Battlefield Earth (2000) Review

Official trailer

Battlefield Earth is the most completely failed film in science fiction history.

This isn’t hyperbole or enthusiasm for the negative, it’s an honest accounting of a film where every element works at a level of incompetence so consistent and so complete that the incompetence becomes its own kind of achievement. The cinematography, the direction, the performances, the production design, the script, the editing, all of them failing at the same time, in the same film, with the same thoroughness. The statistical probability of this much concentrated failure is unusual.

My rating: -1,000,000,000. The correct rating.

This movie makes me want to file a complaint with somebody.

It’s two hours of expensive people making terrible decisions with total confidence, and I think the confidence is the most insulting part. A cheap disaster I can forgive. This one had money, stars and real source material behind it, and it blew all three like a drunk at a roulette table.

The Dutch Angle Problem

Director Roger Christian made the decision to shoot almost every scene in Battlefield Earth at a Dutch angle, the camera tilted anywhere from fifteen to forty-five degrees off horizontal. The Dutch angle is a legitimate cinematic technique used to communicate disorientation, psychological instability, or the presence of something wrong in a scene. It works when it’s deployed selectively and purposefully, in contrast to normally composed shots.

In Battlefield Earth, the Dutch angle is the default. Almost nothing is shot straight. The camera tilts in establishing shots, in dialogue scenes, in action sequences and in quiet character moments. The result communicates nothing except that someone thought tilting the camera was interesting. It’s nauseating. By the twenty-minute mark I wanted to climb into the screen and level the camera myself, and I’d happily dock the director a week’s pay for every degree.

The failure is the elimination of contrast. Technique works through contrast with its absence. A tilted camera in a scene that’s been shot straight communicates that something is wrong. A tilted camera in every scene communicates nothing about wrongness, it just makes every scene tilted. The technique has been deployed so completely that it’s lost its function entirely and replaced it with visual fatigue.

Travolta’s Performance

John Travolta’s Terl is a performance of such magnificent wrongness that it transcends ordinary badness into something strange. The dreadlocks, the platform shoes to increase his height, the clawed prosthetic hands, the scenery consumption that leaves nothing standing, Travolta appears to have decided that the key to playing an alien villain is to remove all recognizable human behavior and replace it with whatever this is.

The strangest thing about the performance is that it doesn’t correspond to any actual thing.

There’s no awareness in it, so parody is off the table, and a sincere attempt that failed would fail in a different way than this. Travolta seems certain of himself in ways that have nothing to do with the craft of acting. Terl made me laugh harder than most comedies do, and I’d bet good money none of those laughs were intended.

Barry Pepper as Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, the human protagonist, is fighting a different battle in the same film. He’s attempting to deliver an earnest science fiction performance in a context that’s made earnestness impossible. Everything around him is operating in tones that can’t support earnestness, and his sincere attempts to act make him look more out of place than Travolta’s total wrongness does.

The Plot and Its Failures

The Psychlos, a race of alien conquerors who enslaved humanity 1,000 years ago, are managing their Earth operations with the competence level of people who have never managed anything. Their security is trivial. Their weapons can be acquired through negligible effort. Their key planetary teleportation technology can be reverse-engineered in days by humans who, minutes earlier, were living as hunter-gatherers with no technological knowledge whatsoever.

The humans defeat the Psychlos because the Psychlos are incompetent beyond any reasonable explanation.

An occupying force grown lazy over centuries would at least be a plausible idea. These are characters who have to be beatable so the heroes can win, and the script doesn’t care how that looks. The resistance succeeds because any competence at all would be enough to beat them. I spent the last act rooting for the aliens to hire one security guard.

A story where the antagonists are incompetent is a story about someone winning a game their opponent wasn’t trying to play. The emotional satisfaction of victory, the sense that something was overcome, that the achievement means something, requires an opponent who was trying to prevent the protagonist from succeeding. Battlefield Earth’s Psychlos weren’t trying very hard.

The Production Design and Its Wasted Potential

The alien technology and the post-apocalyptic Earth have moments of real visual interest that are immediately undercut by the quality of everything around them. The Psychlo home planet, briefly glimpsed, has an industrial ugliness that could have been strong if the film around it had been competent. The ruins of human civilization, glimpsed in early scenes of Jonnie’s primitive tribe, communicate the scale of loss in ways that the film never develops.

What could have been a visually distinctive science fiction film is buried under direction that makes every scene look worse than the material warrants. The production had real resources and the source material has real scope. Roger Christian’s visual choices actively work against the production design, and that waste is what galls me. Somebody built those sets with care, and the director tilted them into oblivion.

Should you skip Battlefield Earth?

Battlefield Earth deserves its -1,000,000,000 as the most completely failed film in science fiction history, and I’m tempted to add a few more zeroes.

Every element of filmmaking fails at once, with money and total certainty behind it, and the result is a historical artifact of incompetence at every level of production. See it once, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, so you know what this kind of total failure looks and feels like. Once is plenty, and it’s more than the people who made it deserved.

Frequently Asked Questions