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Battlefield Earth (2000)

If you know bad movies, you’ve heard of Battlefield Earth. I sat down with this bowlful of cigarette butts soaking in milk ready to have a good time. I tried my best and have concluded it’s not possible.

In the year 3,000, mankind is nearing extinction. Earth has been ruled for 1,000 years by the Psychlos, gold-obsessed galactic conquerors. When a greedy, politically ambitious Psychlo named Terl (John Travolta, AWFUL!) teaches Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) the Psychlo language and how to use equipment to create his own secret mining force, he unwillingly gives mankind a chance to overtake the evil aliens.

This movie leaves you scratching your head. Not because it contains mind twists or deep symbolism. Actually, the story is so simple it'll have you bored in no time. What's mind-boggling is that at no point in its production could this film have shown any promise whatsoever and yet, it was still made. The characters are either flat (any of the human characters) or so over-the-top they can’t be taken seriously (the aliens). To be fair, I’m almost certain Terl is supposed to be comical. These aliens conquered Earth, they saw our military in action, they leveled our cities… and can’t grasp that dogs were our pets and that mankind is only eating rats because of desperation. It makes no sense whatsoever.

The story is so poorly written I doubt even the source material (courtesy of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology) could be any good. It’s a Swiss Cheese plot with so many illogical developments only a blind devotee could've managed to keep this production going. This dull would-be action-adventure with some political machinations thrown in for spice fails at just about everything. It looks cheap. The Psychlos aren’t remotely frightening, intimidating, or believable. The acting is embarrassing, ranging from wooden to so over-the-top it could end careers. If it did come around and become so-bad-it’s-good, this is where I’d tell you about how much fun it is to ridicule, quote, and tear apart. Battlefield Earth is none of those things. You may have seen isolated clips (“While you were still learning how to SPELL YOUR NAME, I was being trained to conquer GALAXIES!”) but they’re not the show-stoppers you’re hoping for. They just sort of come and go, barely jogging you out of your comatose state. It’s not even fascinating to watch in a Showgirls kind of way. I couldn’t wait for the story to end so I could get rid of the DVD, which had been sitting on my shelf for years, waiting to be viewed. I had more fun digging for the pointless Easter Eggs hidden in the menus than I did with any of its interminable 117 minutes.

Usually, I’d try and find SOMETHING about a film like this to like, even if it's an ironic sort of like. A bad CGI spaceship that’ll make you chuckle, the puzzling scene transitions and camera angles, or a game you could play with the lurid use of color throughout, for example. That’s too much work. Battlefield Earth is a pair of underwear that's been soiled so many times it’s more feces than fabric. You may be curious to see it, even just the one time, but trust me, you don’t want to. (Special Edition on DVD, February 10, 2017)

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