starring John Travolta, Barry Pepper, Forest Whitaker; directed by Roger Christian; from the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, screenplay by Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro
I went to see this opening night in the theaters, in order that my friends would have someone who actually had seen it, to give them a first hand report on it. Trust me, it is riddled with problems.
Forest Whitaker & John Travolta in “Battlefield: Earth”
I had to wonder at the production. Just on a visual level, the quality of special effects and make-up and costuming were poor, worse even than a 1960s science fiction show. The aliens, who are supposedly eight feet tall, are unconvincing. Their size is conveyed by putting everyone of them on high platform shoes and an outrageously lofty wig. The result of this is that their faces are too small for their apparent size. When I saw this in the theater, The Green Mile had been previously released. In that film, the character of John Coffee was supposedly a similar giant. Yet his excess size was successfully conveyed by a combination of CGI effects and staging tricks. So I wondered why Battlefield Earth’s designers chose such a sorry route. There were other problems in the visual presentation of the aliens, but I’ll stop with a reference to their hands. Supposedly their fingers were over-long. The production gave the actors rubbery gloves with long fingers, the fakery of which is easily spotted in the way the “fingertips” quiver whenever the characters move their hands.
We will quickly pass over such plot inanities as how people who, for most of the film, are illiterate and yet successfully manage to teach themselves how to fly complicated 20th century fighter jets. Or that fighter jets that have been sitting around (we are told) for a thousand years, manage to be perfectly functional (let alone be still gassed up). And as another friend (Erik Burnham) pointed out, after all the centuries the aliens have been removing the gold from Earth, they still managed to miss the vault at Fort Knox?
One of the most irritating film choices was the editor’s decision to use a wipe transition, wherein the wipe began from the center of the screen and swept to the sides. This was used regardless of what the final image of a scene was. It became absurd when the final scene image was someone’s face: there’s nothing like having a crack cut through the face of the main character and then having it all be “swept away.”
I’m sure we are all aware of the forces behind the film, which caused it to be made. What I do not understand is how the filmmakers seemed to have totally chucked any sense of craftsmanship out the window.
