Battlefield Earth

    Love it or hate it, Battlefield Earth is the much-ballyhooed movie adaptation of the book of the same name. And either way, where there is ballyhoo... I go.

    Let's get the ratings out of the way first, shall we?
    Gore: 6
    Schmaltz: 8
    Character Development: Niceness -999
    Sturgeon Principle: Falls in the lower 20th percentile.

    I will find the man who made this film... and then I shall give to him DEATH!
    Well how's that for an unbiased review? There is so much wrong with this film that I'm not sure where to begin. Or where to end. So let's hit...

Ten Things I Hate About You, Battlefield Earth

   10) Humans as ape men. Now let's get one thing straight; I like good imagery as much as the next man. Making the humans of the year 3000 out to be savage beasts with more in common with primates than modern people is a rather interesting prospect. The humans in this film 'ook' and leap up on their cages to shake the bars and fight for dominance and fling their fe--well maybe they don't map *exactly*, but the thought is there. However, BfE utterly fails to do anything with this at all beyond note it. "This room may look like all the others, but in fact it's not. This room has--oh wait, we took that out. It is exactly like all the others.
    9) Batman-Vision(BAT-TM). This entire film was shot in Batman-Vision(BAT-TM). What, gentle reader, is that? What is Batman-Vision(BAT-TM)? Why have I named it now thrice without explaining what Batman-Vision(BAT-TM) is? (four times now!) Batman-Vision(BAT-TM) hearken back to the days of the campy TV version of Batman. In that show, when the villains were on-screen the camera would be tilted to show how twisted and 'out of phase with reality' the criminals really were. It was effective there because the technique was used sparingly and for camp value.     Nearly the whole of BFE seems to have been shot in Batman-Vision(BAT-TM). I was expecting the laser guns to cause a little textual 'Ber-ZAP!' to spin out onto the screen.
    8) Most Totally Annoying Director In The World. There seems to have been an edict in the BFE camp. Someone, I'm guessing the Best Boy, actually directed this film and the named director spent a six-week drinking binge to celebrate the passing away of his name's credibility. Apparently, someone's direction style is 'take the annoyance to the MAX!'. Why have an elderly man simply point to Ancient Cave Paintings(patent-pending) when he could whirl around and then jab his torch at them? Why show a scene once when you could show it three times in slow motion? Why show a majestic scene when you could simply play grating music and entirely undercut it? Why? Why? WHY?
    7) Let's all play Quake 2! The Psychlos got sent to the Imperial Voice Training Academy of Stroggos. The sound effects in this movie all seem to be borrowed from the later levels of Q2. And sometimes the movie runs as slowly as Q2 on my Pentium 60...
    6) SLLOOOOOOWWWWWWWW... MOOOOOOO.... The philosophy of this film is apparently that any scene which involves DRAMA should be prolonged to whatever extent possible, likely because you won't be seein' much more o'this later. It's as if everyone was outfitted with Jack Deth's Long Second watch and sent into the fray.
    5) One Night In Bankok. The human mind must be capable of ancestral memory, because Our Hero's is able to absorb the darndest things. He gets strapped into a Psychlo (alien nasty being) Teaching Machine, so that he can learn the Psychlo language. Remember this. The Psychlo language. The... Psychlo language. He then attempts to teach his fellow savage humans about mathematics... using English terms. And concepts. And worse, he refers to it as Euclidean math. No. No no no. He should be calling it SLKJLKJSDF-math, or something else equally Strog--Psychlo.
    Further, Our Hero is taken to a local library to break his will -- and allowed to read whatever he wants. Where did he pick up reading skills? The savage humans we see didn't seem to have a written language. The Psychlos can't speak or read human. Where did he pick up the ability to browse the stacks? More to the point, how does he pick up the vast array of skills that we later see him employ just by searching randomly through fallen books? The Dewey Decimal system doesn't seem to work when the stacks are disorganized and more to the point, how does he learn so much about the fallen world without accidentally picking up dross with his gold? He should have spent ages trying to figure out what the fsck "Leaves of Grass" was before moving on to maybe reading something useful. Maybe.
    4) Top Gun! We humans Rock! Did you know that we really don't need Top Gun school to learn how to engage in precision fighter combat? All we need is a week in a flight simulator and the drive to survive!
    Oh, and er... guys? If you find decades-to-centuries-old jet-fighters and feel like using them in your war, think again. The fuel is going to kind of have evaporated...
    3) The Incredibly Mixed-Up Psychlos Who Stopped Living And Became Corpses. The stupidity of the aliens in this film is incredible. If you're constantly being bit on the finger by something you consider to be unintelligent and it continues to innovate new ways to bite your finger, do you a) shoot the little bastard or b) smear BBQ sauce onto your finger and then shove it back into the thing's face? Psychlos reading this, your answer is b).
    2) Oh what fools we humans be... Look guys. If you know that a bad-guy species' atmosphere will go Splode if you introduce radiation into it, do you a) risk an all-out jet-fighter attack on the people who shot down your military in nine minutes or do you b) carry one of the Nukes that you've 'borrowed' into the alien dome that is FILLED with the stuff and and set it off at the risk of one man?
    Gods, Humans and Psychlos were just made for each other.
    And... at number one...     1) Years from now, someone is going to look back on this film with nostalgia! Ooooh, the thought of it absolutely burns my biscuits.

    Was there anything redeeming about this film? Of course there was. There was the nucleus of a damn good movie under this piece of dross. Unfortunately, what we round up with falls under the concept of... DEEEP HUUURTING!

I give this film two lead bars. Now shove it into the lake. Gotta love negative buoyancy.

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