Movie Notes: Battlefield Earth
0 = –23 stars
Starring John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker
Directed by Roger Christian
Synopsis
In the year 3000, humans have been enslaved by the Psychlos, an alien race, for a 1,000 years. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) rises as a human leader who will lead a rebellion to overthrow the alien tyranny.
The Good
- Unintentionally funny in every way.
The Bad
- John Travolta plays the Psychlo alien leader Terl. His costume involves elevator boots, dreadlocked hair, and klingon-like facial hair, and the wussy Travolta voice. It’s not terribly alien or menacing; just bizarre.
- Pretty much every action movie film technique is employed (tilted cameras, slow mo, green filters, Star Wars “wipes”) wherever they make no sense.
- Mind-numbingly horrid dialogue. Too many examples to list here, but the catch phrase “piece of cake” is uttered one too many times.
- Amazingly retarded plot developments. The Psychlos have a galactic empire and a machine with incredible knowledge, yet based on their behavior, they are complete retards. They back-stab themselves to the point of shooting themselves in the foot. Then there’s a laughable situation with the gold — Terl looks at the perfectly smelted gold bars that the humans stole from Fort Knox and doesn’t ponder long on how the “man-animals” got the precious metal into that state. The list goes on and on — the Psychlo planet’s atmosphere will explode in contact with radiation, the humans use a flight simulator to learn how to fly jet planes, and most egregiously, Johnnie is hooked to a “learning machine” giving him too much knowledge — and then Terl leaves him and other humans totally unsupervised (not even a “button camera?”) along with Psychlo aircraft to mine the gold. The Psychlos stupidly sow the seeds of their own destruction.
- Imagine the future morons of Idiocracy except taken dead seriously. At least the humans have an excuse for their retardation — they’ve been enslaved for 700 years. The Psychlos, with teleporters and space ships, are inexplicably even dumber than the humans. The movie documents their moronic efforts to outsmart each other.
- Forest Whitaker, as the assistant Psychlo, looks truly embarrassed the entire time. This is a far cry from The Last King Of Scotland.
- You cheer at the end when the Psychlo home world is destroyed — not because the hero wins, but because the movie is finally over.
- Add a layer of hilarity as the movie is a creation of Scientology — the creator of all that Xenu stuff wrote the book that inspired this film. You may gain some unwanted insight into a truly warped view of the human condition and the universe.
Conclusion
Battlefield Earth is a so-bad-it’s-good masterpiece. Check it out if you’re in the mood for a comedy. If you’re looking for sci fi or action, stay far, far away.
IMDB: Battlefield Earth
Wikipedia: Battlefield Earth
Rotten Tomatoes: Battlefield Earth 3%
I remember seeing this with you in the theater (as in we paid full fare for this dreck). Fortunately, the movie had a lot of laughs (despite not being billed as a comedy).
A few things I enjoyed:
* That ridiculous opening scene where Johnny is running from some Psychlo security detail. The slow motion chase and odd close ups of various body parts were bizarre.
* The Psychlo super technology: small, hidden cameras (to spy on the humans)
* The pathetic, Mystery Science Theater-worthy, matte painting of the Psychlo home planet. Every time I saw it, I laughed. So much for inspiring awe at the home of the universe’s overlords.
* The fact that a 1000 year old Harrier jet still works, can be piloted by humans who have no business flying them and that simply hiding under a bridge (or was it a rock formation) was sufficient to outsmart their Psychlo counterparts. So much for Psychlo radar technology.
On the plus side, I recently watched Roland Emmerich’s “10,000 BC”. The word that kept running through my head as I watched it was “incompetent”. It was as bad as Battlefield Earth minus the laughs…which sadly makes me appreciated Battlefield all the more
Heh… yeah now that I think about it, was that theater as empty as you
remember? So many plot holes — of which you list several. I think Hubbard
wrote himself into a corner with the premise — the humans are enslaved by an
all powerful alien race, so how exactly do you get the humans to a level
where they can overthrow their masters? It seems half the solution was
making the Psychlos complete morons… anyhow, it’s definitely good for
laughs.
[…] A tilted camera in every scene, alternating the angle from left to right. Extremely pointless and annoying, as it’s a trait shared by another terrible movie. […]
[…] Battlefield Earth […]
[…] tired of the tilted-camera thing — but I’ll blame Battlefield Earth and Hal Hartley for ruining my tolerance of this technique, rather than […]
[…] become entertaining again. A few titles have negative star ratings indicating as such. Examples: Battlefield Earth, Freddy Got Fingered, Mommie Dearest, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (which I loved; it’s so […]