The LMT made it to a sneak preview of BE tonight and I got a random sampling of opinions from those leaving the theater:

http://www.xenutv.com/us/battlefield.htm

I included raves as well as complaints but the raves seemed to come from fairly easy to please people who liked it when things blowed up.

My comments from the screening:

It was not the worst film I have ever seen.

They did a good job fixing some of the most glaring problems I had with the first draft script. Gone were the mannequins used as a decoy to avert attention away from Johnnie flying away from the mining camp. In fact, the mannequins even had a fairly clever line written into the script about them.

However, there was no attempt to explain how Johnnie flew his crew away to Fort Knox without being noticed.

And the repeated references to the Psychlos as "monsters" in the first draft were changed to the less annoying "demons" in the finished film.

The opening few minutes were terrible with very poorly done and brief narrative scenes showing that Jonnie's dad is dead...this was all very choppy...but then it settled into a better pace for the next fiften minutes or so and I was thinking this might not be such a bad film after all.

The section of Johnnie's capture held my attention and was fairly well done.

Once we got into the Psychlo leverage crap and the whole mining operation, though, I felt all the energy drain from the film.

I would say that the remainder of the film was pretty tedious with no real ideas explored and a lot of mindless backstabbing from Terl and Ker.

There were plenty of holes through the entire film which were the same problems in the script but the worst nonsense was in training cavemen to fly harriers in a week.

All in all, fairly dull...not horrendous...and the kids seemed to like the action.

The folks who spoke to me after the film seemed to be split. I doubt that the critics will be as forgiving.

Oh...and I thought it interesting that when Terl speaks in Psychlo he has a rich deep bass voice, but when we hear Terl in English, Travolta often sounds exactly like Bette Davis!

I kid you not.