Watched the movie Battleship recently. I live in the Philippines and the movie was released here a month ago.
It is a piece of light entertainment not requiring much in the way of critical thinking especially in the way of naval tactics. While watching the movie I thought of something the heroes could do, but it would have ended the movie half an hour earlier.
The movie does incorporate a couple of things from the board game.
Spoilers below. (The text is colored white in lieu of SPOILER tags. Highlight the text to read.)
The action takes place during the annual RIMPAC exercises. Before that, a group of scientists have built an array of three dishes on Oahu working in conjunction an orbiting satellite have sent a signal to the Gliese star system. Some time later at the start of RIMPAC five objects of extra-solar origin are detected heading for Earth. Extrapolating from the course, they conclude that they came from Gliese.
On their way in one of the objects collides with a satellite and crashes in Hong Kong. Chinese investigators conclude that the wreckage primarily consists of communications equipment. The other objects land in the Pacific about a day's sailing from Pearl Harbor. With the RIMPAC fleet at sea the admiral sends out the Sampson to investigate the objects with Myoko and John Paul Jones in support. When aliens become active they form a shield that cuts off the main Hawaiian islands from the rest of the world. The RIMPAC fleet is outside of the shielded area, thus Sampson, Myoko and JPJ are alone in dealing with the aliens.
Both the Sampson and Myoko are sunk early on with the JPJ suffering light damage and rescues the survivors from the Myoko, about a third of her crew including the captain, the Sampson was lost with all hands. JPJ does lose both her CO and XO leaving the Weapons Officer a lieutenant (O-3) in command.
The aliens land at the dish array and begin modifications to use it and the satellite to contact their fleet. The five objects that came previously are just a recon force. The ground station lead scientist somehow is able to use some of his portable equipment to relay this activity to the JPJ and they make plans to take out the ground station. But before that can happen the JPJ is sunk, the survivors motor in to Pearl and they take over the Missouri with the help of some vets to take the fight to the aliens.
Military losses.
1 F/A-18
About a dozen CH-53Es
USS Sampson DDG-102
JDS Myoko DDG-175
USS John Paul Jones DDG-53
X turret of USS Missouri BB-63
There are two elements from the game in the movie that I saw. The first is that the alien's ordnance looks like the pegs from the game and is strictly line of sight. For the second, the shield formed by the aliens interferes with radars rendering all that expensive AEGIS hardware useless. During the night Myoko's captain advises using the tsunami warning buoys to target the alien ships. These alien ships move about by jumping from one spot of the ocean to another. Thus when the ship lands it swamps the nearest buoy which happen to arranged in a nice ordered grid, so they launch a couple of Tomahawks at buoy F24!
Spoilers finished.
