Battlefield Earth (2000)

When Battlefield Earth was released in May 2000, this inept sci-fi epic qualified as an instant camp classic, prompting Daily Variety to call it "the Showgirls of sci-fi shoot-'em-ups." Other reviews were united in their derision, and toy stores were left with truckloads of Battlefield Earth action figures that nobody wanted. As the film's star and coproducer, John Travolta must have felt an urge to enlist in the witness protection program.

Recklessly adapted from the novel by sci-fi author and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and set in the year 3000, the film is no worse than many cheesy sci-fi flicks, but the sight of Travolta as a burly, dreadlocked alien from the planet Psychlo provokes unintentional laughter from first frame to final credits. As Terl, the Psychlo security chief who conquers Earth and hatches a secret scheme to steal all the gold from Fort Knox (which sits conveniently in wide-open vaults), Travolta hams it up as if he knows he's in a camp-fest. (In a cameo as a long-tongued Psychlo seductress, Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, only adds to the absurdity.) Barry Pepper (the praying sharpshooter from Saving Private Ryan) tries his best to convey charisma as Jonnie, the human slave who leads an uprising against Terl's tyranny, but he's adrift in a foolish plot that makes even smart humans look stupid.

The decrepit look of a dreary future is convincingly established (the ruins of Washington D.C. recall Logan's Run on a grander scale), but in the wake of its ludicrous climax, the best that Battlefield Earth can hope for is a Dune-like fate: it might improve in a longer director's cut--but that's wishful thinking. --Jeff Shannon Amazon.com

Scientologists Versus Post-Apocalyptic Mall Dwellers

"Exterminate all man-animals at will, and happy hunting!" So bellows Terl, played ridiculously over-the-top by John Travolta, in an attempt to quell an uprising of humans on the slave planet Earth circa 3000 AD.

This film has absolutely nothing to recommend it as a serious science fiction movie, but viewers seeking depraved camp value will find numerous unintentionally hilarious elements in abundance. The film, adapted from L. Ron Hubbard's novel, tells the tale of Terl and his followers from the planet Psychlo (clever huh?) using the Earth for resources (especially gold) and slave labor. Barry Pepper plays Terl's chief human (or "man-animal") nemesis in a film so incoherent and vapid, that I had to wonder what his agent promised him in return for his screen presence. Terl is the chief of security on Earth, and is very upset that he is sentenced to remain on Earth due to a dalliance with a Psychlo senator's daughter, prompting him to become extremely deranged and psychotic. The film has ill-executed anti-capitalism sentiments, the merits of which I would debate if it was worth the effort: as it is the film collapses under its own ponderous and pretentious weight, rendering all serious debate a moot point.

Eventually Terl teaches selected man-animals to do various tasks (fly spaceships, run complex mining machinery, etc.) with the thought of making himself richer, ultimately desiring to remove the gold from Fort Knox. It turns out that perhaps they shouldn't have taught the man-animals much, as they quickly become adept at waging war on the Psychlos in CGI scenes that go on seemingly forever. (Have I mentioned the film is quite long and seems even longer?) I laughed out loud when I saw the man-animals find a perfectly intact AV-8B Harrier simulator (complete with electricity) and a squadron of Harriers at their disposal, all perfectly preserved after 1,000 years of unprepared storage. As an aside here, as a former military pilot I am familiar with many types of aircraft and know many people who have flown the Harrier: please note that it is one of the most difficult aircraft to master according to everyone I have ever known who has flown it. Terl relates that when the Psychlos invaded the Earth the combined militaries of the planet were defeated in nine minutes. It will come as no surprise, then, that this self-educated band of aviators has no difficulty whatsoever defeating the Psychlos in combat: they are such good self-taught combatants they are even able to destroy the entire planet of Psychlo itself. As if this wasn't enough to give viewers a bout of terminal eye-rolling, Terl ultimately becomes a prisoner (this is what heavy-handed Hubbard apparently thought of as "irony") in a prison of gold.

This is a big budget, big name movie that is a big flop in every way other than unintentional comedy. Never in William Shatner's life did he overact like Travolta; never has a movie rested its fate on such lengthy passages of middling CGI; and never before has a cult made itself such a laughingstock with a single motion picture. There are many extras, most of which are full of shallow and self-absorbed introspection about the genius underlying the film and the film itself. There's also a commentary with director Roger Christian, but I couldn't stand sitting through the movie again, so I declined that option.

If you want to watch a totally embarrassing squandering of talent and money, I highly recommend "Battlefield Earth". June 6, 2008

So ludicrous its fun to watch

I guess this is the product of John Travolta being a scientologist and more or less worshipping L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote the book on which this movie is based and also started Scientology, but I have to admit that it was kind of fun to watch the first time I saw part of it on cable. Maybe it was just by comparison since just about everything that had been on was really bad. I for some reason hadn't really thought it so overt how absurd it all was, though when I watched it again yesterday I was amazed. Ed Wood would have been proud to have made this movie.

First of all, the aliens are so fantastically naive it's simply unbelievable. They merrily think humans (which look practically identical to them - at least the males do, but hey, they had to get Travolta to still look like Travolta so I guess that they had to do it that way) are completely devoid of anything resembling an intellect. A point which I more or less agree with them on, but they exaggerate it a bit far. For example, Travolta's character finds it hard to believe that a human would be capable of figuring out how to pull the trigger on a gun near the beginning of the film - and yet then he later demonstrates his knowledge that 1000 years earlier, humans had a technological civilization with which they posed admittedly feeble resistance against the Aliens when they conquered Earth. But an airplane is an airplane and a bomb is a bomb. If they were capable of making such things, and his character knew that, he shouldn't have looked down on them QUITE so much and underestimated their threat so thoroughly. At another time, he concludes that humans like to eat rats live, that they must be a favorite food, because Travolta's character witnesses the main character do that after he was set in the mountains without supplies and had gone 3 days without food and nothing else was available. I am sorry but superior aliens wouldn't be so dense. They are unfathomably naive and yet they think the humans are still significantly dumber than they are.

That was the biggest mistake. The most absurd one. Other ridiculousness abounded as well. For instance, gold is pretty abundant in the cosmos, it's just rare on the Earth's surface because it's so dense, that most of the gold on Earth has sunk to its core - it would be MUCH more effective to mine asteroids. A typical 5-mile wide metal (as opposed to rocky) asteroid on humanity's precious metals markets would be worth TRILLIONS of dollars. It will probably have at least .01% and may be as much as 1% gold (as is the Earth's core) and may be several percent iridium! It's downright silly for us to value gold, platinum and iridium the way we do, and it's just a consequence of it being rare in the Earth's crust, and it should be practically worthless to a spacefaring civilization. The rare earth metals, like erbium, terbium, samarium, or the rare light elements like lithium or beryllium, that I could understand. Even silver is rarer than gold in the cosmos! Also, I had a VCR that lasted 20 years and that was simply astonishing. What do you think the odds are that a Harrier jet will be functional after sitting unattended for 1000 years? It'd be a heap of rust. It would be a pile of aluminum and iron and titanium ore. Finally, WHAT could their breathing gases possibly be? There's nothing that reacts in such a way to radiation, save maybe a mixture of hydrogen and fluorine. If their atmosphere reacted in such a way to the puny amount of radiation released by a single A-bomb, it should have exploded eons ago. Earth as well as any other similar planet in the universe is bombarded on a daily basis by cosmic rays with energies far greater than can be attained in the best particle accelerators. Energies so great they are believed to generate tiny black holes on impact at times! And radiation so abundant that it is a MIRACLE that all the men who landed on the moon survived. It all comes from distant supernovas and hypernovas and at times it's as bright as the sun. If their planet would literally explode from such a miniscule amount of radioactivity, it should be long gone.

So it's not good on the science side OR on the fiction side, but for some reason when you put together the bad science with the bad fiction, strangely enough, it's actually watchable. You can kill 2 hours with this movie and it's not the worst way to spend 2 hours. I understand this movie is on the top 10 list of movies which lost the most amount of money ever. Right along with Ishtar and Pluto Nash (now THAT was a great movie). I guess they spent way too much on it and it's just not worth what they put into it. But since it's already made, give it a shot. May 26, 2008

Excellent, Camp

Somebody has said that sci-fi is simply Westerns in Space.

Battlefield Earth brings it back to earth.

What we have is simply a Cowboy and Indians movie, with the Cowboys replaced by the evil space beings (John Travolta, Forrest Whittaker, etc.)--wearing truly clunky and twee 12 inch boots and 50 inch hair--and the Indians replaced by Barry Pepper and friends, wearing leather and fringe and 40 inch hair.

The stupidity of the plot, and the incessant overacting by Travolta and Whittaker, make this a gem.

It is so bad, it's good.

You have to approach it as cotton candy for the mind--and then you can enjoy it.

The more you analyze it, the stupider it gets. (For example, why do aliens who are so sophisticated that they can teleport across galaxies get so obsessed with gold??????)

And this makes it fun.

No cliche is left untapped, no used-to-death Western event is left untried.

Great stuff.

April 30, 2008

Pretty bad acting, sci fi ok

Stilted dialog and pretty bad acting make this a B movie
of the old school. Reminds me of 50's rocket's space opera.
Still it is sci fi...
The idea of a really stupid selfish race with space travel
taking over other planets isn't all that new.
A cave man level human society taking on the aliens
is pretty unique. With a little better dialog for
the aliens and better acting, it might have escaped
whole?! April 30, 2008

If you read the book, you'll love this movie. GREAT SCI-FI!

I will agree that this is not the best sci-fi movie in the world, but you will only enjoy this movie if you read the book. L. Ron Hubbard's book is probably one of the best stories I have read. I agree with another reviewer (Judy L. Woo), that the other half should be made into a movie. The story ends great. (Spoiler for the book coming now!) Johnnie becomes the new ambassador of earth and then all the sentient races come down to Earth to pay their respects to the race that defeated the dreaded psyclos. Johnnie basically secures the existence of the human race and lands the human race at the top of the universal federation at the end. Fantastic story! I can tell that John Travolta and the CSI's (Church of Scientology) must have pulled the strings and the big bucks in Hollywood to make this book into a film and I am glad they did! March 7, 2008

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