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Dan Craft
At the Movies

Thursday, May 18, 2000

Battlefield Earth

Directed by Roger Christian. Written by Corey Mandell, JD Shapiro. Stars John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker, Kim Coates, Richard Tyson, Sabine Karsenti. Rated PG-13 for violence, mild language. (1 hr. 57 min.)

1 star

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha?

Perhaps somebody decided early on that "Battlefield Earth" might work best as a kind of bickering-aliens comedy -- one that just so happens to involve the aftermath of Earth's destruction, the enslavement of humankind and, before it's over, an entire planet incinerated before our eyes, open or otherwise. Here we have, in the most deranged casting decision of the new millennium, John Travolta triggering peals of mirth as Terl, chunky chief of security for an alien race called the Psychlos.

Testy-tempered Terl has aerodynamic eyebrows, a badly fertilized thatch of chin hair and a sneer that suggests Vinnie Barbarino going to town in Mr. Kotter's class production of "Henry VIII in Outer Space."

The Psyschlos, as a post-credits crawl tells us, vanquished Earth a long time ago, from a galaxy way far away. It took around nine minutes to get the job done. Ever since, the surviving humans have either wound up in slavery ("they are an endangered species") or hid out primitively in what appears to be the leftover locations from one of Kevin Costner's post-apocalypse affairs (is it "Waterworld" or is it "The Postman"?).

The name of the alien vanquishers alone suggests a kind of bad joke on the part of the original author, Church of Scientology overlord L. Ron Hubbard, whose 1980 novel provided the script with its source, if not its chronic bad story judgment.

The Kookloos or the Nutslos might have been more appropriate, all things considered.

Whatever, the Psychlos are just that -- a bunch of loony aliens who always seem to be barking lofty orders to the nearest set of ears, buried though they be behind the race's Rastifarian coiffures and bargain-bin Klingon garb.

We won't even get into the issue of that nasal harness they pack, the one with tubes running down from each nostril and back up over to a kind of headset contraption. Though doubtless just another quirk to make those wacky Psychols seem even more so as they bicker away, we in the audience may forever be itching to hand them a wad of tissue.

Nothing Erin Brockovich wore to work can match the distraction factor of this particular component of the Psychlos dress code.

Whatever, these guys just can't seem to finish a conversation without an accusation, a boast, a snotty aside or, in the case of the showboating Terl, a laugh that goes ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Every ha! is precisely enunciated, with a fraction of dead air allowed between each one. It's as if the Psychlos' primary education had involved a semester being taught by the prissy elocutionist in "Singin' in the Rain." (They could do a really great rendition of "Moses Supposes," we suspect.)

Amid the bickering, about which we become less and less concerned as the film's seemingly endless two hours unfold, there is a tale being told. But the distractions keeping piling up.

Heading the pack is Travolta as Terl, one of the great cosmic movie jokes of all time, there can be no doubt. As a practicing and dutiful Scientologist, the star has been trying to get a film version of Hubbard's weighty tome before the cameras for a decade now. So he has doubtless had plenty of time to contemplate the character, and how he'd play it.

If Travolta looks ridiculous in his dreadlocks and nose harness, and sounds even sillier with his clenched-jaw approach to alien megalomania, you haven't, as the man said, heard nothing until you've heard Terl and the boys bickering about "stupid, stupid!" humans. The mincing, strutting style, along with the script's verbiage, suggests a concerted homage to the similar effete and preening alien invaders of E. Wood's "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

But what price homage, if nobody else seems to be in on the joke?

Despite the grandiose, apocalyptic plot, the movie itself looks cheap, badly designed, made on the run, with crummy matte paintings sharing space with the occasional effective computer-generated effect. Director Roger Christian, who worked on the "Star Wars" series as a set decorator and second unit director, and helped create the look for "Alien," appears to have lost his stylistic way.

The dark, drab, muddy color schemes and the murkily illuminated interiors never allow us to fully get our bearings. After awhile, who cares if we're on Earth or in a spaceship or on the planet Psychlo?

Or looking up one of those nose harnesses?

And so what if Terl and his buddy Ker (Forest Whitaker, only slightly less in over his head than Travolta) are trying to pull a fast one on their superiors via a covert plot to use human slaves to mine gold and accrue great personal wealth?

And so what if there's the requisite human slave who leads the revolt against their captors, who goes by the name of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler and who's played by the anything-but-heroic-looking Barry Pepper, late of "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Green Mile"?

Though L. Ron Hubbard's talent as a journeyman science fiction writer has been obscured by his notoriety as the man who gave us Scientology and its legion of movie star acolytes, he could still rattle off a decent, action-packed space opera.

To the film's credit, "Battlefield Earth" comes to us clean of even a mote of a Scientology agenda wedged between the lines. But neither does the end result boast even a stray scrap of the journeyman entertainment value Hubbard could set to prose with incredible productivity.