Movie review: Thriller battles to make sense and loses

May 12, 2000

BY CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI BLADE STAFF WRITER

1 star (out of 4)

In Battlefield Earth, John Travolta spends the entire movie with a black nose-plug thing attached to his nostrils, feeding oxygen to his brain, I suspect. He plays an evil nine-foot-tall alien warlord, Terl, who can't breath Earth's atmosphere and who laughs a lot because he's evil and that's what evil nine-foot-tall alien warlords do in bad movies.

He's laughing because his alien race, the Psychlos, conquered Earth in nine minutes and the few remaining humans putting up a fight are puny and easy to kill. He plans to steal their gold and rule the universe, because, apparently, Uranus is on the gold standard now. But anyway, Travolta's head here is shaped like a football and topped with a dirty tangle of dreadlocks. And after 20 minutes of this, the mind wanders: Isn't it unfair, for instance, that someone as naturally tall as Travolta gets to be nine feet tall in movies, while Tom Cruise would have to play Gene Simmons from KISS before he could look this big?

Then again, little makes sense about Battlefield Earth, neither the plot nor the controversy swirling around its release. The movie is based on the 1982 science-fiction novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology, of which Travolta is an outspoken member. So rumors and accusations have been flying around the Internet that the movie is a thinly veiled Scientology recruitment film loaded with subliminal messages. But Battlefield Earth seems mostly secular and harmless, unless you take into account the paralyzing hypnosis it has induced in preview audiences.

Almost nothing works. Not the editing, which is glaring and distracting. Not the acting. Not the special effects, which are shoddy. Not Travolta's laughing, which is forced, as if someone told him a bad joke and he didn't want to be rude. And not the story, which is focused on Travolta's Terl, the villain, and only tangentially on the hero, measly earthling Jonnie (Barry Popper). Jonnie is captured by Terl, who teaches him the history of everything: science, math, the universe, how to fly a Psychlo warship, how to defeat the Psychlos.

Whoops. Why teach the good guy how to defeat the bad guys? It's hard to say, except the message here is that knowledge is the key to getting ahead. In other words, kids, stay in school, or a race of evil alien warlords will enslave the planet.