31 Days of Cheese: Day 27 - Battlefield Earth

Well we finally emerge from the deep cavern that is Grade Z Movie hell blinking the sunlight and... Oh no. Not this. Anything but this.

Battlefield Earth.

Well at least this film had a budget. In fact I think the budget for John Tavolta’s coffee was larger than the total spent on the last 4 films.

Still. Oh my.

Let me confess. I have, up to now, watched or re-watched each and every film I’ve written about just before I wrote about it. That is, up until now. I watched this junk about a month and half ago for reasons that I won’t get into and I utterly refuse to be someone who has seen this film four times. (The other times were once after my brother bought me the VHS for my birthday, the second time was with my brother who did want to see just how bad it was and the last time was as I stated. Never again.).

It’s appallingly bad. You could go mad simply pointing out the damn plot holes. For example it’s a 1,000 years after the Psychos (whatever) have conquered the earth. The good guys (us) end up defeating them using 1,000 year old Hawker Harriers after learning to fly them using a 1,000 year old flight simulator (which like everything else works perfectly).

Then there is the matter of the alien’s home planet having an atmosphere that would blow up if exposed to “radiation”. This means that the planet’s atmosphere would have blown up about 3-8 minutes after their sun’s first solar flare.

Enough.

Never mind that the aliens all look like Alien Rasta’s on stilts (and they walk that way too.) the poor actors had to walk about on elevator shoes or something to give them their 7 ½ average height. Which leads to them walking very very carefully. Late in the film one of the human rebels tells another (over the perfectly functioning 1,000 year old walkie talkie by the way) that “three Guards are moving fast towards your position” (these may not be the exact words but like I said, I’m not watching this again.) The Guards are not moving fast. They are walking slowly as if they were wading through deep mud or didn’t want to fall off their shoes.

And there is the acting.

The less said about Tavolta’s over acting the better. Cause it’s grating and awful and just bad. The rest of the cast doesn’t do much better (Forest how could you?). And I did notice that the female lead (who doesn’t have much to do other than being in danger was able, like the female lead in Waterword, able to locate leg waxing and hairdressing services in the wasteland (but that’s a feature these kind of films).

When this film was being made there was some worry that this would be some sort of subliminal propaganda piece for L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology (Battlefield Earth was written by him – indeed the film covers only the first half of the book.) but judging from this film and the way Tom Cruise has been acting of late, I suspect that a provision of scientology is that you have to wreck your career at some point.

Enjoy with tongue. (It’s in the film. No, I won’t tell you about it.).