Battlefield Earth
I highly recommend this film. Not in the same way as I do for stunning individual films, nor for the works of directors whom I unconditionally admire, nor even for technically astounding films. I can’t even say I’m recommending this film on its entertainment basis alone. At least, it’s not entertaining in the way it had ever intended to be. You see, Battlefield Earth is simply one of the worst films ever made. It was poorly conceived, written, produced, directed, acted, edited, scored, costumed and possibly even catered. It’s a total mess from start to finish, like a hideous car crash. But just like a hideous car crash you can’t help but stare in open-mouthed amazement. Unlike a hideous car crash you’ll probably be laughing intensely while you gawp, unless you’re a truly strange and perverse individual.
Battlefield Earth is one of those special and exceedingly rare Bad Films, and I unhesitatingly invoke the name of the patron saint of Bad Films in this respect, Edward D. Wood Jr. would have been proud of creating a movie like this, at least it had a massive budget and decent special effects. But like the seminal Plan 9 From Outer Space everything else about it is inept, ham-fisted and yet strangely alluring. The twin responses of annoyance and cruel laughter jostle for position, and in my case laughter won out most of the time.
The story comes from the massive novel of the same name written by L. Ron Hubbard, Golden Age pulp science fiction author and co-founder of yet another money and power scheme wrapped up as a religion, the Church of Scientology. In the year 3000 humans are eking out an existence in the wilds, at least those who haven’t been enslaved by the evil Psychlos (Hubbard’s allegory for the forces of modern psychology) and forced into mining out our planet’s resources before the evil Psychlos destroy Earth out of hand as a useless chunk of rock populated by an inferior species. Our heroic Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) leaves the relative safety of his village, against the advice of the superstitious tribal elders and ends up captured by the evil Psychlos and taken to the ruins of Denver, now surrounded by a massive structure which keeps out all that good clean rugged mountain air. The evil Psychlos’ home planet of Psychlo doesn’t have an oxygen atmosphere but rather something which is never identified in the movie, but it is doubtless evil. The rebellious Jonnie quickly draws the attention of evil Psychlo Terl, played with scenery chewing bravado by John Travolta, and ends up being given a crash course in the evil Psychlo language and history so he can lead a mining expedition into dangerous territory and acquire gold for the greedy (and positively evil) Terl.
But wait, there’s less! After an epiphany in the ruins of a library, involving that tired old scrap of paper, the American Declaration of Independence, Jonnie and his friends have their hearts and minds set on rebellion, and that’s just what they stage in the heroic and thrilling final scenes. Did I say heroic and thrilling final scenes? Sorry, must have been thinking of a different movie. One which wasn’t quite so inane and stupid. Now I’ve given you a brief synopsis, we can leave behind the conceit of this film having a story and get down to what really matters. The laughter.
Laughter is important in this film, evil Psychlos do it all the time, especially Terl when he reveals yet another cruel twist to his incessant scheming. With head thrown back he lets out his madman-plotting-to-take-over-the-world kind of laugh and the audience expects to see James Bond in the background, about to escape from the ingenious death ray and save the world. Or maybe they just wish they were at home watching a Bond film.
Where to start with this film’s glaring faults, inconsistencies and all-round stupidity? Let’s start with the book, which I’ve never read. Despite the praise of Isaac Asimov I’ve never been able to bring myself to read a Hubbard book, but then again I’m not so big on Golden Age SF anyway. From what I’ve heard he’s a fairly poor writer, churning out simplistic plots peopled with generic characters (reminds me of Stephen King) so it’s not like there’s much good material to begin with. The book is in fact massive, and I vividly remember seeing copies in the 80s bearing the legend “Soon to be two major films!” on the cover. So it’s obvious that much would have to have been trimmed, which could go some way to explaining why the result is so gloriously shallow. I’m led to believe the film is actually the first half of the book, with the second film projected to start as soon as the profits from this one started piling up. They needn’t have waited.
Basically the script sucks. Big time! Dialogue is hackneyed and cliché-ridden at best. The acting is on par with the script, sometimes struggling to keep up the quality. John Travolta is primarily responsible as the evil Terl. I don’t much care for Travolta, particularly when he thinks his overblown delivery is going to be taken seriously. His scenery chewing here is as bad as in Face/Off, which makes me think that only Nicholas Cage and his furrowed brow could have made this film any worse in the acting stakes. While Travolta isn’t alone in the poor acting stable, he must shoulder much of the blame for this film. As one of the most prominent Scientologists in Hollyweird, he pushed for years to have this film made, apparently against much studio reluctance. A script like this probably wouldn’t even have been accepted by the guys who picked up Gladiator.
What’s wrong with the directing you ask? Pretty much what’s wrong with everything else; total lack of talent or inspiration. Director Roger Christian hasn’t done anything of note before Battlefield Earth, and probably won’t do anything much now. His previous efforts look like straight to video stuff, if they even got to Australia. He was a set decorator on Star Wars (start blaming him for all the stuff you didn’t like!) and second unit director on The Phantom Menace. That should be enough of a warning to everyone about how he’s going to approach the action scenes. At least George Luca$ managed to instill his finales with a sense of fun and exhilaration, Christian doesn’t even get to the level of a good video game.
Perhaps realising he had a little less than nothing to work with, Christian tries to divert us with his (ahem) unique way of presenting this little piece of dross. Huge chunks of the movie are shot on an angle, leaning left or right with no apparent sense. If you find this annoying to begin with just realise; the whole movie will be like that! It’s truly bizarre, as if Christian has decided he’s an auteur with an individualistic style he’s showing off for the world’s delight. Peckinpah with camera speeds, Stone with film stock, Scorsese with tracking shots, Christian with an unbalanced camera? And if that’s not enough there is a terribly amateur wipe used throughout the movie. It goes from the centre out, and this is a 2.35:1 movie so there’s a long way to go. It’s the only kind of wipe used for a whole two hours! Trust me, it’s annoying. Couple this with the simplistic title cards telling us where the current scene is and you’ll find yourself wondering if the film wasn’t put together on a cheap late 80s home video editing deck. And were they even paying attention? I’m not at all sure, going by the nose plugs. See, in evil Psychlo atmosphere humans wear nose plugs to breathe (and unhygienically share them in moments of atmospheric distress) and in good clean rugged human atmosphere evil Psychlos wear the plugs. During the film there appear to be a number of unexplained, indeed inexplicable, changes of just who is wearing the plug. Problem is some of them seem to be in the evil Psychlo compound where the atmosphere is meant to be theirs. Perhaps it’s a product of a shoddy editing process, or just not quite letting us now what atmosphere we’re meant to be imagining, or perhaps I’m imagining it all. Seems like the kind of shoddiness this film deserves. If you can drag yourself away from the complex and compelling script and pay attention to the nose plug situation you might notice something seeming amiss. Then again you might not.
If this film is anything to go by I can’t wait until the year 3000, it’s all going to be so convenient. So what if our planet was taken over by evil Psychlos and we could only put up nine minutes of resistance (‘we’ probably means the Americans in this case) it’s worth it for all the cool things that will just happen when we need them to. Despite only being taught the evil Psychlo language the heroic Jonnie manages to be able to read English. Or at least enough to read the Declaration of Independence. And I’d have thought humans reduced to superstitious tribal living would have been illiterate. And when he leads a band of courageous warriors to an abandoned military base it’s wonderful to see that electricity manages to make an appearance outside of the evil Psychlo compound. Yes, in the post apocalyptic wasteland not only will we be literate but flight simulators will work when we need them to. And we’ll have the ability to learn to fly Harriers in only a week, when just yesterday we were musing over the issue of the wheel. Nuclear warheads will be shiny and new looking, despite (so I’m led to believe) one of the elements needed in the trigger having the property of decaying after a few years. As for those Harriers themselves, well, the Americans had better thank the British for developing them with such amazing powers. Not only can you learn to fly them in a week, but they also have great fuel efficiency. You can hover in them for a few minutes, fight the evil Psychlos in a night battle and then fly off in formation at sunrise. And aren’t those evil Psychlos considerate? They mark boxes of explosives (looking suspiciously like common dynamite) and drums of fuel as EXPLOSIVE and FUEL respectively. It sounds like a pretty damn convenient future to me.
In a nutshell (big nutshell) that’s the kind of ham fisted, inept film we’re talking about here. If a moment of drama is called for, it goes to slo-mo and pumps up the music. If a moment of evil is called for, Terl laughs heartily. If a good film is called for the audience goes to the video store instead. Sounds like all too many films of the last decade, many of them huge popular successes, but this one is somewhat different. Apart from being a total box-office disaster while similarly stupid films just about print the money, there’s something endearingly fun about Battlefield Earth. Roger Christian’s direction and editing are poor at best, but you get the feeling he’s really trying hard to make himself obvious to you. It’s not like the plodding, by the numbers approach many other directors take when making a big budget film where risks are frowned upon. Just because it sucks is no reason to condemn the man is it? Sure, but coupled the outrageous performance of John Travolta, which is so much like many others he’s done it should finally call into question his acting abilities, and the tragic script something different emerges. It emerges in bad costuming, with the evil Psychlos wearing big heavy boots to make them look tall (they just look like they’re truckin’ on down to me), to the strains of music lifted almost wholesale from a number of other films. It borders on the surreal, and if you take it in the right spirit it is actually quite funny. Not that it means to be.
I foresee a great future for Battlefield Earth. Copies of it will proudly sit on the shelves of schlock connoisseurs the world over, nestled snugly between Robot Monster and the collected works of Ed Wood. It will become a party movie, where drunken slackers will laugh at the slo-mo shootout that’s as bad as The Matrix, yell out Terl’s lines, and cheer when the planet explodes at the end. I won’t spoil it for you, you’ll have to see it yourself to discover which evil planet gets blown up. Drinking games will evolve where a drink must be had each time one of those horrible wipes disgraces the screen. Alcohol poisoning ahoy! Chiropractors will do a booming trade in repairing the necks of those who dared to try and keep the image level throughout the entire film. And in twenty years academic papers will be written by a new generation of Bad Film lovers debating whether or not Roger Christian was a misunderstood genius like Ed Wood. For now I’m chuckling at the memories of so many things done so poorly in one film. I feel privileged to have seen it all fail gloriously before my very eyes. I haven’t had such an amusing night at the movies in a very long time, even with (I should say especially with) the current batch of comedies. Battlefield Earth is a masterpiece of ineptitude the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time.
Craig Andrews
