Battlefield Earth (2000)

A worse religious recruitment film than Passion of the Christ

It is the year 3000. Earth is ruled by aliens known as Psyclos, who have decimated Earth to mine for Gold, which is apparently valuable to aliens to. Few humans remain, some are kept as slaves for the Psyclos, and Johnny (Tyler Pepper) begins to build a resistance against the Psyclos.

Battlefield Earth won all 7 Razzies it was nominated for at the 21st Golden Raspberry Awards, and in 2010, was the recipient of the Worst Picture of the Decade award. But the big question is, did it deserve those wins? Hell yes it did.


I'm not going to sugercoat anything here, Battlefield Earth is horrible in every single way. And not just in the main ways, such as characters, script and acting, but they manage to excel in being horrible with the smaller things that don't usually get much notice. Every single one of their camera angles is tilted, be it in the slightest way to the most glaringly obvious way possible, while every scene of the film seems to be overly tinted in one singular colour, be it blue, or brown, it's an utter eye-sore. They even manage to fuck up the transition effects, by using the curtain wipe effect to transition inbetween almost every single scene this film has.

The alien invaders of the film are truly horrifying, and not horrifying in the same way the Xenomorph was in Alien, they just look utterly terrible. What do they look like, you ask? Imagine actors bulked up to look slightly muscly, their hair in the ugliest braided hairstyle you could imagine, their hands oversized and their nails uncut, and you have the "terrifying" Psyclos. With a budget of $44 million. you'd think they could've conjured up aliens that looked even a percentage decent. One thing that's largely noticable throughout the film is that the Psyclos laugh a lot, and I mean a lot, as if they permenantly have laughing gas flowing within their bloodstream.

John Travolta plays the lead alien of the film, going by unimaginative name of Terl, and he must've have been starving throughout the filming of this film, considering how much he chews the scenery all throughout. In a film filled with hammy actors, Travolta somehow manages to standout, probably due to his over the top line delivery which was buried in a high voice which convinced me that his testicles were descending up his body. Terl especially manages to prove how smart a leader he is and that he is as great a marksman as he claims to be, when he manages to shoot the leg of an unarmed, unmoving cow who was minding his own business instead of shooting the humans that were coming behind him.

Ugliness personified

As the human leader, Johnny is utterly bland and largely undeveloped, but he tries to make up for it by ALWAYS SHOUTING HIS LINES! He shares the same large problem that all of the other human characters have, they are missing any attempt at character development in order to try and make us care about the characters, but the writers seemed to have avoided this because they feel we should be investing within the character regardless due to them being invaded by the Psyclos, which is utterly lazy, half-assed and unsuccessful tactic. Hell, I cared more about that random cow who just lost it's leg above any of the humans, maybe because it wasn't onscreen long enough for me to begin hating it.

You will not believe how much slo-mo is used within this film. If you had problems with Zack Snyder constantly using it, trust me, he has got nothing on this film. If you sped up all of the slo-mo scenes to a normal speed, you may cut a good chunk off this film's running time. Speaking of which, this two hour film really manages to run on for much too long than it need to, but to be honest, you would already know this before you were 20 minutes into the film.

It is astounding how many plot holes the film manages to cram in within it's two hours running time, and how the film suffers from them due to how head-bangingly frustrating they are. Firstly, the Psyclos have taken over Earth because they are mining it for gold, and yet they are completely oblivious to Fort Knox, which is filled with gold. And let's not forget how a primitive band of humans manage to successfully pilot fighter jets in two weeks, and defeat all of the Psyclos.

Battlefield Earth is a film which, astoundingly, fails across the entire board. Direction, acting, line delivery, character design, characters, plot, script, the film fails at every single point. It deserved every single one of those Razzie wins, and is, without a doubt, one of the single worst films to ever be made in the history of the world.