The Dunk Tank: Battlefield Earth

I’ve never seen a movie that looked like it was actively trying to escape the frame, or at least I hadn’t until I consigned myself to Roger Christian’s would-be Scientologist blockbuster Battlefield Earth. That the film, based on a novel by the cult’s founder L. Ron Hubbard, was a colossal flop — it made back less than half of its then-titanic seventy-three million dollar budget — hardly needs saying. Its every shot see-saws violently, opposing Dutch angles rendering space unintelligible and conversations comically Gothic, as though each greeting and arched eyebrow was meant to be accompanied by a flourish of the organ and a clap of thunder and then someone forgot to put them in during post. There is a sense that the entire production is on some level aware of its own misbegotten nature and attempting to rock itself free of the screen’s confines and spare us the sight of its aborted, twitching mass.

If just one element in Battlefield Earth were firing straight, you might have a decent cult classic on your hands. Fix the script and no one’s going to notice that Barry Pepper isn’t much of a leading man. Put a little elbow grease and traditional miniature work into the effects and you’ve got yourself some captivating ripoffs of Lynch’s Dune. Draw and quarter the DP and cinematographer, or else the concept artists and costume department, and you might have something worth looking at! But no, it is not to be. Instead we watch its malformed elements slap together wetly as John Travolta in platform boots and Halloween Store werewolf gloves repeats the word “leverage” and slurps down gigantic green beers. Maybe the single oddest decision in the film is to make the alien overlords drink exclusively through straws, which makes them seem sort of like a race of enormous, powerful toddlers

Speaking of Barry Pepper, a sort of predecessor to Sam Worthington’s bland nothing of a leading man role in 2009’s Avatar, he is completely execrable. From his ape-like hooting to his complete nothing of  a romance with Chrissy (Sabine Karsenti), he is little more than a clot taking up space in the frame. Even his introduction is a bungled farrago, complete with the offscreen death of his unseen father and a good solid five minutes of uncertainty as to whether or not he himself is the character Chrissy is first seen waiting for at the gates of their primitive village. The film’s bravura final action sequence is a study in poorly-produced incomprehensibility, a tangle of firefights hacked into visual sludge by harsh angles, rapid cutting, and some of the worst slow motion in living memory — the film also makes frequent use of apparently pointless slow-motion leading into complex and distracting wipes — before the American military industrial complex is resurrected to save the day. The thing is a damned brain tumor committed to film.