Battlefield Earth

It's a sad story, really. World-famous megasuperstar actor becomes smitten with a best-selling science-fiction novel during his down and out days. Said world-famous megasuperstar actor acquires the rights to film this novel and toils for years at his craft, continuing to develop the project even as he struggles to gain the leverage in Hollywood to get this movie made. Finally, he has the leverage, and he has the script--but he also only has a scant budget to produce what is essentially a summer blockbuster.

So he scrapes together a crew of gifted, intense talents, all of whom throw themselves full tilt into the production. These people bust their asses for this movie, and for the megasuperstar. Essentially, they buy into his dream: to see this best-selling sci-fi novel hit the screen with as much passion and integrity as possible. They toil, they slave, they spend months in Montreal, Canada's armpit. The movie becomes more than just your average production--it must have been more like a crusade. Everyone involved with the film invokes the unholy fire of the cast and crew's unity in interviews, tossing about such rarely-heard buzzwords as "masterpiece" and "Star Wars."

There's no happy ending to this story. In spite of the cast and crew's passionate dedication to the project, Battlefield Earth is a bad film. And despite his own best intentions, John Travolta is awful in it. All of the rumored $50 million budget is on the screen, and sometimes even the production's raw energy seeps onto the screen too, somewhere just behind the action--you can really feel the good intentions beaming forth in every shot. But those are the things that pave the road to Hell, which might very well lead you straight to a multiplex showing only Battlefield Earth.

Okay, so it's not that bad, but it's pretty awful. The story is a muddled adaptation of the book--one thousand years into Earth's future, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) leaves his small clan of human survivors to find a better way of life, and runs headlong into Terl (Travolta), the conniving chief of security for the Psychlos, an alien race who conquered the planet in just under ten minutes and obliterated most of humanity. Terl has been trapped on Earth and is scheming to use humans as slaves to mine gold, which he'll then send back to Psychlo--though why he'd do that when he potentially may be stuck working on Earth for many years to come, we'll never know.

At least in the book, Terl's explained as having one more ten-year tour of duty to serve, and it's understood that he'll return to Psychlo and make good use of his gold. In the movie, no such explanation is offered. That's just one example of the convoluted adaptation by screenwriter Corey Mandel--though L. Ron Hubbard's novel works well as a vibrant action-adventure with some interesting characterizations, the film is largely confusing and lacks any compelling characteristics. The plot is uninteresting, the characters are threadbare at best. Even the cardinal rule of any good sci-fi actioner--that above all, you HAVE to explain precisely how the good guys will defeat the bad guys in the big climax--is flagrantly disregarded. All this stuff happens in the film's extended ending and half of it is inexplicable, some truly false drama. The other half is just boring, because with no interesting characters, who really gives a shit, anyway?

That's the biggest problem with Battlefield Earth: it's drop-dead boring. Occasionally, there are moments of campy awfulness, most of them stemming from Travolta's performance. He plays Terl like a high school kid might play Falstaff in Henry IV; it's way over the top and silly. But when you're not laughing at Travolta unintentionally hamming it up, you're bored stiff. That's a shame, because it's clear that everyone tried really hard and wanted to make a really good sci-fi movie from a really good sci-fi book. Sadly, they failed with Battlefield Earth. Better luck next time, I guess.