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.
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