It was with a certain morbid curiosity and a near certainty that I would be seeing an awful movie that I rented Battlefield Earth, and I must say the movie exceeded all of my expectations, it is indeed exceptionally terrible. Upon finishing the film I immediately checked to see if Ed Wood had directed it, then I remembered he has been dead for some time, but no worries Roger Christian is here to take his place.
I'm not real sure where to begin because there is nothing good to start with and so much bad to describe, but I might as well start from the top. Earth has been taken over by an evil alien race that is scouring the universe for gold....yeah gold, don't know why but they want it. Earth has been occupied for a thousand years by these aliens and they are still here, searching for gold. They haven't bothered to raid the bank vaults of the world, they are too busy digging for the stuff....no really, part of the plot later hinges on the humans finding and raiding Fort Knox to supply gold to the aliens to fool them into thinking the humans are mining when they are secretly planning a revolt....I'm not kidding, but that comes later.
The few remaining humans are savage tribal creatures scratching out a miserable existence as primitive hunter-gatherers. Later on they learn to fly Harrier jets and dogfight alien ships with only a few days of work, they must have been passing down fighter pilot lore for the last ten centuries or so. The main character, Jonnie Goodboy (Barry Pepper) and no I'm not making up that name either, leaves the safety of his tribe because he doesn't believe in the aliens and his dad has just died. His dad's death is very emotional, even though he never appears on camera, is never referred to ever again in the film, and the mourning lasts for about three seconds before the cut to the next scene. Anyway he gets captured by the aliens in a shopping mall and taken to their base. There follows a terrible scene where Jonnie Goodboy does battle with the alpha male in the prison population over who gets to eat first, Jonnie defeats him, and proclaims that everyone will eat at the same time from now on with thunderous cheers from the riff raff....pretty powerful stuff. I've already wasted a lot of time bashing this film so I'll just finish by saying that Jonnie Goodboy gets hooked up to a learning machine, becomes really educated, learns to fly, plans a revolt, does a little nuclear engineering, and blows up a planet. Pretty good for a guy whose most advanced tools were sticks and rocks earlier in the film. Oh one last thing, at least half the film is shot at a fifteen degree angle, we're not sure why, and once again slow motion doesn't make a bad scene better, it just makes it take longer.
I'm not real sure where to begin because there is nothing good to start with and so much bad to describe, but I might as well start from the top. Earth has been taken over by an evil alien race that is scouring the universe for gold....yeah gold, don't know why but they want it. Earth has been occupied for a thousand years by these aliens and they are still here, searching for gold. They haven't bothered to raid the bank vaults of the world, they are too busy digging for the stuff....no really, part of the plot later hinges on the humans finding and raiding Fort Knox to supply gold to the aliens to fool them into thinking the humans are mining when they are secretly planning a revolt....I'm not kidding, but that comes later.
The few remaining humans are savage tribal creatures scratching out a miserable existence as primitive hunter-gatherers. Later on they learn to fly Harrier jets and dogfight alien ships with only a few days of work, they must have been passing down fighter pilot lore for the last ten centuries or so. The main character, Jonnie Goodboy (Barry Pepper) and no I'm not making up that name either, leaves the safety of his tribe because he doesn't believe in the aliens and his dad has just died. His dad's death is very emotional, even though he never appears on camera, is never referred to ever again in the film, and the mourning lasts for about three seconds before the cut to the next scene. Anyway he gets captured by the aliens in a shopping mall and taken to their base. There follows a terrible scene where Jonnie Goodboy does battle with the alpha male in the prison population over who gets to eat first, Jonnie defeats him, and proclaims that everyone will eat at the same time from now on with thunderous cheers from the riff raff....pretty powerful stuff. I've already wasted a lot of time bashing this film so I'll just finish by saying that Jonnie Goodboy gets hooked up to a learning machine, becomes really educated, learns to fly, plans a revolt, does a little nuclear engineering, and blows up a planet. Pretty good for a guy whose most advanced tools were sticks and rocks earlier in the film. Oh one last thing, at least half the film is shot at a fifteen degree angle, we're not sure why, and once again slow motion doesn't make a bad scene better, it just makes it take longer.