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Logic dictates that somewhere within the collective depths of h. sapiens’ paranoid nightmares there must now and then be at least some spark of truth. However, it seems ironic that the recently retired Pope of Conspiracy, Art Bell, could build a career on JFK, Roswell, and Bigfoot while things like Scientology and the covert shrinking of Snickers bars went ignored by almost everyone except the ever more insignificant mainstream press – whatever that means.
None of which would normally have anything to do with a movie review. But there’s no way to talk about a film adaptation of a sci-fi epic written by Church of Scientology founder and Dianetics author L. Ron Hubbard, starring CoS spokes-face John Travolta (who modestly describes the project as “like Star Wars, only better”) without bringing up the notion that some folks find the whole production kind of spooky. Plenty of sane individuals consider the Church to be the world’s best-funded and -organized cult, which has been linked convincingly to all kinds of legal and criminal activities, including murder. There were even rumors that the cinematic treatment of Battlefield Earth contains subtle high-speed subliminal prompts like “READ DIANETICS” and “VISIT OUR WEBSITE” and “GO RENT LOOK WHO’S TALKING NOW.” Frankly, when I went looking around for info to flesh out this piece, the official CoS stuff did look rather Zen cowboy-ish, featuring stylized Rockwellian illustrations of Hubbard as a child on horseback and accounts of his heroic WWII combat exploits (which have been called into question). But I can now tell you that I’ve survived both the movie itself and the research process with no more apparent after-affects than the revival of a long-standing desire to trade my motorcycle for a surplus F-16. So, on with the show –
Subtitled “a saga of the year 3000,” Battlefield Earth is set a millennium after 9-ft. ammonia-breathing, hypercapitalist aliens called Psychlos decimated humanity to make Earth safe for strip mining. Outside the Psychlo main base in Denver, which they’ve reconfigured to look like their disco-Chernobyl homeworld, a pocket of feral neo-primitives led by Greener (Barry Pepper, from The Green Mile and Saving Private Ryan -- the character is referred to as Jonnie Goodboy Tyler in both the book and the credits, but I didn’t notice anyone ever calling him that; you have to admit, it sounds pretty silly when spoken aloud) hides in the mountains in fear of mythical giant demons that stalk the city below. Greener lets curiosity get the better of him one day and rides down to what’s left of the mall, where he’s captured by one of the lumbering rasta-conehead baddies for slave labor. But he’s a smart monkey, and strong, and nearly gets away before running into scheming Psychlo security chief Terl (Travolta), whose race has perfected teleportation but still has a lot to learn about dental hygiene. Terl is into this big corporate back-stabbing “leverage” thing with “the home office,” and needs Greener to train other slaves to use sophisticated equipment to mine a vein of gold in the Rockies that the Psychlos can’t reach for some technobabble reason. Naturally he underestimates humanity’s resolve and intelligence, blah blah, you know the rest.
Lots of other critics have complained that Battlefield Earth is hopelessly derivative, borrowing liberally from Independence Day, The Postman, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Star Trek, and even those “Martin the Martian” cartoons (personally, I think it owes more to Morons from Outer Space than anything else). But that’s kind of unfair, since before turning megalomaniac Hubbard was a fixture of pulp magazines and Silver Age science fiction; if anything, work by him and his contemporaries helped set the sensibilities for the above-mentioned films. My main gripe is simply that the movie is badly done. The script, by first-time writer Corey Mandell, has the aliens using silly Buck Rogers terms such as “picto-camera” and “compo-gradients” that were cool-vogue in Hubbard’s heyday, but sound awfully lumpy now (even their borrowed human slang is outdated a couple generations: “Have you blown a head gasket?”). Compounding the problem, nondescript director Roger Chastain (Masterminds) uses a lot of derivative, flash-blur shots done in dim light to cover a poor job of staging characters with a supposed height disparity of three or four feet. Meanwhile Travolta is chewing scenery, bashing his subordinate (Forest Whitaker), and generally carrying on like Plan 90210 from Outer Space. This mess culminates when Greener trains the other savages to fly 1000-year-old, perfectly functioning jet fighters they unearth in Texas to stage a last-ditch dogfight with the Psychlos, in which Cave Bear-types perform (and talk) like Top Gun’s Tom Cruise (who’s also a scientology devotee).
I suspect it’s some kind of diversion. Battlefield Earth is intentionally schlocky in order to make next weekend’s release of Dinosaur, whose Disney producers the CoS has secretly infiltrated, look good. If you don’t believe me, rent a copy of The Tigger Movie and tell me if, when you play the final scene backwards, it doesn’t sound like Pooh is saying “ELRON IS GOD.” D+
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