Will 'Ouija' go the 'Battleship' route?

By Sarah Sluis

In the past few years, it seems comic book adaptations have been supplanted by adaptations of brands that don't even have a story attached to them. It was as if action figures (Stretch Armstrong) led to board games (Battleship, Candy Land) which led to the technically-a-board-game adaptation Ouija, the rights to which are held by Hasbro. To my mind, the only successful non-book/play/comic book
adaptation wasPirates of the Caribbean. There were just a handful of references to the theme park ride, and the rest was straight-up Jack Sparrow with eyeliner. Based on what Universal's doing with Battleship, I'm not enthused about what they have in store for Ouija.

To refresh, Battleship is the two-person game involving shouting out numbers on your opponent's grid (A-7!, J-8!), and playing cat-and-mouse with your opponent until they have sunk all your battleships. With all that tension from constant evasion, it sounds like Crimson Tide all over again, right? Wrong. The Universal version is not about two boats chasing each other, but about ALIENS. An "armada" of aliens out for destruction, to be specific. It's almost as if the writer of the movie really wanted to make a sci-fi movie and just decided add some aliens. And it has pop singer Rihanna in it, a left-field choice that feels a little like a tone-deaf marketing ploy. Without a screen persona, it would have been better if she started out in something music-oriented to get audiences used to seeing her on screen.

The plot of Ouija isn't out on the Internet yet, but since it's also a Universal project I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to turn what obviously should be a horror film into a car-chase actioner or romantic comedy. In fact, after doing some more extensive Googling, I discover I'm actually on the right track. According to Newsinfilm.com, "Ouija will not take the expected supernatural horror angle � strange consider Michael Bay's horror house Platinum Dunes is producing � but will follow a more Indiana Jones type journey to discovery. " I am up in arms. Universal has had one flop after another, and it's decisions like these that prevent anyone over the age of thirteen from enjoying such misguided releases.