The inclusion of aliens in the plot of Battleship was one of the more baffling aspects of the big-screen adaptation of Hasbro’s grid-based guessing game, but honestly, I find the stuff that’s said about Industrial Light and Magic in this featurette much more interesting than anything about the design of the extraterrestrial antagonists. I especially like the bit where director Peter Berg says that ILM doesn’t say no to any ideas, which goes a long towards explaining the prequel Star Wars trilogy! I’ve often bemoaned that no one was there to tell George Lucas “no” when he came up with a bad idea, and since the Star Wars prequels were 99% special effects, you can see how they could turn out disastrously when the people making the special effects, by their very nature, wouldn’t tell old George when an idea was, well, dumb.
Battleship comes out May 18, 2012.