The Sheila Variations

Battlefield Earth bad reviews re-run

Okay, so many of my readers are relatively new to my blog.

For those of you who have already experienced my compilation of "Battlefield Earth" reviews (some of the worst reviews for a film I have ever seen in my life - and when read all together, create a panoply of comedy ... these reviews are comedy GOLD), please feel free to skip. Or who knows, you may need a REALLY good laugh, and re-reading these always gives ME a good laugh! This random compilation was really the first time I got tons of traffic, due to a couple of highly-placed links (I've got friends in high places)...

Anyway, I thought it was a shame that these gems were pining away over in "Blog-spot" purgatory, so I will re-post them here, for your reading enjoyment. I got letters from people like: "I was laughing so hard that my daughter came into the room, thinking I was dying."

Here we go:

Movie reviews of bad films are one of life's greatest pleasures. I don't even have to have seen the film to get a kick out of a one-star review, if the review is wittily written.

I remember a couple of years ago reading the reviews of "Battlefield Earth", and there wasn't one good review to be found, and it was like CANDY. Especially when the reviewer is a good writer and can scathingly pick apart why the film didn't work, why the whole thing was a disaster. So I went and tracked down some of these heinous reviews. Read in cumulative fashion is unexpectedly hilarious.

From Roger Ebert's review:

-- "Battlefield Earth" is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. -- THAT IS THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE REVIEW....

-- This movie is awful in so many different ways. Even the opening titles are cheesy. Sci-fi epics usually begin with a stab at impressive titles, but this one just displays green letters on the screen in a type font that came with my Macintosh.

-- Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can't recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine. Travolta can be charming, funny, touching and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep?

-- The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.

-- Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in "The Fugitive." I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

Review by James Berardinelli

-- 30 minutes into this wreck of a motion picture, with thunder crashing in the sky above, the power went out, mercifully relieving me of my immediate responsibility to endure the rest of the movie.

-- Battlefield Earth makes movies like "Supernova" and "Sphere" seem like models of coherence.

-- [The director] probably has no better idea than I do of why he occasionally tilts the camera or uses slow motion. Maybe he thinks it looks cool.

-- There is no evidence that anyone involved with this project can act.

-- Looking back on this film, I can't find anything nice to say about it. I despised the experience of sitting in the theater while the movie was unspooling. It is an instant front-runner for worst feature of the year, having separated itself from its nearest contender by a wide margin.

Review by David Edelstein:

-- Only alien DNA could account for instincts so paranormally terrible. (HAHA)

-- Here is a picture that will be hailed without controversy as the worst of its kind ever made.

-- This is the kind of bad guy who strokes his beard with long (Lee Press-On?) talons, gloats over the imminent extermination of the human race, then adds, "Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!" Fu Manchu would roll his eyes. Ming the Merciless would politely excuse himself.

-- He zaps Jonnie with a knowledge ray and then, for some reason, lets him read the Declaration of Independence. I'm not sure what happens next because I went out for malted milk balls and then remembered I owed my mom a phone call. When I got back, Jonnie was leading some cavemen on a tour of Fort Knox, various decadent Psychlos were arguing among themselves, and Travolta was going, "Hah-hah-hah-hah!"

-- Visually, "Battlefield Earth" is a bewildering procession of non sequiturs, held together by the most assaultive soundtrack in cinema history. That is not an overstatement. A horse hitting the ground sounds like a bomb going off. A bomb going off sounds like a planet exploding. A planet exploding sounds like—I'm out of hyperbole. People in the audience dig their fingers into their ears and howl in agony—it's a wonder the roof doesn't come down. Is this a Scientology strategy to drive the aliens out of their bodies?

Review from The New York Times:

From the bottom of the review - (this made me laugh out loud, especially considering the last comment above, from Edelstein): -- "Battlefield Earth" includes astonishingly loud violence and intimations of alien sexuality.

-- "Man is an endangered species," announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump "Battlefield Earth." And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Sitting through it is like watching the most expensively mounted high school play of all time.

-- It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but "Battlefield Earth" may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

-- Mr. Travolta throws back his head and delivers a stage laugh that would embarrass the villain from the shoddiest Republic Pictures serial or an episode of "Xena: Warrior Princess."

-- The only professional thing about the movie is the sound: it's so loud you feel as if you're sitting on a runway with jets taking off over your head.

Review from Jam Showbiz:

-- There's a scene in "Battlefield Earth" in which a visiting alien commander scopes a prison facility and says..."This is one of the biggest crap houses I have ever seen". How right he is.

-- At about the one hour mark, a portion of the audience split the scene and I don't blame them. They were fed-up with being taken for complete and utter morons.

-- Battlefield is so stupid it defies explanation.

Review from San Francisco Examiner:

-- A rebellion ensues, as does a relentless supporting performance by flying debris, which, after so many explosions, gave me a headache and invaded the camera frame enough to prevent me from keeping track of which character with hair extensions was running through the underlit production design.

-- A Scientology recruiting film would be more fun, and they're shorter.

-- If filmmaking has ever been less thrilling and more disengaging, I'd like to see it. Subliminal messages would have made it more endurable. The only real amusement the film can hope to stir will be if a rash of American moviegoers actually exits the theater and heads to their local Scientology headquarters. "Yes, I've seen the film, now I'd very much like to achieve the State of Clear, please."

From Ruthless Reviews:

-- We learn that aliens have taken over earth and other planets in order to strip them of precious metals which they teleport back to planet Phsyclo. Seeing the problem with that requires a high school education. See, simply hording metals, jewels or what have you does not really add much to an economy. That's why the Spanish empire fell from prominence. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but given the infinite number of reasons one planet might conquer another, why not pick one that makes sense? Just give the gold some practical use for crying out loud.

-- Travolta behaved like a second year drama student doing Richard III. Over the top to the point that you wanted to slap him. Barry Pepper meanwhile, was so horribly earnest and "Goodboy", that you really wanted to beat his ass, too.

From the Apollo Guide:

-- Never has the future of humanity seemed so dull, as John Travolta confronts Barry Pepper in a sci-fi confrontation that inspires nothing but boredom. The script is dull, acting forgettable, story predictable and derivative. It's also implausible, but at least noticing that breaks the monotony.

Review from Flipside Movie Emporium (I must excerpt from this one extensively ... it's too funny to chop it up):

--After a week of listening to the universal drubbing of "Battlefield Earth", there's a temptation to go against the grain. Everyone has had a chance to tee off on the film, and the unflinchingly bad reviews have said just about all there is to say. Why not make a stand, then, and present the other point of view? Why not defend a friendless production when all the world is intent on pillorying it? Why not be an iconoclast -- just for the sake of debate -- and say, "No, this film really isn't as bad as all that?"

Because then I would be lying.

Battlefield Earth is the most horrendous, dreadful, corrosive, rank, foul, rotten, noxious, wretched, irredeemably BAD movie to come along in decades. This isn't a movie: it's a crime against celluloid. You don't so much watch it as stare at it in gape-jawed disbelief. Somebody made this. Somebody raised money to put this on screen. Somebody sat there and watched this happen without once screaming, "You fools! You mad, mad fools!" For that, and for so many other reasons, it deserves every bit of scorn that we can possibly heap upon it.

One look at John Travolta as the evil Psychlo security chief Terl and you know there's big problems. Sporting dreadlocks as worn by the Amish and brandishing weapons that the cast of Star Trek abandoned as too cheesy, Terl looks less like a conquering alien than Rob Zombie on a bender. When not chewing on the scenery or shooting the legs off cows, he inexplicably provides the human slaves beneath him with everything they need to foil his evil schemes. Mankind is an endangered species, you see, subjugated centuries ago and now worked to death in Psychlo mines or living a tribal existence in the irradiated outlands. Not to worry though: once Terl captures primitive leading man Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), he promptly hooks the savage up to a learning machine in order to assist in a preposterous scheme to steal gold. Apparently there's no off switch, because Jonnie learns everything from the machine, including history, mathematics and how to organize a grassroots guerrilla war. But Terl isn't concerned. Jonnie can't possibly find anyone to help him, right? And even if he could, he doesn't know where any weapons are, right? And even if he did, they'd all be a thousand years old and inoperable, right? And even if they weren't, the Psychlo technology was advanced enough to crush them before, and they've had a thousand years to improve upon it, right? Right?!

Glaring plot holes like these are easy to point out and "Battlefield Earth" is rife with them. The trouble, however, is that a plot hole implies a solvable problem: to wit, "if only they'd address this nagging inconsistency, the film would be better." NOTHING you could do to this train wreck could possibly make it better. Every single element, every single frame, reeks of abject incompetence. The acting is terrible, the special effects are embarrassing, and the sets look like a fourth-grade production of "Logan's Run". The camerawork is shoddy, the costumes beyond ridiculous, and the directing could give Ed Wood a run for his money. No script tightening or casting change could dent this abomination, no talented individual could find a silver lining. It's like a perfectly woven asbestos blanket, smothering all hope beneath it. The only thing to do is destroy it and try to build something beautiful in the ashes.

I suppose "Battlefield Earth" can be useful as a cautionary example or as a strange testament to Travolta's progress as a star. Ten years ago, he made films like this because he had to; now he makes them because he can. The film was based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, and you would assume that scientologists like Travolta would have a vested interest in turning out a good adaptation. Guess not. It's tough vilifying "Battlefield Earth" because, as I said, everybody and their grandmother is doing it. But no film in recent years deserves it more and few films fail so exquisitely as it does. The louder we condemn it, the better the chance that it will never happen again.

Posted by sheila