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Hi, this is Dana Steven, Slate's movie critic, here with a Sl Slate spoiler special podcast on Battleship, the new Peterberg adaptation of a board game. And joining me in Slate Studios is John Swansberg, our culture editor. Hey, John.

Hey, I, I. Keep the naval puns a coming. So we saw Battleship together the other night and walked out in some state of bafflement.

I think you enjoyed it a bit more than I did.

I think I did.

And I now no longer remember the movie, essentially, which speaks to exactly the kind of movie this is, right?

It's the Hasbro adaptation that you forget immediately afterward.

Right.

But it is going to be really, really fun to talk about it with you.

So where should we start?

Try to help me get this formless bunch of naval explosions into some sort of order.

What is battleship about and how does it adapt to the game?

Okay.

So the naval action kicks off with something called the RIMPAC exercises, which I googled and does exist.

It's a series of kind of biennial naval exercises where the U.S. Navy gets together with other

navies, including the Japanese Navy, and they sort of do war games, I guess, off the coast

of Hawaii. And in this year, during the course of the normal, like, let's pretend there's a war happening, there's an alien invasion.

Right.

That's sort of the setup.

Which is not unpromising as a setup.

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