‘Battlefield Earth’ is a lost cause

by Dan Eaton
THE POST

The new movie Battlefield Earth is the funniest movie of this year.

The problem is that this movie is not a comedy. It’s a $70 million-budgeted jumbled mess of sci-fi, drama and thriller that is destined to be remembered as one of the biggest on-screen debacles of all time.

The year is somewhere in the 3000s. Evil, 9-foot, hairy, dreadlocked aliens named Psychlos have wiped out most of humanity. The survivors live in small bands hidden in caves or forests, while the aliens mine something, though it is never said what.

Although they conquered the earth in a nine-minute battle, they have only one colony on the entire planet. The head security man for the colony is Terl (John Travolta). He wants a transfer, but is denied. He eventually develops a scheme to use man-animals (humans) to secretly mine gold.

One of these man-animals is Jonnie (Barry Pepper), who flees his tribe to seek out food, but gets captured by the Psychlos. He turns out to be one of those precocious heroes who never seem to die and can always rally a crowd. Instead of killing Jonnie, the bad guys slap him around and yell at him a lot, which isn’t nearly as effective as an old laser blast to the head. You’d think that by the year 3000, villains would be smarter.

That’s the general plot – plot being used in the loosest sense. The movie really just careens from event to event. It is based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard and not on the Space Mad Libs book that it appears to be.

The characters in Battlefield Earth will leave you longing for the depth, complexity and intelligence of a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie. God forgive me for saying that.

The Psychlos are a vicious, but amazingly stupid lot. They constantly backstab each other to get "leverage." Oddly, they always seem surprised when it happens.

During the secret mining operation, Terl keeps an eye on the man-animals via a camera, but fails to notice them stealing a spaceship and tooling around the United States, which includes a trip to the Library of Congress and a trip to Ft. Knox.

They zap Jonnie with a magic laser that teaches him their language and Euclidean geometry, among other things. This backfires, and he develops the knowledge to destroy the entire Psychlo race.

His sudden jump of intellect can at least be attributed to a magic laser: What about his companions? At the movie’s beginning, the human’s speak in little more than grunts. In a mere seven days, Jonnie not only teaches them the intricacies of language, but they also pick up military strategy and become masters at flying harrier jets.

The dialogue is cliched and horribly PG-13. Terl’s favorite expression is "crap-lousy." Jonnie speaks in grunts or impassioned Braveheart-esque pleas depending on the point in the movie. Almost every line from a Psychlo seems to end in one of those, diabolical super-villain laughs as well.

Travolta hams it up as Terl, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling that he’s serious.

He was a major force in bringing Battlefield Earth to the screen, based on his love for the book — definitively proving that love is blind.