Battlefield Earth is a 2000 American science fiction film directed by Roger Christian, based on the 1982 novel of the same name by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
The film is set in the year 3000 A.D., where the Earth has been conquered and humanity enslaved by an alien race called the Psychlos. The story follows a young human named Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who leads a rebellion against the Psychlos and attempts to reclaim Earth.
The film was a critical and commercial failure, with reviewers panning its convoluted plot, one-dimensional characters, and over-the-top visual style. It was also widely mocked for its connection to Scientology, as the novel was written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
Review By Ben Dover:
Battlefield Earth: An Unprecedented Amalgamation of Cinematic Feces
Oh Battlefield Earth, you lumbering, grotesque affront to every tenet of competent filmmaking and basic human dignity. This unholy 2000 abomination, ostensibly adapted from the certifiable ramblings of L. Ron Hubbard, is such a staggering misfire, such an egregious assault on the very concept of watchable entertainment, that merely describing its cavalcade of ineptitudes feels like an interminable penance. Alas, we must endeavor to put this straight-to-video-quality “blockbuster” squarely in the pillory it deserves.
From the opening frames, director Roger Christian hurls viewers headlong into a crisis-level psychotropic episode posing as a sci-fi epic. The cartoonishly over-designed Psychlo aliens, with their sneering dreadlocks and cheap foam muscle suits, aren’t just garden-variety interstellar conquerors – they’re grotesque personifications of all seven deadly sins waddling around like anthropomorphic hemorrhoids. And their scenery-chewing villainy is matched only by the mind-numbing idiocy of their ostensible human prey.
Enter our beefy-armed “hero” Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (yes, that’s truly his name), who anchors the “resistance” with all the emotional depth and dramatic gravitas of a napkin holder. As he grunts and mumbles his way through reams of Hubbard’s turgid, faux-profound dreck, you’ll find yourself longing for the subtle actorly brilliance of a Lassie or Mr. Ed just to salvage some crumb of dignity. It’s community theatre at its most retch-inducing.
The film’s visuals, meanwhile, look like they were art directed by a drunken 90s desktop wallpaper designer. The dated CGI, sound stage-bound settings, and overall chintzy effects work make even notoriously low-budget SyFy originals look like Weta Digital masterpieces by comparison. It’s as if professionalism and basic quality control were forcibly ejected from the filmmaking process.
Yet even when assessed purely as a “so bad it’s good” folly, Battlefield Earth fails miserably by virtue of being a stupefying endurance test. For every microsecond of unintentional high camp brilliance imparted by the Psychlos’ ludicrous designs or Barry Pepper’s pec-busting hero turn, there are several eons of soul-sucking monotony. Dreary worldbuilding monologues, endless sequences of people trudging through abandoned cityscapes, action set pieces that could make The Rock fall into a coma – it’s all here in this bloated 118-minute marathon of mind-numbing tedium.
Roger Christian’s magnum opus isn’t just a bad movie – it’s definitive proof that an unlimited supply of money and resources are no bulwark against the existential toxicity of pure, irredeemable hack-work. Battlefield Earth is celluloid primordial soup, an unprecedented amalgamation of cinematic feces that must be witnessed in its full grotesquerie to be truly understood as the darkest of all possible timelines.
Critics Consensus:
Critics 3% Audience 12%
This movie is a complete mess. Everything–EVERYTHING–about this movie sucks. The acting, the characters, the dialogue, the storyline, the camera angles, the tinted film, and even the very logic of it!
Trailer:
AI Images:
