How they could have made the movie Battleship not suck.
So I’m starting a new thing for nights when I don’t have anything else to write about and it’s my special “How they could have made (insert sucky movie title here) not suck”. If you are a regular reader you should know by now I have a massive ego and overinflated sense of my own intellect and therefore feel totally qualified to tell guys in Hollywood who have been doing this all their lives how to do their jobs.
All that being said, the movie Battleship had some major issues and could probably have used some help. One of the biggest and stupidest mistakes was the steps the movie took to actually get the U.S.S. Missouri at full steam and armed in about two hours. I spoke to a guy I know in the Coast Guard the other day and he said those big steam engine ships would take two days just to get the boilers hot enough to generate steam and when you think about the thermodynamics of heating a giant tank of water to the boiling point that kind of makes sense. Also, there is no way they keep 30 year old live rounds on a ship with tourists on board. Furthermore, the pretense they had for including the game of Battleship into the movie Battleship was flimsy at best. (Failboat image I found lurking in the cheap t shirt category)
I, in all my genius, have thought of a plot that would both solve these problems and overall make for a much better and believable movie. Here it is:
Aliens invade the Earth. They set up a floating base out in the Pacific. The aliens breathe chlorine, and start to xenoform the planet (the term terraform is when we attempt to change the environment of an alien planet to let us live. If aliens do it here it’s xenoforming) the planet by pulling chlorine from the salt water (NaCl, for those of us who missed high school chemistry) pumping it into the atmosphere. Our navy attempts to assault them only to find out the aliens employ a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator that fries all electronics that approach them. No radar, computers, missiles, range finders or pocket calculators work anymore, and with the ships more or less dead in the water the aliens ships sink them at their leisure. Aircraft without electronics falls out of the sky, leaving us helpless to thwart their dastardly scheme.
However, changing the entire atmosphere of a planet is a long process, leaving us weeks before the levels of chlorine get dangerous. How, then, to assault the aliens without our electronics? How about the dozens of ships in the mothball fleet? Most of them would take weeks if not months to retrofit with strickly analog controls, but a few older ships still have analog in place. First and foremost, the noble and mighty U.S.S. Missouri. Within a few short weeks of massive retrofit the ship with a number of analog equipped support ships steams to battle the alien menace.
Once they close with the aliens they discover that a byproduct of the xenoforming process seems to be a visibility obscuring fog that leaves the more or less steaming around blind. However, the aliens are in the same boat (haw!) and the battle is reduced to shooting blindly and hoping for a hit, or perhaps firing off flares in hopes of gaining a target.
You get the idea. This strikes me as being a much better story and just cutting some chains and running off. Movies like this just show how lazy and unimaginative Hollywood really is.
Thanks for reading. I think I am going to have fun with these. Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. If you have ideas on how else this movie could have been improve by all means post them here. Off topic comments or suggestions for other movies that could be improved email to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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