Battlefield Earth review

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I don't remember asking you a ******* thing!
Unlike my first post, this is my first actual movie review. Instead of praising one of my favorite movies, however, this review is dedicated to a film that makes me gnash my teeth with anger. I'm talking about a film that makes the sci-fi genre (my favorite movie genre) seem like a bad joke. Two words: Battlefield Earth. Based on a book by founding scientologist L. Ron Hubbard, the film version decided to throw away any scientology reference that it might have had (I've never read it) and go a whole new direction with it. However, they launched this mess with fatal inaccuracy at what they might have intended.

The movie is set in a typical futuristic setting: the year 3000. Not a bad beginning at first, but when you hear about how the humans have been enslaved for one thousand years by an alien race known as the "Psychlos", you think to yourself "that sounds like a Star Wars alien reject name." In fact, considering that this film was made by Star Wars co-director Roger Christian, you might not be far off. We find out they've taken us over because we have gold, supposedly the rarest substance in the universe.

As the film itself starts, you'll see that it's set in an atmosphere that, pardon the language, is basically film that a dog probably pissed on before they started filming. What made them think it was excellent filtering will always escape me. In the middle of this urine-stained background, our main character named Jonnie (Barry Pepper) is upset that his father has passed away, though not very subtly. Why this is important to the story, we'll never know. He's a part of a pack of human outcasts who have stayed under the tyrannical Psychlos' radar. Again, not a bad plot point if used correctly, but you'll see why this fails soon.


As we see Jonnie go out into the barren parts of the Earth, we're caught in the middle of a cinematography nightmare from beginning to end. If you thought Dutch (tilted) camera angles were impressive in many of the artfully made films of yore, you'll wind up hating them watching this movie. For you see, about 98% of this movie is filmed as if a tripod had lost a leg on the side, and the cameramen were too lazy to fix it. It serves absolutely no purpose other than to frustrate the audience and possibly give them lasting neck injuries just from watching the near two hours this movie drones on for. How's that for a first impression?


Johnny finds other human outcasts, and he's led through a jungle of decimated buildings and many marketing statues (I'm surprised we didn't see a certain cartoon mouse among them), explaining to him that they're gods, inventing numerous background stories about them. While they continue their exploration, they're suddenly attacked by poorly edited laser blasts and captured by the "demons" as Jonnie had called them earlier. He's led to one of the aliens' human zoos as we discover that the Psychlos look nothing more than tall, overweight Bob Marley caricatures who are in need of a serious manicure.


The group Jonnie has been caught by is led by Terl, played by John Travolta, and his sidekick Ker, played by Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker. Oddly enough, Travolta plays his alien role as something that even Jerry Lewis would find too hammy. Whatever lesson that Travolta learned about subtlety while he revived his career with Pulp Fiction was cast aside and ripped to shreds during a scene in a bar in which he expresses every sentence as if he were a high schooler imitating Shakespeare just to make fun of him. Forest is bad also, but not to the degree of Travolta's tragic travesty that he thought was acting.


It turns out that Terl is the interim chief of security on his particular Earth outpost. His job includes spying on humans with still photographs taken over several hours (explain to me how that's effective surveillance), and learning absolutely nothing about the human race while on his tour of service. His superiors decide that he's not quite finished with his job, and force him to remain at his post indefinitely, due to an unexplained incident with "the Senator's daughter," a plot that's never explained, so that it becomes throw-away plot number 12 (the others I don't even bother to mention).


In outrage, he devises a plan to make a fortune by using human slaves to mine gold for him so that he can buy his way off of the planet. However, bribing the humans to work proves difficult as (get this) they know nothing of what humans like or what we did before we were captured. In other alien movies, it made sense why we would be taken over––we're killing our planet, they're taking us over to enslave us, they studied us and we were primed for takeover––but in this film, they are thrown aside for reasons of mining gold. Nothing more or less. They attacked us just to get our gold without bothering to know how we're able to adapt so fast to change or even learning what we eat for one thing. Even language is an issue to them, even though they're clearly speaking English themselves to us. Sometimes they switch between Psychlo and English, but subtitles even out that problem, so it's not like they couldn't have used the Psychlo language more often or anything.


They use Jonnie first as he's recently become the leader of a group of prisoners, using a machine to teach him the Psychlo language so that they could communicate better. If they did this for every other human, they could be more useful to them instead of being zoo animals for the amusement of Psychlo children who might come to visit the planet, which we thankfully never see. Terl even teaches Jonnie to fly Psychlo ships, never once thinking that this could be used against him later on. Jonnie tells the other prisoners of this plan, and they all jump on the chance to revolt. Jonnie tells them to hold on though as he forces Terl to tell him about the humans' fall––they put up a "measly nine-minute fight.”


After training more humans, Terl leads his “man-animals” to a field, where after showing off his shooting skills is attacked by the humans. Jonnie points a gun after him, but decides not to kill him. A dumb move, because Terl and Ker have captured his girlfriend and placed a collar bomb on her. Despite Jonnie’s pleas, they kill her, making him wish that he had pulled the trigger––at least to rid us of one over-long hammy performance.


Learning more about Psychlo culture, Jonnie takes one of their aircraft to Fort Knox, grabbing some of the gold there to give to Terl. Which begs the question: how did this supposedly advanced alien race overlook the fact that humans have been mining gold for centuries? It’s as if they just decided one day to take us over, never bothering to study us at all. It fails all logical comprehension, at least in my mind.


Once Terl has his gold, Jonnie discovers an abandoned military base and takes his entourage over there to train for battle. In the span of one week, they learn how to make nuclear bombs, fly fighter jets, and use automatic weapons properly, making Mensa look like a group of babbling infants. Once they finish, they begin their assault, taking down their gunships with our harrier jets––leading me to believe that the so-called “nine-minute fight” was a load of garbage. They blow up the Psychlo’s dome, forcing them to breathe our atmosphere––I failed to mention that these aliens live in a radioactive environment. In the middle of the fighting, Jonnie finds a Psychlo teleporter, sends a bomb to their home planet and detonates it, turning it into a planet wide atom bomb that annihilates the entire Psychlo race. Terl is also captured sans an arm to be used as a hostage in case other Psychlo colonies find out about what happened.


What do I think of this movie? It’s a filthy, stupid, contradictory piece of junk that has brought a bad name to the sci-fi genre. The plot’s idiotic, the acting is bad across the board, and the special effects are bland. When Roger Ebert said that this movie was going to be the punch line of jokes about bad movies, he wasn’t kidding around. This movie makes me want to pull my own hair out while watching it, and that’s just the beginning.


Rating: 0.5 out of 4



I watched this with the RiffTrax audio commentary just the other day, which was pretty funny.

But yeah, Battlefield Earth is such an awful film. The amount of Dutch angles is ridiculous. I read that John Travolta actually approached Quentin Tarantino to direct the film, if you can believe that.
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I don't remember asking you a ******* thing!
I think Tarantino would've been able to make this movie even a little credible, given his talent. But that's probably just me, a fan of Tarantino's work, talking.



28 days...6 hours...42 minutes...12 seconds
The Dutch angles thing is indeed ridiculous and the main reason why so many people hated it. You can watch a film like that.

Oh yeah and the script, over the top acting, scientology message, special effects, direction.....etc.
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Suspect's Reviews



I didn't think it was that bad. Not a great movie, but I saw it more as a sort of boy's adventure story with sci-fi trappings.

I also thought the Psychlos were arrogant but not that bright, really, and that seemed the main reason why humanity still stood a chance. They reminded me of the Tommyknockers, technical whizzes who weren't actually very smart, almost like a kind of race of idiot savants.
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Good grief. I quit reading after the first paragraph. I mean, really? Sheesh, who doesn't know that this is a terrible movie? What's really funny though is after all that you still gave it a .5 out of 4 so what does that mean?
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I don't remember asking you a ******* thing!
I gave it a .5 because of the premise. It's something that was interesting, which was what drew people to start watching it in the first place. If it had been done right (and many things would have to be done for that to happen), it probably would have been a smash it among sci-fi fans.



To be honest, I've only seen three quarters of the movie, I turned off when I couldn't take any more.
Mastermetal777 is pretty much spot on with his review. Thumbs up.



This one is high (or low) on my worst-of-all-time lists. And I wince whenever I remember that I paid full-price at night to see this laughfest.
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You ready? You look ready.
I often wonder how this film would have turned out if "they" hadn't butchered the screenplay, and I think we all know what I mean by "they."
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