Battlefield Earth: David Shea’s review
Prepare for battle
Rated PG-13 for intense sci-fi action.
Rated A-III by the USCCB (link)
Given a final score of 62 with an influence density of 1.16 by CAPAlert (link)
Staring that guy from Grease, that religious dude in Saving Private Ryan, and the black guy in Bloodsport (the guy chasing Van Damme, not the other one).
Viewed 2005-05-05 by dshea, dcantrell, mike, and susi.
Battlefield Earth feels like a high-budget film produced by a high school drama class. It has big characters, big, important ideas, big acting and big screen wipes at the end of every single scene. Seriously, it’s like they put the film together using the video editor in a library. The plot is horrible, and the only reason this forgotten dime-store science fiction novel was ever made into a movie is because the author founded a financially successful religion. I don’t really care about whatever Scientologist undertones may or may not exist in this movie—one of the great things about this country is that everyone is free to believe any damn fool thing they want—but the story is really just dumb.
I’ve never read anything by L. Ron Hubbard, but I suspect that his writing is a lot like that of Kilgore Trout, the writer of pulp science fiction in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Large aliens with inconsistent, vaguely British accents have taken over Earth on behalf of the big evil alien corporation, enslaved the remnants of humanity, and are in the process of mining Earth for its gold. The symbolism in the movie hits you like a punch to the gut all the way up to the heart-stirring climax where the humans prevail through the use of mathematics, the founding ideals of America, and a bunch of Army equipment that somehow still works after 1000 years and that they were able to learn to use in about a week. I’m not sure if the aliens’ dreadlocks were meant to be symbolic, but it’s a lot more funny if you think that they are. The oddly crooked camera angles may have meant something, too, but I couldn’t figure out what. Ultimately, though, it’s the scene wipes that drive the movie. Fade out sound, still frame, wipe from center into moving scene. Every single time.