A carnival of technology

First off, you should know that I own this movie on DVD. When I saw it in the theater I found it relatively entertaining, which just goes to show you how WRONG first impressions can be. I laughed myself silly this time around. I had completely forgotten about the star wipes (btw, doesn’t Lucas have a patent on those things?) It’s unecessarily long, and it’s the kind of length you feel deep down in the pit of your stomach…that queasy, uncomfortable feeling one gets when you watch a movie you know people spent millions of dollars to make and then probably drank themselves to death after it bombed.

At least shit blows up. That gives the movie an automatic 2 points, especially since these are expensive explosions. Unfortunately, the addition of a bloated John Travolta automatically deducts 5 points from ANY movie, so my final verdict is a -3/10.

Five thoughts that came to mind while watching this movie:

• What’s going on?
• What year is it supposed to be?
• ACTING!
• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has more gold than Fort Knox.
• “And then star wipe to…”

This movie blew. The plot sucked. The acting sucked. And that wipe. Every scene transition used that damn dissolve wipe. It was like watching Unsolved Mysteries without Robert Stack’s narration. Oh, and without a freaking plot.

I give this movie 2/10 because it had that crazy guy from Waterworld that wanted resin and because the boots the aliens wore looked like something out of Final Fantasy <pick your favorite number>.

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.