'Battlefield': The sight of a massacre
Friday, May 12, 2000
By Shawn Levy of The Oregonian staff
Roger Christian, director of "Battlefield Earth," was the art director of "Alien" and an Oscar-winning set decorator on the first "Star Wars." But he must never have seen the final products and grasped their inherent grace and allure -- how else to explain the ugly, loud and mind-blowingly incoherent mess that is "Battlefield?"
An adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's novel of the same name, the film is a ghastly, unappealing mess that lacks a single absorbing character, engaging story line or entertaining snippet of dialogue. Even if you were to classify it as a guilty pleasure, it would be the kind of sullying guilt that makes people leap from heights.
"Battlefield" has a plot that is to logic what string cheese is to bridge-building. In the year 3000, a race of giant aliens, the Psychlos, operating from a dome in Colorado, has virtually exterminated mankind and nearly drained the planet of resources. Terl (John Travolta), the Psychlo in charge of security, hates Earth but is doomed to stay because of an impolitic trespass back home. He schemes up a revenge plot that will also make him rich but will require the help of "man-animals," a species the Psychlos hold in raw contempt.
Meanwhile, out in the boonies, primitive human Johnny (Barry Pepper of "Saving Private Ryan") has had enough of hiding in caves and waiting for the gods to liberate his people. He rides off into the world (to fight? feed? it's never clear) and is captured by the Psychlos. Soon, Terl identifies Johnny as the smartest human and teaches him science, history and language -- empowering Johnny, in effect, to overthrow the Psychlos.
If the thing has the vague contours of sense in its outline, the details of it explore new, frightening depths of the preposterous. The humans with whom Johnny unites are an indistinguishable mass of hair extensions and leather vests, illiterate brutes who hunt with sticks yet learn to operate jet planes and nuclear weapons in mere days, without instructors. On the Psychlo side, Terl is burdened with a slow-witted henchman, Ker (Forest Whitaker), whose lowbrow antics are meant to pass as comic relief. All the plots converge in a muddled final battle that goes on forever, senselessly, in murky light and from strained angles so that virtually none of it can be followed, either visually or strategically.
Pepper, who may yet become a star, will one day try to buy up every copy of this thing -- if, that is, it hasn't killed his career and eliminated his chances of making enough money. Travolta, decked out like a cross between Andre the Giant and Jar-Jar Binks, wheedles and sneers, and now and then gets a rise in his voice that makes him sound like Pee-wee Herman. (It's not at all clear that this is intentional or a joke.)
The film is shot in a hazy, indistinct fog, overlit in blue, green and purple, minced on the editing table like garlic -- a profoundly unsightly vision. Travolta presumably signed on because novelist Hubbard founded the Church of Scientology, of which the actor is a member. The church is often besieged from without and has a reputation for thin-skinned reaction to criticism. But with stuff like this coming from the faithful, it might be in more danger than it knows.
