 "Not quite as bad as it looks" | 2009-10-18 |
| - Reviewed By User: A2HFL26OQJ2T9X |
I know, I know...
Gaping plot holes, cheesy lines, ridiculous coincidences, hammy acting, lack of faithfulness to the novel (which, although no classic, was apparently much more sensible than this)....'Battlefield Earth' is certainly not a good movie. However, the reviewers slamming it as the worst movie ever made are wrong. It is certainly deeply flawed, but it does have a certain cheesy attraction.
The biggest problem lies not so much with the film itself, but the fact that it takes itself so seriously. If 'Battlefield Earth' were simply another pulp blockbuster like 'Independence Day', you could probably forgive alot of the stupidity on display here. But this movie so obviously sets out to be something "Big" and important. Check out the "making of" section of the DVD; the cast and crew really do seem to think they're making the next '2001' here. So instead of being able to laugh off the implausibilities in the story, the movie's self-important seriousness forces us to notice them, emphasising over and over again the leaps in logic and cavernous holes in the plot. The gap between the creators' ambitions and the eventual outcome is hilariously wide, and you can only wonder why nobody thought to ask how cavemen can fly a plane in a week, or books and fuel kept for 1000 years are in perfect working order.
Many people bag John Travolta's role, but I actually think his slightly self-conscious hamminess comes closest to what the film should have been. It's Barry Pepper's leaden performance that really drags this film into the depths, making ridiculous scenes even more cringeworthy with his po-faced earnestness. You just have to laugh at his deadly serious attempts to teach cavemen trigonometry, for example. Even worse, the director seems desperate to make a major artistic statement (because this film is going to be the new '2001', remember?), so he employs a variety of tilted angles, extreme close-ups, partial-scene, and other distorted camera effects which are just annoying.
So if you are after a genuine, thought-provoking sci-fi film, then look elsewhere.
However....'Battlefield Earth' is entertaining to an extent, provided you just take it as a cheesy B-grade sci-fi flick and not the big budget flop it was. The movie works alot better if you just surrender to its stupidity instead of fighting it. |
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 "This is a great movie! Think about what is happening now!" | 2009-08-07 |
| - Reviewed By pgb@padrak.com |
It doesn't have to be aliens or ETs that shut you out of your world and take over.
It just could be the international bankers, the private FED, and the corrupt US Federal Gov.
Why do you think that they spend so much money to get elected?
How are they going to pay back their "friends" that donated those funds?
Where do you think that money comes from?
That's right! - From you!
Watch this movie again with this perspective in mind, and you will see a whole new world! Yours!
Then go see this 5 minute wonderful clip created on[...] from the movie "V For Vendetta"...
"V's Message for the U.S.A"
[...] |
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 "Interesting Movie" | 2009-07-26 |
| - Reviewed By athenian1 |
Battlefield Earth brings to the screen a futuristic scenario where aliens are in control of Earth and humans have been reduced to a mere slave-race.
It is the year 3000 and the Pshyclos, an evil race of aliens, have taken over planet Earth to satisfy their need for raw materials. Subsequently, humans have become an endangered species...
Don't look for the movie to make much sense; it doesn't.
John Travolta, Forest Whitaker, Barry Pepper, and the rest of the cast carry out their performances well though the acting is nothing extraordinary.
The setting, the (full of holes) plot, the (weak) dialogues, the special effects, and the music make for an amusing film.
In a nutshell, it's probably not a movie you would want to add to your collection, but it will provide for an evening's entertainment (especially if intoxicated and/or in a silly mood).
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 "WHAT PRICE SCIENTOLOGY? WHO CARES?" | 2009-07-21 |
| - Reviewed By michaelanderson65 |
Well, poodles, Once more I returned home after a relaxing facial and manicure only to find that little Jimmy jr. had yet again poisoned the family DVD player with some heinous assault called BATTLEFIELD EARTH. How he managed to bribe his Germanic governess Mrs. Whipcrack to remove his fetters and take him to the local video store is still under investigation. (I would have thought this beyond her. She claimed to be former Gestapo on her resume.) With my freshly painted nails digging into my palms, and a growing concern for the I.Q. of my youngest son, I sat down to witness what could quite possibly be the worst movie of the new millennium.
Released to scathing reviews in the summer of 2000, one could only hope that BATTLEFIELD EARTH was, as many paranoid trogs would have it, a subliminal recruitment for the L. Ron Hubbard religion/carpetbagging operation, because then it might have some purpose. Otherwise, it is a brain-baking travesty, a Hollywood laughingstock that must inevitably damn at least some of the careers wrapped up in it. It's difficult to imagine how John Travolta, (whose personal project this was in one way or another), got away with his reputation and price tag intact. As a Rasta-coiffed alien in six-finger fur gloves and big Gene Simmons boots prone to drinking what looks like Gatorade at his local alien gin mill, Travolta utters dialogue only LOST IN SPACE's Dr. Smith could get away with, including multiple exclamations about Earth being "this horrid planet!" Much to his hammy dismay, Travolta's Terl is stuck on Earth monitoring its security after the Psychlos have essentially wiped out civilization and are busy strip-mining the planet.
Jonnie (Barry Pepper) gets captured by the Psychlos; when Terl decides to surreptitiously have "man-animals" mine gold for personal profit, he slaps Jonnie into a brain-educating machine, not realizing that Jonnie has a Captain Kirk-like need to be free. The revolution takes forever to happen, and director Roger Christian's 45-degree angles, hyper-closeups and hemorrhaging slo-mo shots virtually comprise a textbook in how to make an irritating, ineffective and dull action film. Unarguably the dumbest sci-fi novel ever to be a bestseller in this country (if it was one - anti-Hubbardians think there's a warehouse full of paperbacks somewhere), BATTLEFIELD EARTH makes it to the screen with its nova-sized plot holes (caveman learning how to formation-fly Harriers in a few days!), glaring inconsistencies ("Six Psychlos coming fast!"; cut to six aliens walking very slowly) and slackjawed foolishness intact.
Don't even get me going on the Fort Knox debacle, or Kelly Preston's cameo as an alien trollop with a foot-long tongue, or Pepper's portentous reading of the Declaration of Independence. I haven't seen such a laughably incompetent summer movie since summer movies became summer movies some years ago, and that's saying a pantload. As to Mrs. Whipcrack, we have a special room in our basement for people who don't follow orders. Perhaps she might enjoy a little visit down there next to our sloppy gardener Mr. Chu. |
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 "Better than I expected" | 2009-07-11 |
| - Reviewed By User: APP7NLONT59JN |
I went into this movie fully expecting for it to be horrible. Mike Nelson of MST3K fame did a RiffTrax on it, it is constantly made fun of. Even the cover indicates stinkitude: the only review on the back of the case is (literally) from JoBlo's movie blog! It can't get any lower than this. So naturally, I had to see what the fuss was about.
I have a personal theory on this: the writer(s) of this film had ADD. Hear me out...
The first hour is absolutely incomprehensible. They introduce our protagonist, who has no name, rides a horse, and attempts to attack a mini-golf dragon and is dragged into an abandoned mall and is captured by John Travolta, who is given a name almost instantly (Terl), and makes him do things with other captured people with absolutely no explanation. The writer is clearly hyper at this point, but I suspect at 42 mins realizes this and takes a pill to calm himself down.
From 1:00 to 1:30, the movie begins to make sense. Our protagonist is given education, and all of a sudden he begins to make sense and you learn what the heck Terl is up to. They discover Fort Hood and Harriers. The protagonist is even named! The pill is clearly working.
But the pill clearly wears off from 1:30 to the end, the nonsensicalness/hyperness of the plot returns and the film becomes a blur of SFX.
At the end of my first watching, yes, this is dreck. However, for kicks and background noise, I put on the commentary and watched it again immediately afterwards. And I realized a number of things:
1. The movie was trying to follow the book, methinks, very closely.
2. It makes sense for the first hour that your confused as all get out. Because, our protagonist is. The last 30 minutes, though, cannot be excused. So the plot is horrendous and the writing is to blame.
3. It's kinda funny; a number of jokes are made on the lack of knowledge of future humans.
3. The director of this film has an impressive history (Star Wars ep IV as set designer), wanted to make a film on a book by LRH, and had a very small budget. He somehow got a Canadian crew and SFX team to make a B- movie with big name actors on a shoestring budget, and the commentary revealed this, and it was really neat to learn about all of the work he put in. His academic integrity and ability to explain what was going on was really informative. He also explained a lot of subtle jokes that were made about the humans not understanding common skills we have today.
So while I wouldn't consider this movie entertaining, it is informative. |
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| "It really is that awful. 4%" | 2009-06-20 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1ZSOK69XSXF73 |
I heard about this movie when it came out nine years ago and haven't seen it until last week. I remember seeing stuff about it when it was released and everyone rightfully said "You don't want to see that, it's one of the worst movies of all time." I saw this last Friday and I wasn't expecting this to be any good at all, I saw it because this has so much notoriety surrounding it, I just had to see how loathsome it was with my own eyes. Trust me, every bad thing you heard about Battlefield Earth is 100% true.
I won't judge the movie on religious matters, I'll judge it strictly on a cinematic level. Basically, the plot is that an invading alien race called the Psychlos (really creative names) have conquered Earth and the humans, who are living caveman-like lives, are fighting back.
I'll get the one good quality out of the way. I do believe that Barry Pepper really did put effort into his role, despite the fact that everyone else phoned in their performances, so I have to give him some credit there. Everything else is terrible, and I'll categorize every bad quality neatly.
BAD ACTING:
Minus the performance of Barry Pepper as human resistance leader Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, everyone else put NO effort into their roles. I felt like John Travolta as Terl knew that this movie would be the rightful whipping boy of movie critics and audiences alike and gave out one of the most laughable performances in a big budget movie. He's supposed to be the head of security on Earth and supposed to be really smart and evil, he's neither. He makes the stock villains in the 60's Batman TV show look like Dr. Weir in Event Horizon in comparison. If Terl is supposed to be really smart, how is he so stupid as to allow a handful of "man animals" learn to use Psychlo technology (which would screw him and his race over) and doesn't even know what humans eat? He even finds this out by putting a few "man animals" in a little hunt to find and eat rats for crying out loud!!
PLOT HOLES:
Oh man, there's numerous plot holes bigger than the Grand Canyon throughout this cinematic mess. For one, Terl explains to Jonnie that the Psychlos defeated all of the armies on Earth in nine minutes circa 2000 but towards the end of the movie, a handful of cavemen with horribly outdated weaponry defeat the invading Psychlos and destroy their home planet. You mean to tell me that the most advanced fighting forces from powerful nations like America, Russia, China, and the UK got their butts handed to them by the Psychlos but a few cavemen were able to destroy practically the entire Psychlo race with really inferior weapons? Also, note that 1000 years prior to the movie's setting that the Psychlos almost certainly had weapons and vehicles that were technologically inferior to the ones in the current setting so that makes it even more implausible that Jonnie and his comrades were able to beat the Psychlos. Also, the destroyed cities are in really good condition despite laying there abandoned for 1000 years. Books in the library are merely dusty and isn't it really convenient how the Harrier jets, machine guns, and bombs are in perfect working condition at Fort Hood and waiting for Jonnie and his men to be used? There's even electricity in Ft. Hood!! Wouldn't you think that after 1000 years the light bulbs and computers that were still left on after it was abandoned would burn out after about a week? My favorite part has to be where Jonnie devises a plan to steal a bunch of gold bars from Fort Knox and I can't get over how the gold is just waiting there for Jonnie and his crew to be taken. Wouldn't you think people would have looted Ft. Knox after it was abandoned and way before the movie's setting? The only thing more nonsensical than this is Elfen Lied.
BAD CAMERA WORK:
Practically every shot in this movie is at an angle. Didn't Roger Christian complete film class 101? Angled shots in movies are effective only when used in moderation. I swear, I saw probably one, maybe two shots in this movie that weren't angled.
BAD COSTUME DESIGN:
I'm not really that picky when it comes to how costumes look in movies, but the Psychlo costumes are absolutely atrocious!! The platform boots are so obvious that it kills any suspension of disbelief that you might have that the Psychlos look relatively legitimate in a fictional world. Besides the stupid platform boots, they look like pathetic humanoid Wookies.
STATUS AS A "CAMPY" MOVIE:
Some people have called this a camp-classic, I can't disagree with them more. "Camp" status only applies to low budget works like Plan 9 from Outer Space and the original La Blue Girl hentai because of obvious production shortcomings and the whole "so bad it's good" vibe prevailing throughout the whole thing. Battlefield Earth is just "so bad it's bad" because this wasn't low budget, this had a multi-million dollar and it was a BOMB!!
Best to never see this joke of a movie, kids. |
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