There are certain movies out there that set the high water mark for being "bad". In that list you normally find such familiar names as "Plan 9 From Outer Space", "Manos: The Hands of Fate" and "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians". Some of these movies are enjoyable in a "so good it's bad" kind of way. Others are just unwatchable and you can't get any kind of enjoyment from them. But one movie that belongs on this list is "Battlefield Earth". It's been voted as one of the worst movies of all time and nobody, except for members of the Church of Scientology, find it to be any good. So what's it all about?
The movie itself is based on the first novel of some saga but it bombed so badly that no other movies were ever made and for that we're all thankful. it takes place in the year 3000 when mankind has been reduced to near barbarism by an alien race known as the Psychlos. They came to Earth because of it's great natural resources the most important of which is gold. They love gold. This is literally their raison d'etre. So they destroyed our civilization and are now in the process of strip mining the planet for our gold.
A young barbarian, named Johnny "Goodboy" Tyler, is the hero of the book. And after getting captured by the Psychlos forms a rebellion, takes them down and nukes their home planet. . Cue the happy ending and everybody is now safe. Or are they? The idea was to continue the series but since it didn't make any money and most people thought it was crap the sequels never got made.
But what makes it so bad you might ask? Well, it's a combination of a lot of things that just came together in such a way to make a gigantic pile of suck. Let's look at them shall we?
The writing is terrible. L Ron Hubbard, the author, started out as a writer of pulp magazines. These were cheap magazines from the 50's that had a lot of fantastic stories in them and a lot of the giants of Sci-Fi got their start here. There's a certain style in pulp magazines which is "use a lot of words" as they were typically paid something like five cents a word. So in order to make more money, they would just go crazy with descriptions, adding words that weren't necessary and bloating their stories. You can see quite a bit of that in here. People don't talk. They instead speak in exposition in a way that normal people don't speak. It gets rather annoying after a while.
The cinematography has some odd stylistic choices which honestly nobody really gets why they did it. For example every shot is set on a Dutch Angle. What is this? Well it simply means that every shot is tilted slightly. Do you remember in the old Adam West "Batman" series? Whenever they'd show the villain's hideout the camera was always tilted slightly. This was to show how "twisted" the villains were. But here, it's done in every shot. Then every transition from one scene to the other is a curtain wipe. There's just no reason for this.
And then there's the acting. Oh my God it's terrible. John Travolta., a long time Scientologist, wanted to get this movie made for the longest time with him in the lead role of Johnny Tyler. But since it took so long he was now too old to play it and had to take the role of Terl, the Psychlo leader on Earth. And let me tell you he overacts like there's no tomorrow. And here's the thing, John Travolta has shown us that he's a good actor. But here? He's chewing the scenery as if he's starving and it's made of chocolate. The man is so over the top terrible that it's hard to take him seriously as a villain. The rest of the cast aren't much better going from passable to terrible.
The story itself makes no sense. The Psychlos destroyed all of Earth's armies in a mere 9 minutes over 1000 years ago. But at the end a bunch of cavemen, flying Harriers manage to do what trained soldiers couldn't do a millennia ago. Fighter jets which have been sitting underground for 1000 years work perfectly. The fuel for them hasn't degraded. There's electricity to power these training modules which teaches them how to fly. The computers which run them are in perfect working order. This is beyond stupid. And then, to add insult to injury, they teleport some random dude to the Psychlo home planet and blow it up with one nuclear warhead. That's right. The entire planet ius destroyed with one nuke. How? Supposedly their atmosphere reacts to "radiation". And yet L Ron Hubbard was supposedly a nuclear engineer. I'm not and I can still tell you that that is absolute crap.
And then there's the elephant in the room namely does it have any connection to Scientology and the answer is a big fat yes. Although a lot of it has been toned down but it's there if you happen to look for it. For example Johnny Tyler is a "natural clear" or a person that has achieved the state of "clear" in Scientology without having to go through the whole process. In the novel he literally heals himself from a head wound just by thinking of it. This is something that Scientologists are supposed to be able to do. But oddly enough they don't which ought to cast doubt on their whole religion. The Psychlos are nothing more than the big bogeyman for Scientologists as they're supposed to stand in for psychologists. Psychlos = psychologists get it? And their love of gold is representative of this because, according to Scientologists, they're all about getting people's money. There are a few more things here and there that aren't necessarily important. For example when Johnny is tied down to the learning chair to teach him their language he's taught by a creature called an obsequious creature called a "Chinklo" or something like that. This is a veiled reference to the racist word for the Chinese which I'm not going to write here and it was changed in the movie to Chinklo from it's original form. L Ron Hubbard was notable for his dislike of the Chinese due to having traveled to China as a child and hating it.
This is a terrible movie that should only be watched to see how bad it can get. No enjoyment of this movie is possible. Even as a "so bad it's good" kind of way. It's just bad and it deserves to be left upon the scrap heap of history as a warning to those not to do this.
The movie itself is based on the first novel of some saga but it bombed so badly that no other movies were ever made and for that we're all thankful. it takes place in the year 3000 when mankind has been reduced to near barbarism by an alien race known as the Psychlos. They came to Earth because of it's great natural resources the most important of which is gold. They love gold. This is literally their raison d'etre. So they destroyed our civilization and are now in the process of strip mining the planet for our gold.
A young barbarian, named Johnny "Goodboy" Tyler, is the hero of the book. And after getting captured by the Psychlos forms a rebellion, takes them down and nukes their home planet. . Cue the happy ending and everybody is now safe. Or are they? The idea was to continue the series but since it didn't make any money and most people thought it was crap the sequels never got made.
But what makes it so bad you might ask? Well, it's a combination of a lot of things that just came together in such a way to make a gigantic pile of suck. Let's look at them shall we?
The writing is terrible. L Ron Hubbard, the author, started out as a writer of pulp magazines. These were cheap magazines from the 50's that had a lot of fantastic stories in them and a lot of the giants of Sci-Fi got their start here. There's a certain style in pulp magazines which is "use a lot of words" as they were typically paid something like five cents a word. So in order to make more money, they would just go crazy with descriptions, adding words that weren't necessary and bloating their stories. You can see quite a bit of that in here. People don't talk. They instead speak in exposition in a way that normal people don't speak. It gets rather annoying after a while.
The cinematography has some odd stylistic choices which honestly nobody really gets why they did it. For example every shot is set on a Dutch Angle. What is this? Well it simply means that every shot is tilted slightly. Do you remember in the old Adam West "Batman" series? Whenever they'd show the villain's hideout the camera was always tilted slightly. This was to show how "twisted" the villains were. But here, it's done in every shot. Then every transition from one scene to the other is a curtain wipe. There's just no reason for this.
And then there's the acting. Oh my God it's terrible. John Travolta., a long time Scientologist, wanted to get this movie made for the longest time with him in the lead role of Johnny Tyler. But since it took so long he was now too old to play it and had to take the role of Terl, the Psychlo leader on Earth. And let me tell you he overacts like there's no tomorrow. And here's the thing, John Travolta has shown us that he's a good actor. But here? He's chewing the scenery as if he's starving and it's made of chocolate. The man is so over the top terrible that it's hard to take him seriously as a villain. The rest of the cast aren't much better going from passable to terrible.
The story itself makes no sense. The Psychlos destroyed all of Earth's armies in a mere 9 minutes over 1000 years ago. But at the end a bunch of cavemen, flying Harriers manage to do what trained soldiers couldn't do a millennia ago. Fighter jets which have been sitting underground for 1000 years work perfectly. The fuel for them hasn't degraded. There's electricity to power these training modules which teaches them how to fly. The computers which run them are in perfect working order. This is beyond stupid. And then, to add insult to injury, they teleport some random dude to the Psychlo home planet and blow it up with one nuclear warhead. That's right. The entire planet ius destroyed with one nuke. How? Supposedly their atmosphere reacts to "radiation". And yet L Ron Hubbard was supposedly a nuclear engineer. I'm not and I can still tell you that that is absolute crap.
And then there's the elephant in the room namely does it have any connection to Scientology and the answer is a big fat yes. Although a lot of it has been toned down but it's there if you happen to look for it. For example Johnny Tyler is a "natural clear" or a person that has achieved the state of "clear" in Scientology without having to go through the whole process. In the novel he literally heals himself from a head wound just by thinking of it. This is something that Scientologists are supposed to be able to do. But oddly enough they don't which ought to cast doubt on their whole religion. The Psychlos are nothing more than the big bogeyman for Scientologists as they're supposed to stand in for psychologists. Psychlos = psychologists get it? And their love of gold is representative of this because, according to Scientologists, they're all about getting people's money. There are a few more things here and there that aren't necessarily important. For example when Johnny is tied down to the learning chair to teach him their language he's taught by a creature called an obsequious creature called a "Chinklo" or something like that. This is a veiled reference to the racist word for the Chinese which I'm not going to write here and it was changed in the movie to Chinklo from it's original form. L Ron Hubbard was notable for his dislike of the Chinese due to having traveled to China as a child and hating it.
This is a terrible movie that should only be watched to see how bad it can get. No enjoyment of this movie is possible. Even as a "so bad it's good" kind of way. It's just bad and it deserves to be left upon the scrap heap of history as a warning to those not to do this.