I'm surprised at the negative reaction to Battlefield Earth. Certainly it is not great art, certainly it isn't an intricate and thought-provoking film. But it never claims to be. It is simple explosion-based entertainment, and at this it succeeds. There is nothing wrong with action films; they have their place in cinema every bit as valid as intelligent thrillers or intricate drama or slapstick comedy. All too often Hollywood makes the mistake of chickening out of pure spectacle-based entertainment and tries bolting on an ill-conceived "intelligent" subtext - look at Independence Day, or to a lesser extent, The Matrix. If you want to include a political or social message, you should make damn sure it holds water in its own right before spoiling an otherwise acceptable piece of entertainment. I went into Battlefield Earth with low expectations, and I found them not merely met, but exceeded. There was one worrying moment, when our charicature alien overlord leads our muscular hero to the library of congress. "Read any book you like", he says, "We defeated your human armies in nine days; there is nothing you can learn here which will help you to overthrow us." This is when the feeling of dread overcame me. Oh god, I thought, he's about to find the declaration of independence and the whole film is going to turn into conventional Hollywood pap about how freedom is some special secret to which only Americans are privy, and it'll turn into some ridiculous gung-ho Independence Day style abomination. And indeed, in the next scene, he is seen looking at that very document. But that was it. For such a base film, the creators at least credited their audience with a smear of intelligence. No more was said of the incident. It affected the characters in all the ways we knew before the start of the film they were going to be affected, without ever turgidly rubbing our noses in how lucky we, the audience, are to be American. Independence Day this film is not. In this context, the glaring plot holes (aliens are mining the planet for resources, but haven't bothered taking the gold we've already mined; flight simulators and advanced weapony still work first time with no maintenence or electricity; cavemen can learn to fly Harrier jump-jets in a week) become irrelevant. This is not a film which attempts to depict a realistic future ("Aaaah. Do you see the point we're making? Shall we explain it again for you?"). It is a film which presents entertaining fantasy in richly grim cinematography and big satisfying explosions, and never once insults the audience by claiming it's trying to do anything else. I saw the film in the same week as I saw Gladiator, and the contrast was stark: Gladiator is pure bread-and-circuses gory entertainment with a tacked-on ending about how great it is to die and go to Hollywood Heaven, presenting itself as an intelligent action film while completely failing to explore the (I thought) central idea that the film itself belongs to a category of entertainment which fulfills exactly the role of the original mob-pleasing blood-and-guts at the colloseum - by raising your hopes that intelligent issues will be raised, it hopelessly falls by not following through. Battlefield Earth has no such pretensions, and it succeeds admirably. I left the cinema entertained and happy to have spent a couple of hours with my brain unashamedly offline and immersed in schoolboy fantasy. Don't knock it.
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I'm surprised at the negative reaction to Battlefield Earth. Certainly it is not great art, certainly it isn't an intricate and thought-provoking film. But it never claims to be. It is simple explosion-based entertainment, and at this it succeeds. There is nothing wrong with action films; they have their place in cinema every bit as valid as intelligent thrillers or intricate drama or slapstick comedy. All too often Hollywood makes the mistake of chickening out of pure spectacle-based entertainment and tries bolting on an ill-conceived "intelligent" subtext - look at Independence Day, or to a lesser extent, The Matrix. If you want to include a political or social message, you should make damn sure it holds water in its own right before spoiling an otherwise acceptable piece of entertainment. I went into Battlefield Earth with low expectations, and I found them not merely met, but exceeded. There was one worrying moment, when our charicature alien overlord leads our muscular hero to the library of congress. "Read any book you like", he says, "We defeated your human armies in nine days; there is nothing you can learn here which will help you to overthrow us." This is when the feeling of dread overcame me. Oh god, I thought, he's about to find the declaration of independence and the whole film is going to turn into conventional Hollywood pap about how freedom is some special secret to which only Americans are privy, and it'll turn into some ridiculous gung-ho Independence Day style abomination. And indeed, in the next scene, he is seen looking at that very document. But that was it. For such a base film, the creators at least credited their audience with a smear of intelligence. No more was said of the incident. It affected the characters in all the ways we knew before the start of the film they were going to be affected, without ever turgidly rubbing our noses in how lucky we, the audience, are to be American. Independence Day this film is not. In this context, the glaring plot holes (aliens are mining the planet for resources, but haven't bothered taking the gold we've already mined; flight simulators and advanced weapony still work first time with no maintenence or electricity; cavemen can learn to fly Harrier jump-jets in a week) become irrelevant. This is not a film which attempts to depict a realistic future ("Aaaah. Do you see the point we're making? Shall we explain it again for you?"). It is a film which presents entertaining fantasy in richly grim cinematography and big satisfying explosions, and never once insults the audience by claiming it's trying to do anything else. I saw the film in the same week as I saw Gladiator, and the contrast was stark: Gladiator is pure bread-and-circuses gory entertainment with a tacked-on ending about how great it is to die and go to Hollywood Heaven, presenting itself as an intelligent action film while completely failing to explore the (I thought) central idea that the film itself belongs to a category of entertainment which fulfills exactly the role of the original mob-pleasing blood-and-guts at the colloseum - by raising your hopes that intelligent issues will be raised, it hopelessly falls by not following through. Battlefield Earth has no such pretensions, and it succeeds admirably. I left the cinema entertained and happy to have spent a couple of hours with my brain unashamedly offline and immersed in schoolboy fantasy. Don't knock it.