavement under the watchful eye of the Battleship-Revelation, it finally
sunk in that this was really happening. On May 18, Battleship will be in theatres and my only question is: Why?
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| Near the Wilshire/Vermont station |
So what I got from watching this trailer is that aliens hid
in the ocean because they could. And then they attack, because why not? Then we
fight back… with boats. Yeah, that was pretty much what I got from it.
Who knows? Maybe it will be a great movie with a great
plotline and not just some thin shadow with a bunch of special effects that is
desperately trying to capture the audiences’ sense of nostalgia by forcing it
into the ill-fitting frame of a board game.
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I will admit now – I’m not a huge movie person. The last two
movies I saw in theatres were Hunger
Games a few weeks ago and The Muppets
back in November. Both were movies I knew I would enjoy. Hunger Games because of the books and Muppets because of all the memories that tied to them. I also admit
that I’m not super-snobby about movies. I’m not lamenting how everything is a
sequel, a remake, or filled with FX instead of plot. What I am saying is that
maybe not everything needs to be made into a movie.
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Time to switch gears to the videogame industry and the crash
in 1983 Follow me, trust me, I’m getting to a point. Anyone play ET on the
Atari and think this is what caused the videogame crash? It wasn’t the cause,
merely a symptom. ET was like the achy shoulder in a much, much larger flu.
Basically anything was being made into a game. It wasn’t just Atari making
games, they had little control over their systems and pretty much anyone could
make a game for their system and did. Also a lot of games were being rushed
into completion.
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With the videogame market being inundated with so many
low-quality games that were just made to be made, the game industry in the U.S.
sank for a while. Now lets get back to the movies and my point. My thought is
that, in some ways, I can see the movie industry paralleling the gaming
industry of the 1983. It’s expensive to go to the movies but most of us are a
fairly forgiving audience…up to a point. Battleship feels like a movie being
made simply to be made and it almost feels that this may be the beginning of
the inundation of movies made to be made.
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| Please let this one be made before the crash Source |
