Rating of
0.5/4
The Worst of the Worst
JLFM - wrote on 04/03/13
Worst movie ever made? Boy howdy, they weren't kidding. Who could have possibly thought that Battlefield Earth was a good idea? Who? Surely someone working on the set could've seen how absolutely moronic this whole thing is. Even The Last Airbender had some decent special effects and tons of unintentional laughs. Battlefield Earth has absolutely nothing going for it, and now holds the honored position of being my least favorite movie.
This is where I'd usually explain the plot of the film, but in Battlefield Earth, everything is so needlessly confusing and sloppily made and edited, it's almost impossible to tell what's going on most of the time. To the best of my ability, the story is about John Travolta dressed up in awful attire and make-up, trying to take advantage of the primitive human race by using them to mine for gold. The humans, of course, are trying to break free from their captors.
This nearly two hour Sci-Fi film seems to never end. While the novelty of being unbelievably terrible may keep some entertained for a short while, I quickly became bored. One can only endure so much awfulness before becoming just plain tired of it.
To explain everything that Battlefield Earth did wrong would to be to write for years and years. And seeing as this movie has already wasted too much of my life, I'll just explain a small fraction of Battlefield Earth's flaws. This should be more than substantial evidence that this is a film to be avoided.
First off, the story is cliched, unintelligent, and told with such laziness, and terrible editing, there's no way to tell what's going on most of the time. In fact, after the movie was over, I didn't recall a single character's name. The manner in which the story is presented makes no sense. I hardly understood anything.
The film appears to repeat itself dozens of times. There were at least a dozen times in this film where Jonnie Tyler (the human protagonist) is being choked by Terl (John Travolta). At least five scenes involve Terl babbling about how stupid Ker (his assistant) is. And Jonnie Tyler makes at least three escape attempts. Not to mention the excessive use of slo-mo and slanted camera angles. Seriously, every other camera shot was done at a slanted angle, even when people were just talking with each other. People today complain about shaky cam, but if more audiences saw what too much angled camera shots looked like, they would have nothing to say.
Special effects are terrible. Costumes are terrible (Breathing devices that go into your nostrils? What were they thinking?!). Make-up is terrible. Dialogue is laughably terrible. And don't even get me started about acting.
The score by Elia Cmiral is loud and obnoxious (like the movie). It focuses too much on poor percussion than actual music. I can only remember two scenes where the score actually had a tune.
If you're dying to see what many proclaim to be "the worst movie ever," the full version of Battlefield Earth is on YouTube. If you want to save yourself two hours of painfully terrible (and painfully boring) cinema, you'd be better off staring at a blank wall for the same amount of time. Unintentional laughs last only as long as you can tolerate bad and boring cinema. Ugh, I can't believe John Travolta still has a career.
