Bad Movie Review: Battlefield Earth (2000)
Starring:
John Travolta
Barry Pepper
Forest Whitaker
Kim Coates
Dir: Roger Christian
Two hours of my life. TWO HOURS THAT I’LL NEVER GET BACK. John Travolta’s adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s epic sci-fi novel could only be bad news.
If you’ve ever seen “Battlefield Earth” then John Travolta owes you an apology. The disco-dancing douchebag spent millions of his own money to make sure that this movie, an adaptation of Scientology-founder L. Ron Hubbard’s novel of the same name, was made.
It didn’t need to be made. There are people who are going without food in this world, but John Travolta had to spend his money ensuring this movie got made. I can’t say that I’ve read the original novel, though I’m sure that if it was badly-written, had one-dimensional characters and made no sense whatsoever, then the movie is a faithful adaptation. The same would also be true if the novel was just 1000 pieces of paper that L. Ron Hubbard had wiped his arse on.
“The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.” – Roger Ebert
The film notoriously overuses Dutch angles. A Dutch angle (for the uninitiated) is basically when the camera is tilted. The horizon becomes a diagonal line. Sam Raimi used it to great effect in the Evil Dead series to show when a character had become possessed. Roger Christian uses it in “Battlefield Earth” to show that a character is talking. Or that a character is riding a horse. Or that there is something on the screen. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, I think there are only 2 shots which aren’t Dutch angles. It left me seasick.
The plot is absolutely incomprehensible. It’s only through reading about the novel that I’ve learned what the heck was going on for those two hours of celluloid trauma.
There are weird two second shots dotted throughout the movie that needn’t be there. “Dramatic” shots of characters stood on mountain-tops. It’s as though the director filmed stuff and felt obliged to use the footage.
In a dystopian future, where humans have forgotten even the basic concept of mathematics, turns of phrase like “the grass is always greener” and “piece of cake” have survived unchanged. You can suspend your disbelief to accept that, but cavemen flying jump jets having been self-taught? This movie has less feasibility than Uri Geller has credibility.
This movie only has one particularly outstanding bad movie moment – something so bad that it’s hilarious. I can’t remember laughing as hard as I did when John Travolta shot the legs off some living cows.
With the film set in alien invader hub Denver, it was only a matter of time before we got to visit neighbouring Aspen – the location of Jim Carrey idiotfeast “Dumb and Dumber” . Is that a deliberate in-joke or a clumsy coincidence?
“Battlefield Earth” is an allegory. The Psychlos ruling Earth are in fact, according to the novel, controlled by the Catrists (short for ‘psychiatrists’. Geddit?). This isn’t revealed in the movie though because “Battlefield Earth” only covers the first half of Hubbard’s long-winded novel. A sequel was planned from the outset, but the film’s critical reception ensured that it remained unmade and that Hubbard’s followers would have to find other ways of planting their philosophies into the mainstream psyche.
It’s ironic that a film which has the intention of showing the “evils” of psychiatry is so, so terrible and disorientating that therapy is required afterwards. What an absolute own-goal.
There are no redeeming features about this bad movie. “Plan 9 From Outer Space” has a charm to it, whereas “Battlefield Earth” is uncomfortable to watch from the outset – you watch it knowing that the movie has an agenda. It’s an awful, awful film. The moviemakers’ incompetence at making films is only beaten by their inability to brainwash.
I think you should copyright the term “disco-dancing douchebag.” Hilarious!
I’ll be happy if it gets into common usage and linguists in 100 years time will trace its first written usage back to this review.
We bailed early on this one. Our bad movie stamina usually surpasses peak human levels, but good golly, this thing was atrocious.
Still, I’d like to know more about it. In other cases, there’s a reason a movie goes bad. “Troll 2″ was a cheap foreign production with bizarre direction. “Gigli” was all bad script and re-writes. But how did “Battlefield Earth” become the monster that it is?
-Your pals at “24 Hours to Midnight: The Blog!”
http://24hourstomidnight.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/unwatchable-battlefield-earth/
Oh, but it makes a great Rifftrax. Try it!