Battlefield Earth (12)

Having read the Book 'Battlefield Earth' by the Late Great L. Ron Hubbard, you can imagine my joy at the release of the film. Much awaited anticipation was soon to be let down once i saw the film. Now John Travolta is a brilliant and talented actor but i feel he was let down buy the script department this time. Although the film was watchable and did stick with most of the original storyline, i feel in my opinion that it was lacking the impact that the trailer implied and thefore seemed to lose the audiences interest halfway through the movie. The sort of film i would bung in the VCR if there was nothing else on. Travolta was convincing to say the least, but i feel he could have given more.

For many years my favourite book has been Battlefield Earth. It is a fantastic science fiction story that has a great bad guy, a great good guy and an "on the edge of your seat" action packed story. So when the film appeared I was very excited... Oh dear what did they do?

The film makers should have put a disclaimer on the bottom of the posters that read something like, "Warning this is not the film of the book it is just extremely loosely based on it.".

Ignoring the fact that the film has probably ruined the book for a lot of people and will also probably mean that a lot of people will now never read the book I will try to review the film in its own right...Bear with me...

Earth has been invaded by Aliens who are using our planet as a mining colony, the year is 3000 and humans are an endangered species who live sort of like cavemen hiding from the aliens. Humans no longer have any technology and wear cavemen like clothing, hunt with bows and arrows live in caves etc. Our hero is Johnny "goodboy" Tyler and he goes against his village elders wishes and leaves the safe mountains to travel down to the plains looking for a better home for the village "winter in the mountains is not fun". Johnny gets captured by an alien who decides to use humans to mine gold in dangerous parts of the world. Evil Alien trains human, gets more humans, trains them and sets about getting them to mine. Humans find weapons (including Harrier jump jets!) and set about destroying the all powerful alien race. The end.

My apologies for the boring story breakdown but I don't have a lot to work with!

The special effects look a bit cheap, nowhere near as sleek as other films around at the time. The film made the characters lifeless and drab, have you ever seen a film where the main character is so dull you couldn't care if they made it to the end or not? Well this is like that for every character. Even the bad guy is dull. I cannot remember one single piece of music from the film so no joy there either.

Overall I would rather chew a razor blade than watch this film again.