Battleship (film)/WMG

At some point in the film, someone will say, "You sank my battleship!"

• Considering how the phrase is associated with the game, it's all but inevitable that someone's gonna say it, probably during the final battle. It's also likely, due to the fact that the latest trailer reveals that the USS John Paul Jones is sunk. Since Alex, the main character, is stationed aboard the ship, it's likely he'll escape, get on board another battleship for the final showdown, and say this just as he fires off the salvo that will destroy the big enemy ship, and save the day.
  • According to Film Brain on Twitter that phrase is never uttered in the whole run time of the movie.
  • I just saw the movie today and can confirm that the line was never uttered at all throughout the movie.
  • While we don't get the actual line, we do get a variation of it:

They won't sink this battleship!

The aliens actually came in peace

Given how Berg seems to base his premise on the idea that any contact with an alien species might be inherently harmful, no matter what our (or their) intent, and the minimum development and focus on the aliens, it is possible the whole conflict was a gigantic misunderstanding. After all, the Americans fire the first shot - albeit a warning shot - leading the aliens to respond in force. When the aliens do respond with force, they are initially more concerned with disabling infrastructure rather than causing harm. One alien avoids killing a kid, and another repeatedly pushes a human aside, rather than killing him.

Sure, we assume that the aliens are signalling home to call an invasion, but we never get confirmation one way or the other. All we have is the (rational) fears of the human characters. From the alien perspective, they've just lost one of their ships and come under fire from the natives. It makes sense they'd want to establish communication home. The theory's expanded a bit here

• I don't think this counts as a WMG, since the director has explicitly said as much. The article description even said so for a time.
• Against that theory is a) the weird, psychic vision...thing that the main character experienced and b) if that was the case, they're clearly not very good at it. Violently crashing into a planet's major population centres is gonna start you off on the wrong foot, different species or no...
  • The vision thing is a jumble of images that the lead can't make sense of outside the fact that it feels bad. Of course it feels bad, that thing seems to have dumped his memories into the poor man's head. Sure, we see images that could be war, but the film avoids giving the lead dialogue like, for example, the President's "locusts" explanation in Independence Day.
  • I thought that population centre thing was an accident? Their communications device thingy winged a satellite (poor driving), and got damaged and knocked off course. It could be that they either misconstrued this as an act of aggression or figured "hey, to be on the safe side, let's contact home before anything happens" and things just sort of spiralled from there.
• As intriguing as this theory is, it is all Jossed by the novelization written by Peter David. The aliens (who refer to themselves as "Regents" in the novel) are here to investigate and evaluate humanity's potential as a threat. This is the real reason why they leave humans alone when not being fired upon: they are waiting for the humans to attack them first so they can properly see how dangerous the threat level is. The novelization also reveals that the reason why the Regents' fleet is so weak is possibly because of idiocy and/or political jockeying among the Regents' leaders: the Regent in charge of the fleet at Earth (called the "Land Commander") has a very low opinion of his superior, the "World Commander", believing that the World Commander does not understand how to fight a war properly and assigned him vastly insufficient firepower. The Land Commander knows his forces are woefully ill-prepared to fight a planetary population and are forced to scrounge human technology to build a transmitter that can signal his people that they really need reinforcements.
  • Another point in the Land Commander's thought processes reveals that the Regents are stretched thin across the galaxy, so the World Commander really may not have had any other forces to spare to send to Earth. He thinks it still doesn't make the World Commander any less of an idiot, though.

The aliens are not invaders or explorers, they're refugees

Their only displayed weapons are either shitty (the dumb-fire grenade launchers) or very sophisticated razor drones. As a weapon, missiles are proven to be much more efficient than either. But consider, the aliens prefer either area of effect or high precision. Their weapons either blast away or burrow. Those don't sound efficient as weapons because they're not weapons. They're mining equipment! Their ships look sophisticated but are very fragile for spaceships, because they're not even military scout craft but are converted civilian vessels. Their message was not so much as a call for reinforcements but as a Don't Come Here for their refugee fleet.

• Jossed by the novelization, see the WMG above.

Battleship is what happens when the Transformers never make contact with Earth

What are the aliens running from? Megatron. Why blow up cars and automata? To make sure the Decepticons aren't there in disguise. Why blow up roads? So Decepticons can't use them. Why put up a shield? So Decepticons can't drop in on them. Why do their scanners makeit apoint to scan for heartbeat and eye shapes? Because Decepticons can imitate biological forms too, as re: the second Bay movie.

• Mother of God... aliens versus the transformers. Why didn't that happen sooner?
  • Well, Battleship and Transformers are both owned by Hasbro, so a crossover is completely possible.

The Aliens did not need the satelite

Yo think about this carefully Aliens who can invade with hyperadvanced technology need a human satellite. For comparison that is like CNN needing a local Country Radio station.

• • They lost their own "radio", and according to the book were deliberately underequpped by their boss and/or were stretched thin.

sequel

The Sequel if there is one will deal with the actual alien invasion.

---

Back to Battleship (film)