Battlefield Earth
Jaw-Droppingly Awful
True-blue sci-fi fans won’t appreciate me mentioning this, but science fiction is primarily written for juvenile tastes.
Now, don’t get your pointy ears in an uproar; it’s true, isn’t it? Most science fiction is not adult literature, it just isn’t. I like Star Trek as much as the next guy, but, like it or not, it is not written on a serious, highbrow, intellectual level. Lots and lots of science fiction is designed for, and marketed to, nine year old boys. The fact that lots of adults read and enjoy science fiction doesn’t automatically make it adult literature, it just means that there are lots of people who never got over being nine years old.
(Having said that, there is nothing wrong with liking science fiction. I like it myself. I mean to cast aspersions on no one, whether author or consumer. I’m only trying to make a point here; please, keep those negative comments to yourselves. Thank you.)
If you’re an adult reviewer, approaching the movie from an educated, sophisticated, mature adult perspective, Battlefield Earth is a putrid mess, no two ways about it. The acting is horrid, enough so that one hopes that John Travolta gets indigestion from all the scenery that he chews. The special effects aren’t up to what twenty-first century audiences expect (the ungrateful little wretches that we are). The story is patently unbelievable and ridiculous. The human characters are wooden and lacking in any interesting qualities. The aliens are scruffy and grungy and walk around on stilts. The dialogue is just wretched; the only high point is hearing Travolta step into his Primary Colors persona and engage in the occasional sophistry; “I said I wouldn’t kill him, I didn’t say that I wouldn’t order someone else to kill him.”
But if you’re a nine-year-old, or if you still have a nine-year-old’s attitude towards sci-fi, Battlefield Earth can be fun.
Battlefield Earth is set in the year 3000, in a time where no one is worried about the Y3K bug. The last of the human race lives in caves in the Rockies and eats rats. The world’s soap and shampoo supplies have been liquidated. Things are grim, but in a picturesque, snowcapped kind of way.
Barry Pepper is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, Our Hero, and he rides out of the caves on his white horse looking for adventure. Since the movie’s not called “Stupid Dork Rides Around on His Horse Until He Gets Lost,” he finds it in the form of the Psychlos, the nine-foot-tall alien overlords of the planet who capture him and stuff him in their metal processing plant.
The Psychlos have their home base in Denver. They’ve put a huge roof over it and added central heating, and what a good idea. (If the Department of Justice ever quits hounding Bill Gates, maybe he’ll put a roof on Seattle, make it fit for human habitation.) Inside the dome, the atmosphere is that of Psychlo, which is poisonous for humans. Humans have to use gas masks inside the dome, Psychlos have to use breathing tubes outside, and there is an awful lot of changing from one atmosphere to another.
The Psychlos are in the gold business, mining it out of the Rockies and shipping it back home via teleporter. (Some of the early action takes place in an a abandoned mall, one wonders if the Psychlos have gotten around to looting the local Zales or not.) John Travolta is the head of the Psychlo security division and wants to get into the gold-smuggling business. Unfortunately, the new vein of gold he’s found is in an area with high uranium levels, and Psychlo air explodes in the presence of radiation. (It just does, OK, accept it, and don’t worry about the physics.)
Battlefield Earth is Travolta’s movie, for reasons chronicled elsewhere. Hollywood vanity pieces like this have a well-earned reputation for badness and awfulness. Battlefield Earth is not as good as Hudson Hawk or George Clooney’s Fail-Safe remake, but it’s slightly better than The Last Action Hero or Brenda Starr or Fair Game. However, when you reach those levels of badness, fine distinctions matter little. Travolta doesn’t help matters one little bit; he’s snide, overbearing, hammy, and makes every mistake that evil overlords make in movies.
Travolta and Pepper have to trust each other, just a little, to work together and mine the gold. Everyone, even the nine-year-olds, can see this coming. It doesn’t happen though, not for a long time, as there’s an awful (in both senses of the word) lot of Psychlo corporate infighting nonsense we have to wade through first, not to mention a lot of defiant posing by Pepper to establish his macho leadership credentials. After a convoluted plot twist involving a lot of arrogant sneering on Travolta’s part and a lot of rat-eating on Pepper’s, Travolta hooks Pepper up to a “learning machine” so that he can learn the Psychlo language and the skills he’ll need to mine the gold. The learning machine works by setting off these tiny firefly sparks that zoom towards Pepper’s eyes, sort of like the little sparks that fly off of Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile.
The learning machine turns Pepper into Goodboy Will Hunting, able to figure out the Psychlo language and the mysteries of the equilateral triangle. It also turns him into a master of stitching up plot holes, of which Battlefield Earth has a sufficiency. Pepper (who also gets an hour in the Denver library to learn human-type stuff like the Declaration of Independence and where all the nuclear bombs are hidden) becomes smart enough to lead an insurgent attack designed to break the roof over Denver and set the human race free from Psychlo domination.
I know, I know, this sounds plenty dumb. Fortunately, it is a tiny bit less dumb than the source material, which I believe had more Scottish warriors. If we’d had bagpipes and kilts and claymores and bad imitation Sean Connery accents — or worse, Ewan McGregor — Battlefield Earth would have been the clear favorite for the worst movie of the decade. But, like I said, this is not a grown-up movie.
You may not want your nine-year-old to see Battlefield Earth; it’s a violent movie, although not a gory one. (One of the main characters has his arm severed at one point, but we see nary a drop of blood.) But if you decide to, they’ll get a kick out of it. There’s crumbling buildings and post-apocalyptic nonsense and gross-out moments and things getting broken and explosions and whatnot. It’s no roller-coaster ride, mind you, but at a certain childish level, all of the action and the scenery is kind of neat.
For me, Battlefield Earth is a qualified success on two levels. As a card-carrying ex-nine year old, I enjoyed the explosions and the infinity of shattering glass (no one gets cut, though) and the inherent goofiness of the story. (That, and the scene where the Harriers hide out in the parking garage.) As a cynical, jaded adult movie critic, I enjoy the process of writing a review that skewers the gaping plot holes and relentlessly bad acting. Anyone who is not in either of these two categories will find Battlefield Earth a jaw-droppingly awful excuse for a movie, one that should be avoided at all costs.