Subject: Review: Battlefield Earth (2000)

From: Serdar Yegulalp <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 May 2000 19:36:37 GMT

Battlefield Earth (2000)
1/2 *
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 2000 by Serdar Yegulalp

Here it is, ladies and gentlemen: the worst film of the year 2000.  I say
this in blanket confidence because if there is a film worse than
"Battlefield Earth", I don't want to know it exists.  I'll take my chances
with being wrong.

Derived from the only-science-fiction-by-association novel of the same name
by L. Ron Hubbard, "Battlefield Earth" opens in the year 3000, when a bunch
of aliens named the Psychlos have taken over the world.  Humanity has
descended to the stone-age level.  The head Psychlo on Earth, Terl (John
Travolta), has literally struck gold and has a plan to have human slaves
mine the gold out for him.  He also engages in some dimwitted blackmail
scheme with his fellow Psychlos, a plot item that feels more at home on one
of those websites where someone puts a secret camera in a restroom.

The human hero, Jonnie "Goodboy" Tyler (Barry Pepper), winds up becoming the
chief guinea pig in Terl's schemes.  He manages to organize a human-led
revolt, in scenes of such astounding stupidity and incompetence that B-movie
directors like William "One-Shot" Beaudine would be holding in their sides
with laughter.  Does anyone here believe for a second that a flight
simulator -- or for that matter a fighter jet -- would still be working
after a thousand years?  Or that there would still be fuel, electricity,
spare parts and so on just lying around?  I've never seen so many people
work so hard to defy common sense and logic at every turn.

John Travolta is not a bad actor, but he is completely wasted in a movie
that does not give him anything better to do other than stomp around and
gloat unconvincingly.  He's just not a very good bad guy -- we've got far
too much of a nice-guy teddy-bear persona in mind for him already, a problem
that dogged him in "Broken Arrow" as well.  His one really menacing thing to
do, other than laugh, is Narrow His Eyes.  With all the mugging that goes
on, this might as well be a silent film with title cards.  Come to think of
it, that alone might make it more entertaining.

In a film loaded with bad things, the worst thing is probably the movie's
obsessive-compulsive ugliness.  The Psychlos look like nine-foot-tall
rejects from a Rastafarian cover band that plays Kiss.  Every set is dark,
cramped, trash-strewn and badly photographed.  The sound effects are
nerve-deadening. The camera looks at everything like someone ran into it
full-tilt before it was switched on.  I've seen films made on digital video
in people's basements that looked better than this.

THe film's one claim to fame is its origins: L. Ron Hubbard is also the
creator of the controversial Church of Scientology.  But the film is devoid
of anything to explicitly connect it with Scientology, just as it is devoid
of anything to explicitly connect it with entertainment, thought, feeling,
or coherency.  Maybe that's for the better.