====================

Roger Christian
Battlefield Earth
(Warner Bros.) PG-13

it's worth $1.50

Holy mother of Terl, we're all going to fall under the dark spell of a nefarious cabal of uber-rich Scientologists, out to brainwash us with L. Ron Hubbard propaganda and Barry Pepper action figures!

Such was the paranoid caterwaul of blue-faced right-wingers when the film adaptation of Hubbard's rich, epic sci-fi novel was announced last year. Don't see this movie, or you'll be at the devious beck and call of Barbarino! Don't buy that Battlefield Earth toy, lest you inadvertently assist in financing Scientology's covert plans for world domination!

If those squeaky reactionaries had only waited for the film to be released, they'd have realized the only danger in seeing this film is in busting a gut at its unintentional hilarity.

"People have asked me if there is a connection between 'Battlefield Earth' and Scientology," Travolta is quoted as saying in the film's press notes. "There is no connection... The two have virtually nothing to do with each other."

And good thing for the Los Angeles-based religion, too, for it's hard to imagine the swanky halls of (Dianetician Hollywood hangout) Celebrity Center so ever-populated and well-monied if this film were at the core of Scientology's philosophical tenets.

The film's story, lifting only half of Hubbard's 1,000-page novel for the screen, is a classic hero's journey, one on which audiences have ridden sidecar so many times previously: A lone rebel rises from the ashes of his people to conquer the dark forces that have oppressed him. (Or as the film so eloquently states in its opening log: "Man is an endangered species.")

The film is set 1000 years in the future on a planet Earth devastated by a hostile alien takeover. The lone rebel, Jonnie Goodboy, is played with jut-jawed sincerity by relative newcomer Barry Pepper, whose performance looks snipped right from the "Flash Gordon" funny pages. Goodboy has all the depth his surname implies. He's a videogame hero, an Aryan Super Mario, with nothing to do but run obstacle courses. It's to Pepper's credit that Goodboy registers at all, offering a chiseled, earnest, messianic turn that would work, for its sheer willfulness, in most films of this ilk. The major trouble is that Goodboy's chief nemesis, a nine-foot tall alien named Terl, is portrayed by the much larger than life John Travolta, who also produced.

Stacked with a blue beehive with flowing dreadlocks, an impeccably manicured goatee, blue skin, puffy Muppet hands, and a British accent that reminds one of nothing so much as Alfred E. Neuman doing Richard III, Travolta here chomps nearly as much scenery as craft service. Travolta's Terl, a gold-hungry megalomaniac prone to one-liners, lacks any real menace (think Castor Troy joins Blue Man Group). It's a slapsticky, schticky, movie-hogging performance, one that devastatingly sets the movie's narrative out of whack. This is a hero's journey in which the villain, because the actor portraying him likely commands 40 times the salary of the film's hero (and also boasts the film's only real marquee allure), gets all the screen time -- even if that screen time is spent mensching endlessly about being skipped for a promotion. (No matter how superior this alien race, wealth is still the most important thing).

Assisting Terl in his wicked plot to enslave a group of humans to mine the Earth of all its gold is Ker, a stumpy Forest Whitaker who here resembles Della Reese on stilts (or maybe Aretha Franklin with a fu manchu?). The inane banter struck up by these two sparring colleagues calls to mind the slaphappy repartee of Saddam and Satan in last year's South Park film -- but for scene after scene.

Eventually, the film cannot help but give over a scene or two to Goodboy and his pack of loyal slaves (who look like refugees from a Spin Doctor's audition). Goodboy, enlightened by a crash course in the history of the universe, courtesy of an inexplicable plot point, determines that Euclidian geometry is the key to staging a rebellion. His plan to turn the tables on his captors by memorizing a dusty copy of the Declaration of Independence, cleaning out Fort Knox (for the gold Terl desires), then lifting every piece of (impressively still operational) artillery from Fort Worth (to lay waste to the aliens), is as gutsy as it is wholly laughable. (How these dreary slaves make it from Colorado to Kentucky and back in 14 days, on foot and with no supplies, is something perhaps only Brigham Young could answer).

The final showdown, to the film's credit, is impressively staged. A massive crush of combat that actually achieves (for a fleeting sequence) the film's epic aspirations, it is far too little too late, despite the expert production design of Patrick Tatopoulos and the creative special effects of Erik Henry and his team.

Directed by George Lucas protegé Roger Christian, the film shamelessly cribs full shot sequences from Blade Runner and The Matrix and opts for more dutch angles than an old episode of "Batman". When blocking action sequences, Christian is fairly capable of orchestrating beautiful chaos. However, his directorial chops come up severely short in reining in the performance of his lead actor.

So what threat does Battlefield Earth finally pose to humankind? None at all, but for the inevitable brain-drain most of this summer's action spectacles will claim, and the uneasy and inexplicable yearning with which one is struck to sit through a similarly-themed, vastly superior (but still horrendous) Lori Petty movie from a few years back. Viva Tank Girl.

- J. Rentilly