OK, so as I egotistically noted on this NG, my birthday was yesterday (I'm now 29, the age everyone pretends to be.) I chose to take my wife to Battlefield Earth. I also brought along a friend who had read the novel and could help interpret the scenes which many reviews had said made no sense whatsoever. My friend evaluates the novel as 'not bad'.

OK. First off. It is not the worst science fiction movie I have ever seen. That honor goes to 'Highlander 2'. But for films made in my lifetime, it ranks a close second. It was easily as bad as Plan 9, only with neater special effects.

There was one or two things I kinda sorta found amusing about the movie. Ker, I kinda felt sympathetic for and was kinda happy he turned out OK in the end. And I thought it was a cute touch what eventually became of Terl. That's about as far as it goes for me for what I liked.

What I didn't like: The effects were not really impressive. Done Tautopolous style, that means low light or poor visibility to fudge things a bit. When they had good visibility (like during the destruction of Psychlo scene, holy anti-climax Batman) the special effects were really unimpressive. The pyrotechnics used were stupid. Clods of dirt being shot into the air. Big fat hairy deal.

I also couldn't stand Travolta's performance. His overacting would make William Shatner wince. He couldn't even keep his accent straight. Half the time he was talking like plain old Travolta. The other half of the time he was talking like a British pouf and doing a bad Bette Davis impersonation. His diabolical laugh was painfully forced and one of the worst examples of acting I've ever seen from Travolta.

The dialogue was horrid. Example: Jonnie Tyler frees his girlfriend from deathtrap X. She tells him, "I've never believed in fate, but I've always known this was your destiny." I screamed at the near-empty theater screen for her to SHUT UP! (The three of us and one other guy comprised the entire audience.)

The plotline was impossible to follow. Jumping from scene to scene was dizzying. Fortunately my friend was there to explain the four chapters that got skipped between scenes, and explain Terl's obsession with 'leverage' and such. (He also noted how in the book the Psychlos were very much Hubbard's allegorical indictment against psychiatry - how all Psychlos had psychosurgery at birth and how a cabal of psychiatrists secretly controlled the psychlo emperor).

The two women who had speaking roles were even more shallow and one- dimensional than the other characters. Kelly Preston and her CGI tongue was there for someone's odd concept of sex appeal. Jonnie's babe was there as a love interest. Every woman on the planet should be offended.

The dialogue was painful. Stilted with 20th century terminology that made no sense whatsoever, it was often unintentionally funny. (For exampe: A human who had been living in stone age conditions all his life was wont to say 'Piece of cake!' a lot. It was his catch-phrase.)

None of the characters was interesting enough to care about. You got to see Tyler do all this stuff to gain his fellow man-animals' trust and you never cared. Not once. He had all these neat democratic freedom ideas and all you could think was 'Where did he get these ideas from? Why are these cavemen following him as if he's charismatic?' It made no sense at all.

The concept of Terl finding the most rebellious man-animal in captivity and making HIM the leader was laughable. The melodramatic romantic scenes were laughable. Terl's 'terrible evilness' scenes were laughable. The times the directors were TRYING to be funny weren't laughable at all, as in the scene where they talk about dogs being the superior species of the planet, or the scene where they discover man- animals like to eat raw rat. They were just stupid.

And of course there's the harrier jumpjets and stuff. One could read in between the scenes and decide the flight sim worked because they had a generator, or they fixed the harriers between scenes, but that of course stretches suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. But this has been covered in the major media reviews.

Oh yeah, and Roger Christian almost never positioned the camera without a rakish camera tilt, which made me seasick, and he was in love with 'center-out' horizontal wipes between scenes. That guy couldn't direct to save his life.

OK, so the movie sucked, and it wasn't even easy to heckle because we were too busy trying to figure out where the hell it was going. So that's that. It wasn't QUITE as bad as the critics said, but it was awful.

That having been said, you might be wondering what this semi-student of the inner workings of that which is Scientology has to say about the Scientological metaphors.

They were absent but for the name 'Psychlo'. In fact, the real Scientology tenets, like the hate of psychiatry, were IN the book, but were neatly stripped from the movie, in an almost deliberate effort to purge the movie of any Scientology-oriented metaphors. They were conspicuous by their absence. So the critics were right there.

And I didn't leave the movie feeling any more sympathetic or friendly to the CoS than I did entering it, so so much for subliminal implants in my meat brain.

So there you are, one wog's opinion of BattleField Earth.

Oh by the way, we bought tickets to BE, we didn't buy tickets to another movie and go in to the BE theatre. I figure Scientology needs the money from our three tickets anyway, after this mess.