John Travolta's bad hair day.
One star Currently playing areawide
Movie Reviews
CLEARLY A BOMB BATTLEFIELD EARTH by Charles Cassady, Jr. Published May 17 - 23, 2000
Space debris like Battlefield Earth could be laughed off as the schlock that bigsummermovies are made of. Except the spheres cry out in despair over the immensity of wasted talent, effort, millions in budget and time (mainly yours) invested in this headache-inducing effects blitz, the sort of overproduced cosmic clunker that gives science fiction in general a bad name. It’s a "Saga of the Year 3000," which finds our planet long-conquered by the Psychlos, resource-plundering aliens for whom sadism, greed and treachery are virtues. In their heavy booties, bad rubber makeup and towering physiques, they look like a cross between fan-club Klingon wannabes and Elton John as the Pinball Wizard.
The nastiest Psychlo is Terl (John Travolta), cackling security chief for a Psychlo mining colony near the ruins of Denver. To secretly extract and horde gold for himself, Terl trains some of the scraggly, surviving humans, whom Psychlos use and abuse as disposable beasts of burden. Johnny (Barry Pepper), a sort of 31st-century Davey Crockett, is the rebellious "man-animal" and born leader who Terl selects for an education in Psychlo language and technology. But Johnny has his own schemes, and somehow turns his ragtag miners and other feral humans into a crack team of freedom-fighters and Harrier pilots (!?), who launch a long-overdue counterattack against the invaders--and the Psychlo home world itself--in a noisy finale so incoherent and farfetched it makes Independence Day look like a Carl Sagan meditation.
With ugly production design, childish dialogue, poor acting (Travolta seems to be channeling Captain Hook through Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless), and director Roger Christian’s woozy, tilted camera angles, Battlefield Earth fails in just about every department. Well, maybe the buglike Psychlo battle planes exude a brutish charisma, and there’s a scene when Terl sports a huge erection whilst inspecting his gold--that’s what passes for subtlety here.
And it might have been worse; the 117 grating minutes of Battlefield Earth cover less than half of L. Ron Hubbard’s hopelessly juvenile 1982 bestseller that’s been star-producer-Scientologist Travolta’s cinematic pet project for more than a decade. Press notes cheerfully predict that the rest of the 1066-page book will get its due in the sequel. One can well imagine hollow-eyed cult members taking up collections at LAX for startup funds. In the meantime, this dreadful feature might at least come in handy as a torture tool for deprogrammers.
