Battlefield Earth

Wow.

This really is unbelievably bad.

Apparently, L. Ron Hubbard and later John Travolta tried for a long time to have Hubbard's novel (or part of it or whatever) Battlefield Earth made into a film. Why anyone - even a single minded scientologist like Travolta - would want to put this piece of crap onto the big screen (or small screen, or any screen at all) is beyond my comprehension. I have not read the source material but judging from this it must be among the worst of its kind.

But let's get to the 'story'.

It is the year 3000 A.D.

Earth, once mankind's home, has been ruled for the past 1000 years by a cruel alien race from the planet Psychlo.

As they have done on countless other planets across the galaxies, the Psychlos mine Earth's metals and teleport them back to their home planet.

Gold is the rarest and most valuable metal of all.

The dwindling human population is fighting to stay alive. Hiding in pockets, in radiated areas, they are on the verge of extinction.

Initially, we meet a group of cave dwellers - mankind has moved back to living as Neanderthals - and like any larger group of humans there is that one young man who cannot play by the rules. His name is Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, referred to as 'a greener' (as in: the grass is always greener...). We first meet him when he comes home from a quest for medicine to save his ailing father. He didn't make it in time and the gods took is father in the night.

"Nooooooooooooooooo!" (in slo-mo)

He picks a fight with the group elder/leader who warns him of the gods that pose a constant danger to them. The greener insists that there must be a better life elsewhere, where they do not have to suffer from hunger and anyway, nobody has ever seen one of these gods. He takes off to find such a place. Almost immediately he runs into a couple of hunters who tell him that they can show him the gods. They take him into the ruins of a city and tell him that when the people defied the god's order to not lay eyes on this or that, they were frozen. Evidence (a): statues. The move onto a former mall to show Evidence (b): mannequins (who apparently have been especially badly behaved).

The trio is attacked by an over-sized alien, who uses a stun gun on them. It also shots the greener's horse with this device.

"Nooooooooooooooooo!"

Then they are put on the slowest aircraft in history and brought to a human processing center in....Denver.

The alien language sounds like a grunt, but for the benefit of the viewers, they communicate in English when talking among themselves, only when addressing the human animals, the grunting is used. Terl, chief of alien security, learns that he is to stay on this filthy planet that he hates so much for an additional 50 cycles and he is pissed off. So much so that when his second in command, Ker, suggests to rip off home security by secretly having the humans mine for gold.

Anyway, the greener immediately and constantly wants to run away, making a reputation for himself. The aliens consider him somewhat smarter than the inferior human race and let him flee with a small group to watch them in their natural habitat and - most importantly - finding out what their favorite food is to use that as leverage. The group goes without for food for three days and Terl tells Ker that they will only feed when they think themselves secure and when they do, they will have a celebratory meal of their favorite food. The humans, starving, finally find rats and eat them, raw. Then they notice that one of their buttons each is a camera and destroy them. This leaves Terl somewhat dumbfounded because he thought them to be much to stupid to know what cameras even are. Their little trip to freedom is cut short and they are returned to the mines.

There, the greener is put in front of a knowledge machine and he absorbs, well, everything there is to know. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. The greener can now communicate with Terl and Ker and gives his cell mates a mathematics lesson. Again, why? Nobody knows.

Anyway, with his new understanding of how everything works, the greener kicks off a rebellion and after his girlfriend from back home is captured, presented and then shot....

"Nooooooooooooooooo!" (now without sound, but again in slo-mo)

...the rebels set their plan into action. The plan entails mining for gold and letting the aliens think they will do as they are requested, making secret recordings of the plan to rip of home security, and, well, taking down planet Psychlo. Of course.

They get gold bars from Fort Knox (like you do) and present them as first pieces of evidence of their cooperation. Then they find an underground US military base (very handy, that), air-crafts, weapons (nuclear, no less), and a flight simulator (!) with which they train. They start a mass uprising during which the dome over Denver is destroyed, exposing the aliens to the earth's atmosphere in which they suffocate.

Thanks to a Psychlo teleporting device on location (of course) an atomic bomb is teleported to Psychlo where it detonates and destroys the atmosphere, wiping out the entire population. The only alien survivors are Terl and Ker. Terl ends up imprisoned in Fort Knox while Ker makes nice with the humans.

The end or, the beginning for the victorious humans.

0/10