Battlefield Earth (2000)

★★½
Early in Battlefield Earth, the hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) thinks he's come across a monster and swings at it with a weapon he finds nearby. When he has a moment to get his bearings, he sees that it was only a lifeless structure. We recognize it as a dragon or dinosaur statue from a mini golf course, and his weapon was a golf club. Jonnie meets two hunters, who inform him of a great city nearby where the gods were frozen in their place during a conflict long ago. The hunters take Jonnie to the city to show him. They find one frozen god, who is just a stone statue. They go inside a building, where Jonnie sees more frozen gods and observes that they must have really angered someone to bring this horrible fate upon them. They are department store mannequins. This is not supposed to be a comedy, but the movie was trending in that direction. I realized this in the first 10 minutes, but I kept holding out hope that the script would settle down and deliver the serious science fiction action movie that the trailers promised. That never happened; the movie kept defying my expectations. Eventually I just gave in and enjoyed what I was watching because it was making me laugh. I saw this in the theater on its premiere weekend. I couldn't gauge the audience's reaction to this, but I'm certain everyone around me could gauge mine.

The movie's assembly is the result of hubris, sinister forces, inexplicable artistic choices and blind luck. Astronomer Fred Hoyle proposed that Darwinism was as unlikely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard to create a 747. Perhaps, but here we have evidence that a tornado sweeping through a cinematic junkyard could actually create something that falls between a bigger pile of rubbish and a polished movie, and that something is Battlefield Earth. It is the result of every possible oversight imaginable at every stage of development. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard penned the 1000-page book on which this movie was based and saw its publication in 1982. His life story, chronicled in Alec Nevala-Lee's book Astounding, is that of an imaginative and prolific writer-turned-madman. Isaac Asimov met him once and concluded once was enough. When the movie version finally gained traction in the late '90s thanks to John Travolta's involvement, a screenplay emerged, but its ties to Scientology made it untouchable. Travolta finally found a company willing to finance it, and the outcome is a strange assembly of extreme color palettes, tilted cameras, hammy acting and absurd plot developments.

In the year 3000, man is an endangered species thanks to the ruthless Psychlos, a warrior race that has conquered many planets throughout the galaxy. Earth has been occupied for 1000 years, with the remaining humans living in prehistoric tribes or used as slave labor by the Psychlos. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler doesn't believe in the existence of the aliens, so he sets out on a quest to find out for himself. Eventually, Jonnie and his hunter companions are captured by the aliens and taken to the ruins of Denver, which is housed inside a giant glass dome. It is here that the movie's main attraction makes his appearance. The Psychlo security chief is Terl (Travolta), and his very appearance inspires laughter, but wait until he speaks. Far from a menacing growl that we might expect a creature of his size (he's around eight feet tall) to use, his voice has an absurdly high pitch that makes everything he says funny and stands in contrast to his role as an intimidating alien who wields advanced weaponry. Terl is quite the creation. Travolta's performance is so bizarre that every time he exited a scene, I couldn't wait for him to come back and surprise me some more. Whether he's scheming against his superiors or going on drunken rants at the bar, Terl is the gift that keeps on giving.

Terl's apprentice is Ker (Forrest Whitaker), whom Terl is grooming to becoming the next security chief. They make quite a pair. Ker is less naïve and forms a perfect contrast to Terl's gullibility. There is a scene about halfway through the movie that illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Terl hates his assignment on Earth and wants to buy his way off by obtaining gold mined illegally using humans. Terl sees in Jonnie an especially intelligent human who could lead other humans in his gold-mining scheme, so he rounds up Jonnie and his friends and turns them loose, letting them think they've escaped so they can search for their favorite food. They find a rat, which was the only thing available, but watch Terl and Ker's reaction. Terl is delighted at the discovery, but Ker is skeptical and is disgusted that the rat is uncooked and wonders why only Jonnie is eating while the others watch. Terl concludes he is the leader and therefore eats first. This exchange is entirely in line with their established personalities, but their delivery of this dialogue when coupled with their body language, voice inflection and facial features just achieves a whole surreal level of comedy. They have lots of exchanges like this. A later scene in which Ker finally gets the upper hand only to see Terl pull a last-minute save had me in stitches.

As part of the plan, Terl puts Jonnie in a learning machine to help him learn the Psychlo language, but he also learns their history, their technology, their weaknesses and so on. With this new-found knowledge gifted to him by his captor, Jonnie organizes a revolt to overthrow his oppressors and save the planet. This story arc is ludicrous, yet its lack of plausibility somehow escaped the attention of its screenwriters (both credited and uncredited; there's plenty of finger-pointing going around) and ultimately whoever approved the final version. In order to squeeze in time to train his troops and plan the revolt, Jonnie breaks into Fort Knox to retrieve the gold (barely covered in dust after 1000 years) and present it to Terl when he returns to collect. As soon as I saw the stacks of gold bars, I laughed because I knew that somehow Terl would believe whatever story Jonnie told him to explain the fact that the gold is already smelted. Absurd plot developments like this happen often enough that when something truly stupid happens—something that would earn harsh criticism in another movie—it's just another silly circumstance in a movie full of them. When Jonnie's allies show up in Harrier jets to fight the Psychlos after training for one week, I just went with it.

The Psychlos themselves are a peculiar bunch. They are oafish and display little common sense despite graduating from academies that teach cadets how to conquer galaxies. It's hard to believe these creatures managed to get out of their own solar system. I don't know how in the world Travolta and Whitaker developed these characters. I don't know if director Roger Christian imparted his vision for how Psychlos should behave or if the actors came up with these quirks and ticks on their own. Like the aftermath of Hoyle's tornado, the fallen pieces just came together in the right way and right time to produce something oddly watchable. Whitaker can hate on the movie all he wants in interviews to try to save face, but watching him here mesh so well with Travolta's Terl, I can only conclude that he had a great time filming his scenes. Either that, or his ability to maintain composure and commit to the part when the camera starts to roll is the best ever on the list of good performances in troubled productions, surpassing Roy Scheider in Jaws II and George Clooney in Three Kings and even David Thewlis in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Battlefield Earth manages an impressive feat. It sustains scene after scene of happy accidents throughout its two-hour run. It's like watching a two-hour sports blooper compilation where every blooper happened in the same game. We begin with Jonnie Goodboy Tyler smacking a mini golf obstacle, get numerous Dutch angles, see a cow's leg shot out from under it, listen to Ker's plan to buy new wives and end with Terl behind bars missing one of his appendages. As odd as this may sound, it is John Travolta who holds this all together. He went all in to give us this entertaining villain who is entertaining for the wrong reasons. I don't care how many Razzies this movie won. The Golden Raspberry Award Foundation is the same organization that concluded that Ennio Morricone's iconic score for John Carpenter's The Thing deserved one of its statuettes, so whatever. Laughter is an incredibly satisfying feeling. Watching a comedy that advertises itself as a comedy and fails to deliver leaves a terrible emptiness in the viewer. The year 2000 saw Ready to Rumble, The Ladies Man and Snow Day bumble their way through their negligible plots on their way to obscurity. John Travolta's pet project achieves something they could not: It made me laugh. I'll take it.

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