Subject: Review: Battlefield Earth (2000)

From: Scott Renshaw <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 May 2000 18:47:59 GMT

BATTLEFIELD EARTH
(Warner Bros.)
Starring:  John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, Kim Coates,
Richard Tyson.
Screenplay:  Corey Mandell, based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard.
Producers:  Elie Samaha, Jonathan D. Krane and John Travolta.
Director:  Roger Christian.
MPAA Rating:  PG-13 (violence, profanity, adult themes)
Running Time:  117 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

     BATTLEFIELD EARTH ... is ... 117 minutes ... long ... which is
... plenty long enough ... to spend ... watching ... a very ... bad
... film ... but I grew even ... more ... annoyed ... when I realized
... the film ... could have been ... at least ... 15 minutes ... shorter
... (therefore ending ... all our torment ... 15 minutes ... sooner) 
... if someone ... had told ... director Roger Christian ... to stop
... using ... slow ... motion ... for ... every ... freaking ... action
... scene.

     Lousy summer action films are nothing new. It is still a bit
shocking, however, when you have the misfortune to stumble upon one so
fundamentally inept even as grandiose adventure. BATTLEFIELD EARTH is such
a shambling behemoth, a film not even bad enough to be funny-bad (at least
not often enough). Based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, it tells of an
earth 1,000 years after a conquering alien invasion by the profit-hungry
Psychlo race. Bands of humans live primitive hunter-gatherer lives on the
outskirts of the Psychlo mining colony in Denver, while most humans work
as slave labor. Leading the Psychlo security force is the arrogant Terl
(John Travolta), embittered by his posting on earth and prepared to con
his superiors out of a recently-discovered gold deposit. But he's about to
meet his match in Jonnie (Barry Pepper), a feisty human keen on leading a
rebellion against the Psychlos.

     I've never read the L. Ron Hubbard novel on which BATTLEFIELD EARTH
is based, so I don't know how much of the film's narrative idiocy is his
responsibility. I do know that the film could set you to scratching your
head so furiously you could draw blood. How is it that in 1,000 years of
occupation strictly for the purpose of acquiring precious metals, none of
the Psychlos bothered to investigate Fort Knox, or noticed the big glowing
vein of gold in the rocks a few miles from their headquarters? What
miraculous change in the planet's weather patterns allowed books in the
Denver Library to survive 1,000 years' exposure to Rocky Mountain winters? 
And would it have been so hard to explain why the Psychlos' domed habitat
is so strategically important when both humans and Psychlos must wear
breathing devices (strangely like high-tech Breathe Right strips) in order
to survive inside it?

     Even with so much slipshod storytelling involved, I might have
settled for an action-adventure that seemed concerned about making its
action somewhat ... adventurous. Instead, Roger Christian turns every
confrontation, every chase and every battle into parade of slow-motion
explosions. The device has certainly become popular thanks to Hong Kong
directors like John Woo, but in such cases the film-maker is usually
giving viewers the opportunity to appreciate a particularly cool stunt, or
Chow Yun-Fat flying through the air with a pair of guns blazing. 
Christian, on the other hand, uses slow-motion to turn the film into an
agonizing crawl towards its conclusion. It's clear he wants BATTLEFIELD
EARTH to be something epic and mythological; the frequent George Lucas
collaborator even uses the familiar wipe-dissolves from the STAR WARS
films. In Christian's hands, unfortunately, the wipes are yet another way
he takes us far too slowly from one place to another. You know a film is
failing on its most fundamental level when an entire sell-out preview
audience responds to the climactic explosion with stony silence.

     BATTLEFIELD EARTH does offer the chance to watch Travolta -- who has
shown no reluctance to ham up his villainous characters in films like
BROKEN ARROW and FACE/OFF -- whooping it up as the gleefully duplicitous
Terl, which occasionally makes the film watchable. Sadly, his gusto only
makes it evident that someone involved in the film was actually trying to
make it watchable. It certainly wasn't the casting director, who chose as 
a protagonist the capable but uncharismatic Pepper (who may just be the
separated-at-birth triplet sibling of Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp). It
wasn't screenwriter Corey Mandell, whose gifts for absurd plotting are
rivaled only by his deft way with mangling dialogue and character
development. And it wasn't Roger Christian, who appears to have learned
absolutely nothing about pacing from his work as second unit director with 
Lucas. In his attempt to tell a "saga of the year 3000," Christian has
chosen ... the sneaky trick ... of making ... the film ... so ... plodding
... that you'll leave ... the theater ... wondering ... whether ... 1,000
years ... have ... passed ... since ... you ... went ... in.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 alien somnabulations:  2.

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