Dec
30
Worst Movie of the Decade | Battlefield Earth
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To close out the 2000s, I thought I’d review the worst movie that I saw in a decade that had some pretty craptacular offerings. It’s hard to settle on one movie that’s stunningly awful and beats out all the rest, particularly when “Rollerball” is sitting there eating bananas. So I had to come up with some criteria. It needed to be a movie I’d seen twice. Sometimes, you see a movie in the wrong frame of mind, and upon a repeat viewing, it suddenly works for you. This pretty much knocked all the other potentials out of the running. No way was I going to give “Soul Survivors” another chance to impress, Eliza Dushku or not. I also wanted a movie that genuinely felt like a wasted opportunity. Some movies had no right to be good anyway, like “Alien vs. Predator,” so it’s hard to begrudge their awfulness. The worst of the worst really had to shit the bed. Only one movie managed to edge out Tim Burton’s remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
Yes, the worst film of the aughts is “Battlefield Earth.”
For folks who haven’t read L. Ron Hubbard’s book of the same name, it’s probably difficult to imagine “Battlefield Earth” as anything but a punchline. However, the 1,050-page pulp sci-fi novel makes even something like “Avatar” seem smallish in scale. I read it in the summer of 1999, still smarting from the resounding disappointment that was “The Phantom Menace,” and thought it was the best space opera I’d laid eyes upon, a true epic that’d make for one hell of a movie or series of movies. At the time, I knew filming had begun on a big-screen adaptation with John Travolta playing the heavy, Terl, a paranoid star beast.
In the book, Terl is fed up with his bureaucratic position on the backwater planet Earth. It’s the year 3000, and the planet has since been conquered by the Psychlos — an species of furry lizard-people — that have wiped out the bulk of the human population and turned the planet into a mining colony. Out of pure boredom, Terl decides kidnap a human and train him to do unenviable tasks just to see if it can be done. So he snatches up Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a young blonde frontiersman. Jonnie proves to be a quick study, learning the Psychlo language as well as how to operate their vehicles and machinery. Terl then decides to educate a whole bunch more humans, so they can mine a deposit of gold he’s discovered in a hush-hush side operation that’ll make him rich enough to retire early. The humans he’s trained, meanwhile, aren’t complete imbeciles and plot an insurgency against the Psychlos in an attempt to rid the planet of their occupiers. What follows is something along the lines of “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Braveheart.” At least that’s how I pictured it in my head.
The movie manages to take a fairly straightforward men’s adventure story, something James Cameron could’ve done in his sleep, and turn it into the cheapest-looking $60 million turd I’ve ever seen; we’re talking SyFy Original Movie production values here. Director Roger Christian shoots everything at a canted angle for no reason, directs John Travolta’s shrillest performance to date, and delivers the ugliest, clunkiest and dumbest sci-fi western that wasn’t part of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy. The Psychlos all look like doughy, middle-aged Predators wearing shoe-lifts. That these monsters conquered space is more disbelief than I’m willing to suspend.
Simply put, the film remains somewhat faithful to the source material without really understanding what makes it entertaining. Everything comes across as rushed and wholly unbelievable. In an unintentional bit of meta-text, Terl educates Jonnie by projecting a whole bunch of information directly into his eyeballs, which is not unlike what the film itself does to the audience. It’s an aggressive, mind-boggling info-dump. All the fun little moments are lost. During the same sequence in the book, Terl is monitoring Jonnie in his cell. Famished, Jonnie reluctantly eats a rat, and Terl mistakes rats for an actual delicacy. So later he brings Jonnie a mess of rats to eat and is very confused when Jonnie reacts with disgust.
Terl’s a terrific character in the novel. Cunning, extremely duplicitous, a frightening and yet likeable bastard — the character seems like a great fit for Travolta. In the movie, though, Travola plays him like a preening, unwashed schmendrick. The Terl in the book would’ve eaten this clown’s lunch.
After Terl dies partway through the book (*spoiler*) and the Psychlos are vanquished, Jonnie finds himself having to defend the planet from other intergalactic nogoodniks. The film elects not to kill off Terl at the climax, which falls squarely in the middle of the events of the novel. Presumably, the filmmakers were crossing their fingers that the film would be a hit, the second half of the book could be realized on the screen as a sequel with Travolta returning to his Razzie-nominated role. But the film opened a week after “Gladiator” in the summer of 2000 and quickly sank like a stone at the box office. I do find it rather hilarious that the misnomered production company Franchise Pictures actually financed “Battlefield Earth.”
In measuring sheer awfulness, I think “Battlefield Earth” best exemplifies the absolute worst the 2000s had to offer. The film is commercial filmmaking at its most stunningly incompetent, where not a single choice made by anyone involved was correct. An artistic and financial failure, it’s one of the first phony franchise-starters of the decade full of ‘em. I wonder when they’ll try to remake it.
-Brad Lohan
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And here is David Wain’s list of the top ten most mediocre films of the decade (you have to scroll down)….
http://www.davidwain.com/site/BLOG.html