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I'm a critic, and I read the book years ago and thought it sucked diseased rinoceros pizzle.

(there, bias properly declared)

I thought about it, and I finally decided that this turkey may not even make it to video, and I'd hate to never have the chance to see it for myself. (They told me that in the end, you regret the things that you didn't do... I think they lied.)

Well, where can I begin. So many dung beetles (I mean reviewers) have chewed up this pile of elephant turds already, and the best parts are already gone. The remainder swelters in the sun, and even the flies seem to avoid it. This elephant apparently wasn't feeling very good for the last few days.

I waited in the theatre for a while, in ambivalent anticipation. It was exactly like strapping into a roller coaster, not being sure wether you're going to have a great time, or puke your guts out on the guy behind you. Unfortunately, I had a queasy feeling that it would be the latter.

I went in and sat down, it wasn't hard to find a good seat. After a few minutes, I took a head count, which was pretty easy. One... This is the first movie I've EVER had a private screening for. Even ishtar had more bodies in seats. Oh well, at least I don't have to listen to some airhead yakking away behind me, or put up with someone kicking my seat. I had a flashback to seeing Star Wars at the Kapiolani theatre on Oahu. The line was wrapped around the block, and you had to stand in line at least one show's worth to get in. That was a blockbuster. This was definitely more of a ball-buster. Gladiator was showing on two screens, BE on one.

The opening credits were exactly like everyone said, about as impressive as any home video editing kit. They weren't BAD really, but they were so dead and lifeless. Nothing to inspire. Shades of things to come.

The planet-sized plot holes have all been done to death.

I did wonder why the psychlos had only one earth base, and only on the ground at that. You'd think that elementary warfare would have taught them to hold the high ground. Even had our hero done in their only ground base, there's little a band of harrier-flying cavemen could do against a few rocks dropped from orbit. Where DID they get JP-5 for those harriers anyway? Where did the liquid nitrogen for the cooled IR seeker heads in the sidewinders come from? Why wasn't all the rifle ammo ruined by 1000 years in storage? Why were the lights on at the base? AAAGGGGGH.. Ask no questions, lest you spiral down to the singularity of nonsense, which is this movie's core. The plot is not as well reasoned as the story of Dr Forrester and the crew of Mystery Science Theatre.

How did Johnny learn math from the psychlos in arabic numerals? Apparently there was a psychlo geometer named Euclid also. Must be an implant..

So the cave men all pile into the working and powered up harrier simulator, and learn to fly the perfectly preserved, provisioned, and fueled harriers that were waiting for them, and in their spare time, they brush up on some basic tactics.

The interplanetary transporter was interesting, but if you've got that, why do you need flying machines that sometimes put out a serious blast of downdraft, and at other times put out not enough to flutter the leaves on the trees? Why are they so goddamn noisy? Wouldn't some semblance of stealth be useful? The psychlos have also apparently not figured out that covert surveilance is not well conducted from buzz-bomb aircraft apparently propelled by some sort of orion-type propulsion system using gigantic farts.

Their danger-guns didn't fit their handling-fingers very well, indeed terl seemed to have an unexplained surplus of those (fingers, not guns). Their pict-o-cams perform suprisingly well, but nothing we haven't seen in any bond film you could name.

The giant boogers contain an apparently endless supply of gas, never saw anyone recharge one, or even saw the tanks to contain the gas. Is THAT what's in those codpieces? Or is it something else?

Why did the Psychlos choose to live in a wrecked and bombed out city for 1000 years, simply throwing a dome and calling it home? Why does John travolta sound like a woman? God knows he's got enough room in that U-Haul codpiece. Do the psychlos worship Doc Martin? (Or maybe Don Martin?) I give Christian credit for this much, he apparently realized how hideously bad those uber-boots were, and set most of the scenes up so that you can't see anyone walking very clearly, or for very long.. So the man isn't a total idiot. More tragic the end result.

As head of security, terl was worse than hopeless. Even a third under-weenie of security would have done better. Odo would have slapped him silly. A parking lot guard would have done a better job.

The planet psychlo sits there in space, bombarded by radiation, yet it does not explode. It could not even have a significant reaction rate to have been there long enough to have psychlos. One small nuke, and the whole atmosphere goes up, somehow generating enough force to shatter the planet. This indicates that the chemicals must be tremendously reactive, in fact more reactive than an atomic explosion, yet somehow stable enough to sit there, bathed in radiation from space, for billions of years. The planet psychlo would also have to have very little heavy elements in it's makeup, but that's at least possible. I bet their first astronauts got quite a suprise though! Psychlo, we've got a prob(BOOOM).

What do psychlos eat, anyway? Are they all on the kerbango-fast diet plan? Apparently, they haven't learned even that much about humans in 1000 years of observation, leading me to wonder how many psychlos it would take to change a light bulb. I think it's an excersize in futility. This lack of knowlege leads to a rather long and pointless space-filler sequence where terlvolta works out the most complicated possible way to figure out what humans like to eat, and in the end, gets it wrong. This whole sequence could have mercifully been cut, and the movie would have been measurably better for it.

Other reviewers are calling it a rip off of planet of the apes, I think it's more of a klingon-ized version of Dilbert.

The low points:

How to differentiate? Oh the humanity. This is the Hinden-film of TerlVolta's career. I didn't particularly like him in anything except "get shorty", and in that one, I didn't like the movie that much. I did think he made a decent "bad guy with class" in that one. Broken arrow was a bit too much on the "Doctor Evil" side, and this later one, I think he's gone where no evil villain has gone before.

The high points:

Umm.. The trailer for X-Men!

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