I have seen plenty of bad films in my time, but I usually understand the reasons behind their being made. For example, "Saturday Night Live" rip-offs with actors like Rob Schnider, Adam Sandler, Norm MacDonald, etc. are cheaply produced and do not face much difficulty making back their cost at the box office. The countless plot-free action movies that pop-up every summer manage to pull in cash thanks to their good-looking actors and stylish visual effects. But "Battlefield Earth" baffles me. This is not simply a movie that fails in the acting and writing departments. It is also a failure technically, showing a total lack of skill in everyone involved.
For those of you who decided not to sit through L. Ron Hubbard's 1,000+ page novel, the "plot" (heh) involves Johnnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), a young human who single-handedly rises up against a race of aliens that have dominated Earth for a thousand years and have almost entirely erased mankind in hopes of mining for gold. He is captured, learns of the true nature of the aliens' plans from their leader Terl (John Travolta), organizes a revolt, and so on. It's a good thing that the writers gave our hero the name "Goodboy," because it's about as far as they seemed willing to go with character depth.
The acting ranges from laughable to downright pathetic. Whenever something bad happens to Johnnie, Pepper is given the chance to look into the camera and shout "NOOOOO!" to express the emotional damage inflicted on his character. Distinguished actors such as Forest Whitaker and Michael Byrne are sadistically embarrassed in supporting roles. And John Travolta... sheesh. It looks like he didn't even bother to read over the script. He says his lines as if he were Snidely Whiplash with laryngitis, and can't even get the mandatory evil laugh ("HOO HOO HOO HA HA HA!") right.
As I said earlier, technical problems also abound. About twelve-too-many slow-motion shots are used during the fight/chase scenes, and they are handled with such clumsiness that it looks as if someone were using stop-motion movement instead. Most of the visual effects look like something you would see on a cheap cable TV series. The lighting in the underground scenes is so dark that I had a hard time figuring out whose face I was looking at. Even the camera angles are bad- every scene has tilted shots that appear to have been filmed by the cameraman from the old "Batman" TV show. Director Roger Christian should have stuck to designing sets for a living (yes, he won an Oscar for his work on the original "Star Wars"), because he can't even set up a shot properly.
"Battlefield Earth" looks and feels like one of those direct-to-video sci-fi movies that show on HBO at 3:00 in the morning, yet the budget was big enough to feed a small country. A critical and commercial bomb, this movie deserved every ounce of bad press it got and will be stuck somewhere between "Glen or Glenda?" and "Inchon" on the list of the worst movies of all time.
For those of you who decided not to sit through L. Ron Hubbard's 1,000+ page novel, the "plot" (heh) involves Johnnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), a young human who single-handedly rises up against a race of aliens that have dominated Earth for a thousand years and have almost entirely erased mankind in hopes of mining for gold. He is captured, learns of the true nature of the aliens' plans from their leader Terl (John Travolta), organizes a revolt, and so on. It's a good thing that the writers gave our hero the name "Goodboy," because it's about as far as they seemed willing to go with character depth.
The acting ranges from laughable to downright pathetic. Whenever something bad happens to Johnnie, Pepper is given the chance to look into the camera and shout "NOOOOO!" to express the emotional damage inflicted on his character. Distinguished actors such as Forest Whitaker and Michael Byrne are sadistically embarrassed in supporting roles. And John Travolta... sheesh. It looks like he didn't even bother to read over the script. He says his lines as if he were Snidely Whiplash with laryngitis, and can't even get the mandatory evil laugh ("HOO HOO HOO HA HA HA!") right.
As I said earlier, technical problems also abound. About twelve-too-many slow-motion shots are used during the fight/chase scenes, and they are handled with such clumsiness that it looks as if someone were using stop-motion movement instead. Most of the visual effects look like something you would see on a cheap cable TV series. The lighting in the underground scenes is so dark that I had a hard time figuring out whose face I was looking at. Even the camera angles are bad- every scene has tilted shots that appear to have been filmed by the cameraman from the old "Batman" TV show. Director Roger Christian should have stuck to designing sets for a living (yes, he won an Oscar for his work on the original "Star Wars"), because he can't even set up a shot properly.
"Battlefield Earth" looks and feels like one of those direct-to-video sci-fi movies that show on HBO at 3:00 in the morning, yet the budget was big enough to feed a small country. A critical and commercial bomb, this movie deserved every ounce of bad press it got and will be stuck somewhere between "Glen or Glenda?" and "Inchon" on the list of the worst movies of all time.