RATING: 1 out of 4 stars

The 'Battlefield Earth' movie proves to be a sci-fi nightmare

By Terry Lawson Detroit Free Press Published: 5/12/00

Exactly how big a movie star is John Travolta? Big enough to get "Battlefield Earth," as misbegotten a movie as there has ever been, not just to a screen, but to a couple of thousand of screens. Making "Battlefield Earth," Travolta has said repeatedly, was his greatest dream. It could prove everyone else's worse nightmare.

Even notoriously indiscriminating science fiction fans are likely to desert this "Battlefield," whose closest antecedent is not any alien invasion epic, but Kevin Costner's similarly ill-considered vanity project, "The Postman." It told almost exactly the same story of a post-apocalyptic world whose human survivors were roused to rebellion by a simple, solitary hero. And it, too, was under the impression that it was imparting deep messages about freedom and self-realization while just being stupid and boring.

It did not, however, have villains even half as ridiculous as Terl (Travolta), a 10-foot enforcer in a dreadlock wig and Kiss-brand platform boots. Terl is from the planet Psychlo, and his job is to keep in line the handful of surviving natives of Earth, circa 3000.

The Psychlos, we are told, are advanced enough to have conquered Earth, which they have strip-mined into a wasteland, in nine minutes. Yet if Terl and his deputy, Ker (Forest Whitaker), are representative of Psychlo strategy, it would seem a lucky accident they even found Earth to begin with.

Nevertheless, Terl, outraged at being passed over for promotion, hits upon a plan to bilk his bosses by using man-animals, considered too stupid to do anything but fetch and carry, to mine gold.

With Ker blackmailed into helping, he selects a feisty runaway named, and I am not kidding, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), to be their on-site foreman. In what will prove to be the first in an endless string of misjudgments, the brilliant Terl makes the mistake of zapping Jonnie with centuries of education.

Soon Jonnie is using geometry and biology and a dusty old copy of the Declaration of Independence to inspire his fellow man-animals to revolution.

Ahh, knowledge! The key to spiritual enlightenment and freedom. That's a core belief of Scientology, the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard, who in 1982 wrote the book on which this movie was based. Hubbard was a science fiction author before publishing the best-seller "Dianetics" in the early 1950s, reinventing himself as a controversial mind messiah.

Critics of Scientology, who are almost a cult unto themselves, have accused Hubbard disciple Travolta of loading "Battlefield Earth" with subliminal messages designed to indoctrinate the unsuspecting. But there's hardly a intelligible moment in "Battlefield," much less a subliminal one.

Everything about "Battlefield Earth," from the incoherent storytelling to the sub-comic book-style dialogue to its parade of unconvincing digital effects stinks of moldy cheese, yet the movie has not a whiff of irony. If there is anything more excruciating than a bad science fiction movie, it is a bad science fiction movie that takes itself seriously. If Travolta is having fun strutting around, throwing back his braids and laughing like a cad, he's only amusing himself. We're amazed only at the hubris.

"Battlefield Earth" is directed by Roger Christian, a one-time "Star Wars"-series art director, who has made the movie even more monotonous by bathing it in blue and withholding anything resembling actual action until the climactic battle.

Its screenplay is credited to Corey Mandell and JD Shapiro, who may want to seriously consider changing their names. But neither they nor the members of the cast, some of whom are asked to pretend to eat raw rats, are any more to blame than the huckster Hubbard.

If you want to point a finger, point it at everyone who told the Emperor that his new clothes looked just swell.