Review: Battlefield Earth (2000)

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Screenplay By: Corey Mandell & J.D. Shapiro
Directed By: Roger Christian

I have often spoken of my love for movies so bad that they are awesome. In the search of these hidden gems one regularly comes across movies so bad that they are just bad. Battlefield Earth is such a movie, it’s not awesomely bad, it’s simply terrible. I have no intention of giving this film a detailed breakdown, not only isn’t it worthy of one but I feel no need to write a review that will do nothing but slam the film over and over again.

Surprisingly there were a few things to like about Battlefield Earth. Any sci-fi fan will get a kick out of the initial journeys into desolate and abandoned locales. The post-apocalyptic look is handled pretty good in those scenes, nothing to write home about, but enough to make a sci-fi nerd happy. The premise is also decent, but it only stays as a premise and never goes anywhere. That’s all I have on the positive side, it’s that bad.

I’m going to keep the list of negatives pretty short, because if one chose to they could conjure a twenty page dissertation about the flaws in Battlefield Earth. Most glaring is the story and the dialogue. The story makes no sense and is next to impossible to follow. The dialogue isn’t cheesy in a good way and there are far too many instances of people being portrayed as idiots who aren’t capable of normal syntax one second and then spouting off words like they work at the corner deli the next. The editing is atrocious, the acting consists of lots of yelling and grunts. If there was any actual direction in this film I certainly didn’t see it, and the final battle sequence is so hard to follow that you never know what is going on nor do you care. There’s so much more I could list but we’ll stop there.

There you have it, my review of Battlefield Earth. There’s no need to go any more in depth than what I wrote. It’s bad, that’s all there is to it. If you are like me and enjoy movies so bad that they are awesome then avoid Battlefield Earth. It isn’t awesome in any fashion, it’s just bad period.

Rating:

1/2*

Cheers,
Bill