R e v i e w : B A T T L E F I E L D E A R T H
by K. Harris - Copyright © 2000
Disclaimer: I'm not a professional film critic, and I don't play one on TV either This review is intended only as a comparison between the film and the novel - for a review of the film itself, check other sources
Any film based on a book, especially a well-known book, must invariably be compared to that book. In this case, the spectacular L. Ron Hubbard sci-fi novel BATTLEFIELD EARTH is vastly superior to its film version in every respect. Having read the paperback twice and being more familiar with the complexities of the story than the majority of the film's critics, I found countless major discrepancies between the two, as will anyone else who has read the book even once. The screenwriter has taken very broad liberties with the story and, in doing so, has created a script full of events which seen to occur almost at random and often without discernible reason.
A great many of the film's elements with which critics have found fault are due to the merciless hatchet job which was performed on the original story. It would take far too long to detail the many differences between the book and the film, particularly in the finer details of the story, most of which were hacked to bits or ignored completely. To be fair, it is a rather lengthy tome - over a thousand pages in paperback form - and any attempt to turn such a large novel into a screenplay will undoubtedly require some amount of cutting and rewriting, but the screenwriter seems to have edited the story with a chainsaw.
In fact, only the most basic plot remains: In the year 3000, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler - one of Earth's last remaining humans after an invasion and takeover by the alien Psychlo race a thousand years prior - leaves his secluded mountain village, is captured by the evil Psychlo Terl [security chief of planet Earth], is taught the Psychlo language and basic mining techniques courtesy of an instruction machine [a device invented by an extinct alien race called "Chinkos" in the book and, for some reason, "Clinkos" in the film] and, as a secret experiment, is forced with other humans ["man-animals"] to mine a huge gold deposit in the Rocky Mountains near the ruins of Denver. Anxious to end his tour of duty on the hideously ugly, weak-gravity, poisonous planet Earth, Terl plans to teleport this cache of gold back to his home planet in coffins normally used for shipping dead Psychlos, dig up the coffins after a time, and retire an incredibly wealthy and powerful Psychlo.
What the film only hints at, by way of several small unexplained flashes of fire in the cockpit of Terl's personal transport plane, is that this gold deposit is in an area full of uranium ore pockets, which means that no Psychlo can get anywhere near it because radiation makes their "breathe-gas" explode. It also makes no mention of the point that this vast gold deposit had been buried until recently, when an earthquake and resulting rock slide uncovered it, allowing it to be discovered by Terl's reconnaissance drone. Since it is impossible for any Psychlo to mine the gold, Terl forces "man-animals" to do the work for him after determining, in his initial experiments on our hero, that humans can in fact be trained to perform certain tasks. But, he underestimates humans and refers to them as "rat brains" - what he doesn't know is that Jonnie Tyler has learned what radiation does to Psychlo breathe-gas. Tyler procures a supply of old nuclear warheads from an ancient U.S. Air Force base and substitutes them for Terl's gold in the lead coffins [marked "Radiation-Killed" by Terl so that no Psychlo will want to open them]; they are then teleported to planet Psychlo and detonated.
In the book, the Psychlos, in their infinite greed, have mined the crust of their own planet [using their "deep-core mining technique"] to the point where it resembles so much Swiss cheese, making it a bit fragile and easily vulnerable to a nuclear blast - which, when Tyler's warheads are detonated, punches a hole in the planet's crust reaching nearly to the core because the teleportation receiving platform on Psychlo had been sealed off in every other direction by an emergency force field, giving the full force of the blast nowhere to go but down. The film does show the result of this blast and of a large amount of radiation being released into the breathe-gas atmosphere of planet Psychlo, but it does so in such an anti-climactic way that you have to wonder what just happened and why it happened in the first place. There is no clue that this is, in fact, one of the most crucial plot points in the original story - the film basically depicts this event as "...and then planet Psychlo exploded." In the film, planet Psychlo is reduced to a cloud of dust; in the book, it becomes what amounts to a small star, a point which is more than a little bit important to the remainder of the story.
The very concept of teleportation, one of the most crucial elements of the original story, is only a minor element of the film - I can only recall its having been used twice, and even then only as a third-rate special effect. It is in fact the very key to the Psychlos' vast power; having an exclusive monopoly on teleportation, the technology and mathematics of which they will guard to the point of berzerker suicide, they control sixteen universes. The film doesn't even begin to hint at any of this, and in its absence, we learn almost nothing about the Psychlo race itself - little more than that they come from a purple planet and claim to have conquered Earth in nine minutes.
This, in broad summary, is the plot of the FIRST HALF of the original L. Ron Hubbard novel - the second half presumably will be used as the basis of the sequel, should anybody actually want to see one after this debacle. Personally, I do want to see a sequel, but only in the hope that they can get it right next time. As a fan of the novel, I eagerly awaited the film. Now, having seen the film, I am greatly disappointed by it - while the novel is a fantastic, intricate, and highly imaginative piece of science fiction, the film is a piece of something else entirely.
_O_ <\_/> _/ \_ Crossfire. ---------------------- "...and the greatest of men would be silly and lazy," so I would be king, if the world was crazy" - Shel Silverstein
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