After the reveal that the main villains in Peter Berg’s upcoming Battleship (can we even call it an adaptation?) will be aliens, the little enthusiasm I had for the project was almost entirely replaced by increased trepidation. It’s tough enough to accept the fact that we’re seeing a board game brought to life, but throwing aliens into the mix seemed a bit much. Perhaps sensing this increased anxiety, Universal recently rounded up a few bloggers and sent them to San Diego for a tour of a navy destroyer, as well as a chance to discuss the project with Peter Berg himself.

Read on for their findings, which include further details on the aliens, a rough outline of the main characters and plot, and how prepping for Dune helped Berg develop this film.

According to Berg, the aliens are known as The Regents, and will be portrayed by a combination of live actors with CG. They come from a world similar to ours, and aren’t actually looking to take over humanity or the planet Earth. Instead, they’re on a mission to build a power source in the ocean, which is where they come in contact with a navy fleet. The film will also show us both sides of the story—from the aliens’ perspective, as well as the humans.

He explains away the seeming illogicality of having aliens come to Earth just to fight on the ocean by grounding the alien ships once they hit the ocean. Berg mentions that the ships do fly to Earth, as well as through the atmosphere, but they lose that capability once they land. They’re also not busting out any lasers or fantastical alien weaponry—their weapons will be ballistics-based just like ours.

Berg also mentions that the main character of the film will be the Commanding Officer of a destroyer. He has a team of five trusted shipmates which include the XO and a Scotty-like chief engineer. They’re currently in the casting process right now, but there isn’t any further information on that front—aside from the fact that he’s a “big fan” of Abram’s Star Trek casting.

When asked if prepping Dune helped him with envisioning the alien’s story, Berg responded:

It got me excited about the idea of world creation in that any time you embark on world creation, no matter how good you are, if you’re James Cameron and you’ve done it before and you grew up designing spaceships and spacecraft it’s still an unbelievably daunting and unnerving task. You think, ‘Okay, I’m going to throw my hat into the ring of world creation.’ You’ve seen my films and I’ve never done that before. I was intimidated. ‘Dune’ kind of got me over the hump where I had sort of met enough world creation designers to understand how you go about doing it. ‘Dune’ for a variety of reasons wasn’t the right thing. I was ready to go after it with ‘Battleship’.

And yes, there will be homages to the board game throughout the film, including the line “You sank my Battleship!” (I can’t wait to hear the collective audience groan with that one).

If you’re hungry for more Battleship info, check out the coverage over at Latino Review and CHUD.

Discuss: Do these further details make you more, or less, excited for Battleship?