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The Battlefield Earth Contest
Nothing positive about Battlefield Earth comes to mind. Critics and moviegoers have exhausted entire vocabularies of expletives and adjectives trashing this shipwreck of a movie, not only the worst movie of the 21st century but perhaps of the 20th as well.
Battlefield Earth makes Ishtar and Waterworld look like Citizen Kane. There are plenty of bad movies, but a major studio release without a single redeeming quality is a rarity, historically significant in its own right.
You've all heard by now how horrible this film is, so here's a chance to go against the mob -- always a worthwhile quest -- and challenge conventional wisdom. The greatest opportunity this film offers is to find something good about it.
Is there anything praiseworthy about Battlefield Earth? I confess, having seen it twice, the only thing I can come up with are the pretty good special effects involving in blowing up an alien planet. Otherwise, it's a case study in awful writing, unspeakable direction, grotesque cinematography, horrific acting, and ugly, clunky design.
Those with little disposable income should just skip it. Video rentals will be very cheap. But for film-lovers who might appreciate the opportunity to ponder just how bad a movie can be, it's actually worth a trip. You will leave the theater with lots to talk about, I promise, and a pleasant feeling of superiority.
The story, briefly: It's 3000, and the "man-animals" have been nearly obliterated by a greedy, ill-tempered group of aliens called Psychlos -- kind of like Klingons with dreadlocks, only deeply into making money. Talk about mixing cultural metaphors. They are led by Terl (played by the hapless John Travolta, who now faces yet another comeback struggle) who, even though his race has mastered enough technology to conquer the universe, is obsessed with amassing gold. A studly man-animal named Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (played with truly numbing woodenness by Barry Pepper) decides to leave his desolate home high in the Rocky Mountains (they wear prehistoric, Flintstones-style clothes, but also have time to do dreadlocks) to take on the Psychlos, headquartered in a vast glass dome built on the ruins of Denver. This, of course, after some inspirational wandering through the ruins of the U.S. Capitol and the National Archives. "We used to be a great people," declares Tyler to his buddies, who pound their chests at odd times and sporadically emit Tarzanian war cries.
The movie features your more-or-less standard sci-fi plot, based on L. Ron Hubbard's best-selling novel. But you can't blame Scientology for this mess. This is a Hollywood disaster. The future sucks, technology has betrayed us yet again, some species of alien/machine has taken over the earth, a few noble souls try to fight back. (Boy, did The Matrix do it better.)
I can't add anything original to the richly-deserved avalanche of abuse this movie has generated.
So herewith a Battlefield Earth contest: we'll be happy to give one copy of O'Reilly's newly-published The Whole Internet: The Next Generation, a new edition of one of the first and best user's guide to the Net, to the first person who sincerely and convincingly offers something good about this movie.
The O'Reilly book is, in fact, a lot more worthwhile. It's good to read, to give to friends and family members, or to keep as a security device to whack intruders on the head. Your own tirades about Battlefield Earth are, of course, also welcome.
If it's so bad, why in the world did you see it twice?
Tort
Battlefield Earth would be just about the perfect movie to riff if there is ever to be another Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie.
Yet Another Web Site
The guys at pointless waste of time called "Battlefield Earth" the best film ever. Check out their review.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
Wait... Jon Katz saw "Battlefield Earth" twice ?
And he's offering a 'small, but useful prize' for anyone who can scrape up something positive to say about it?
Oh God! It's all so clear(tm) now! He's a Scientologist!
Power up them Tesla coils, geeks. Maybe we can overload his e-meter!
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
I went to this movie on a date with this chick named Kelly. We were actually double-dating with my buddy and his girlfriend who were going to go see a show at a theater complex a couple of miles away. It was one of those chick-flick luvvy-duvvy shitfests that his girlfriend made him go see. I will not see movies like that, period. I was a bit curious about Battlefield Earth, though .. I liked John Travolta in many of his recent movies and I thought "What the hell?" I called up Kelly and asked her if she wanted to go (we had been out once before) and she said sure. My buddy and his GF dropped us off at the theater and went to their flick. They would be back later to pick us up.
.. my buddy was suffering through some pansy-ass chick flick that wouldn't be over for over an hour! This left us with the problem of what to do for that hour. We didn't want to just sit around and do nothing. The sky was overcast and as I recall it was even drizzling a little bit.
.. you know, the kind of place that has hourly rates. Slyly, I asked Kelly "You ever wonder what it would be like inside one of those motels with hourly rates?" I didn't know how she'd take it, dude .. like I said, it was only our second date. Well, imagine my happiness when she got this little smile and said "Well, now seems like it would be a good time to find out." What followed was an hour of the most unimaginably raunchy, sweaty, athletic, mind-blowing sex I've ever had. We even had time for a quick shower (though I won't describe the state the bathroom was in .. yeesh!) By the time we were heading out the door, my buddy was just pulling up to the opposite curb.
Well, turns out the movie sucked so bad that we were ready to leave about halfway through. The only problem was that we didn't have a ride
Across the street from the theater was one of those fleabag motels
So the bottom line is, Battlefield Earth was responsible for a very interesting afternoon. So I would like to thank you, Elron Hubbard! Thank you from the bottom of my heart! You might be a freak, Elron, and your Scientology cult might be a complete sham, but at least your piece-of-crap movie got me laid real good and proper-like!
Thank you, Elron! Thank you!
1) It didn't *totally* disregard *all* of the things that made the book so damn good. I think they kept some of the names the same.
2) It wasn't longer.
3) It proved that John Travolta can, in fact, be made uglier through use of extensive makeup.
4) Parents can say, "Don't misbehave, Johnny, or I'll get you casted in the sequel!" to discipline children.
5) It TOTALLY disregards the second half of the book, and who wants to watch the part without totally improbable odds of beating an alien race thousands of times more advanced than our own anyway?
6) It's giving Britney Spears and Bill Gates some needed competition in the "Worst Thing Ever To Happen, Ever" category.
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Watching Battlefield Earth didn't give me cancer, and from the lack of discussion about it on the news, I assume that it has not given anyone cancer. Cancer is a bad disease and I applaud the producers of Battlefield Earth and their decided no-cancer policy towards the viewers of the film. Also, the videogames at the theater were pretty cool and the nachos weren't half bad.
Warning; plenty of spoilers in this summary- if you care, heh.
1. Paper and other wood products can survive a thousand years and still be readable.
2.It only takes seven days to become proficient at flying Harrier jets by flying a simulator. Also, the simulator teaches dogfighting.
3. Harrier Flight Simulators have their own internal source of power that lasts longer than a thousand years.
4. Alien races obsessed with gold will overlook our nation's biggest collection of it when they invade. (And probably the rest of the world too)
5. Aliens powerful enough to conquer the universe will be unable to tell the difference between dogs and people.
6. Harrier jets can not only hover and zip around like helicopters, they have some sort of stealth mode too.
7. The sole purpose of women is to be captured and used as a bargining chip by the alien overlords. The Lesson: don't get attached to anyone if you're going to take them on.
8. Radiation from uranium deep underground causes their gas to react badly, but a nuclear bomb doesn't cause the gas to react until detonated in a clever climax scene, giving the martyr a chance to wipe some tears from his eyes and do other crappy dramatic things.
9. Alien women have extremely long and sexy tongues. Yowza!
10. John Travolta looks stupid in giant clogs.
11. People in the future are more convincing cavemen than the people in Flintstones Las Vegas.
12. UGH UGHH UGHHH! UGHHHHHH! (Translation: Me speak good english sometimes, use animal grunts when theatrically useful).
13. It doesn't take a creativity or talent to make a box-office success in Hollywood. It takes marketing, and lots of it.
I could go on and on and on. This was the most horrible movie I have ever seen, plot hole wise. As a friend said, this movie had plot holes that you could learn to fly a harrier jet in under seven days through!
-JeremyT
http://tughouse.tuginternet.com
Shameless TUGHouse Plug
It got Jon Katz of the street twice.
:)
Hey, you asked
Finkployd
The lighting was genius and very cutting edge. It made use of clever monochromatic and multichromatic effects to impart a surreal and usually appropriate mood to any given scene. The Grim and dank purple of th alien homeworld, the stark and gray of the alien work camps, the eerie, alien tones in the skyscraper scene all were used to good effect.
Unfortunately, the lighting director's wonderful work is easily lost by the incompetent camera operators (how many out-of focus scenes can -you- find?) Poor cinematography, third rate makeup and special effects, and a grating, distracting and incongruous soundtrack. Bad, bad, bad directing means that the only redeeming value of the movie was lost utterly in an avalanch of suck.
SoupIsGood Food
I was impressed by one part of the "horrifying" cinematography.
:). It's harder to trick the human eye in areas it's intimately familiar with. Human forms and faces still aren't convincing when done straight up with CGI. So it's still a challenge.
/not once/ - in this entire trash-heap of a movie, plot holes oozing all over the place, did I ever have a moment where I looked at the 10 foot tall beasties and the 6 foot tall oo-mans and think "this looks contrived". I realised afterwards that the one thing I was convinced about was that John Travolta really /was/ 10 feet tall (talk about being larger than life!) and looked perfectly natural in those big ol' clown shoes of his.
In today's age of computer graphics, some really amazing special effect lineups are possible. Everything from massive heart-pounding battle scenes to heart-renching impossible vistas. BE worked towards this, not really leading the way, but still doing a respectable job.
The one thing I was impressed by, though, at the end of the movie was their achievement tackling a problem still difficult because of its very plausableness (sp?
What was it?
The size difference between the Psychlos and the humans. Not once -
The director and technical staff achieved this through a pretty elegant set of means, not the least of which was very clever camera work. They achieved this one goal masterfully.
There you go. Top that.
--Tiger
Battlefield Earth can, without any reservations whatsoever, be called a motion picture. Everyone involved, from the screenwriter to the technical crews and actors, set out to make a motion picture, and that's exactly what they did. Here are just a few things they accomplished:
1) Battlefield Earth is distributed as a series of individual frames on long, translucent strips of celluloid which, with an arrangement of lenses and shutters, can be projected in rapid sequence on a large screen. Through a characteristic of human visual perception called "persistence of vision," this creates an illusion of motion.
2) Thanks to a blend of audio and visual technologies, Battlefield Earth synchronizes recorded sound with projected images, enabling a real sensory one-two punch!
3) Battlefield Earth employs a visual language involving a series of individual shots which are edited in a particular sequence to create a narrative.
4) Battlefield Earth was filmed with a variety of equipment which, with proper maintenance, can actually be reused for future motion picture productions! Such equipment includes cameras, microphones, editing stations, clappers, and large men with tool belts.
Yes, this project was shepherded through its various stages of production and assembled finally into a completed film. This is undeniable. I say to you, Battlefield Earth: MOTION PICTURE!
http://www.farmerbob.org
By providing something easily trashable, it allowed hundreds of reviewers to write hundreds of mild-to-very amusing reviews trashing it.
I have personally spent probably a total of twenty minutes being entertained by reviewers topping each other at amusing anecdotes of the filmatic crapulence of this film. And I didn't even have to spend a dime! Multiply that by the millions who encountered reviews and you get something that entertained many more than would have a merely mediocre film.
The cake is a pie