Battlefield Earth

"Better than Star Wars" - an actual John Travolta quote about this film

Did you know that the full title of this film is actually Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000?  The shortened title sounds like it might be halfway decent (if you didn't know any better), but that subtitle...yeesh.  Let me take the understated route and say that any movie set 1000 years in the future has a decent chance of looking silly unless they spent years speculating about the future of technology.  Is that a fair statement?  I think I'm being damn generous.  This isn't my first bought with BE.  When it first hit the video shelves after its disastrous theatrical run, I tried to watch this with my friends at No Bulljive; excessive drinking and a break to play Frisbee in the rain didn't come close to making this watchable.  What made me think that watching it on my own, years later, would improve the experience?  I had a theory.  This time, I decided to watch the Saga of the Year 3000 in 15-20 minute chunks.  That way, the pain gets spread out over a period of weeks and I don't spend the night with self-loathing.  What made me decide to endure this pain again at all?  I caught a few minutes on TV and laughed out loud.  What can I say?  I like to mock.

Entertainment Weekly published this.  Who knew they could be kind of funny?

Let's run through the plot as quickly as possible, because that's where a lot of the hurty brain feelings come from.  In the year 3000 (A.D., I guess...which calendar do the aliens follow?), humans are an endangered species.  An alien race called the Psychlos has conquered the Earth, using it as...um...well...maybe they're draining our resources?  I'm not sure.  They like gold, though.  Anyway, the Psychlos live in dome-covered cities, spread across the globe, with their largest settlement being in New York Chicago Los Angeles Denver (?!?).  Humans are either used as slave labor or they eke out an existence in small bands, hidden from the Psychlos.  Jonnie Goodboy (Barry Pepper) lives with his tribe deep in the Rocky Mountains.  Basically, he's a caveman, just without a decent cave.  Fed up with eating dirt for dinner, Jonnie goes exploring to see just how much of his tribe's legends are true.  Along the way, he teams up with a hunter, Carlo (Kim Coates).  While they're busy making friends, the two are captured by some Psychlos.

So far, it's not good, but it could be worse.  There's a Star Wars: Episode III-worthy shout of "Noooo!" in the beginning, and it's stupid to think that human speech devolved into animal grunting without any noticeable physical changes.  Oh, and the fact that a miniature golf course withstood 1000 years of weather and is still recognizable is pretty ridiculous, but that's as bad as the introduction gets.  It never gets this good again.

Enter the Psychlos.  Terl (John Travolta), the security chief on Earth, is eager for the end of his time on Earth; he has paid his dues by living on our stupid planet, and now he wants to leave.  That's too bad.  Terl's boss shows up and tells him that his stay has been extended indefinitely, thanks to something he did with "the Senator's daughter."  Wait...that sounds familiar...is that the movie where Travolta asks someone what is worse than rape, and it turns out to be...wait for it...rape?  Never mind, that's The General's Daughter.  I never thought I would be comparing that movie favorably.

Anyway, Terl comes up with a plan.  When he sees that Jonnie, a common "man-animal," is smart enough to wield some Psychlo technology, he decides to educate Jonnie.  Why?  Um.  The end game has Jonnie and some other man-animals working mining machines to dig up gold in a radioactive area (where Psychlos can't go), so he can buy his way off the planet with (radioactive, and therefore useless to the radiation-shy Psychlos) gold, as well as with some blackmail videos he has stored up and creatively edited.  How does Terl teach Jonnie to mine?  He has Jonnie sit in front of a learning machine (we call that a television in America) that shoots education right into his face.

"Get ready for the money shot, er, an unnecessarily complete education, Jonnie"

Wait...the Psychlos have monitoring drones, but not mining drones?  That makes no se --- AAAUGH!  BRAIN HEMORRHAGE! 

Jonnie learns the Psychlo language, their history, his own history, mathematics, and all sorts of other things that have absolutely nothing to do with gold mining.  With his new-found education, Jonnie sees the weaknesses of his enemies, and teaches his fellow man-animals that now is the time to fight like an animal because four legs good, two legs bad! be inspired by the United States Constitution (really) and fight for their right to completely exterminate the Psychlo race.  The movie ends with cavemen destroying spaceships with 1000+ year-old fighter jets (let that sink in...it's okay to scream...) and teleporting (They can teleport?  Why do they have space ships, then?) a nuke to the Psychlo home planet, which destroys it like a friggin' Death Star.  That's right, humanity is saved by nuclear weapons.  Whoops, I'm sorry, nuclear weapon, singular.

Here's a fun quote from the movie: "I'm going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a diet of kerbango."  Whaaat?!?  Waaas?!?  Thaaat?!?  First of all, I love that Psychlo children are called "baby Psychlos."  That would be like telling someone that I slept like a human baby last night.  Basically, this begs the question, "as opposed to what...?"  Also, on a more personal note, that line almost made scotch come out of my nose, which only upset me more.  Just terrible dialogue.

Why is Battlefield Earth one of the most notorious movies of the the modern film era?  Sure, my description of it might sound kind of dumb, but is it really that much dumber than the bulk of what Hollywood churns out every year?  I don't think so.  No, BE plumbs the depths of awfulness by doing everything you can do in a movie poorly.

Let's start with the acting.  It's horrible.  End of story.  Honestly, John Travolta is as horrible of an overactor has ever, and his worst tendencies come out in force whenever he plays a villain.  Forest Whitaker was surprisingly bad as Travolta's lackey.  Barry Pepper was the worst, though.  The combination of his awful acting and his character's ridiculous dialogue puts him forever on my shit list. 

"The Academy saw this movie and wants my award back?  Aww, man...!"

The direction by Roger Christian is even worse.  It's not bad enough that the special effects look cheap, which is about all I expected this movie to do right, but everything in this movie is cheap.  The opening credits look like they were done with Power Point.  The Psychlos all have different accents, which is such an unnatural choice for actors to make that it had to have been made by the director ("John, you can be from Victorian England, and Forrest, you can be from Gruntsville, Oklahoma").  The camera work is wretched.  Every chase scene, which is normally something I would assume you would want to imply speed in, is filmed in slow-motion.  The camera tilts at random times, for no effect at all.  Even the transition wipes between scenes looked amateurish.  No wonder this director never helmed another major motion picture after this (or before, either, to be honest).

But maybe it all looks cool, right?  'Fraid not.  The costume design is laughably bad.

Barry Pepper, or the worst X-Men character from the 90s?  You decide.

I'm always impressed when primitive characters have long, flowing hair that is both tangle-free and not dread-locked.  It tells us so much about the culture of these man-animals, that they have lost all educated knowledge, but have still found a way to produce and use Suave shampoo.  The man-animal design is kind of stupid, but the Psychlos are where the real stupidity comes in.

Psychlos are 8-foot tall humanoids with very large skulls, bad teeth, and a lot of hair.  I don't know exactly why they wear riding pants and cod pieces, but it's certainly not for the cool factor.  What bothers me most are the mittens they call hands.  Look at the size of those things!  They are bigger than their faces and, when you watch the actors try to use them, are clearly awkward and nearly useless.  Well, at least they all attain their 8-foot tall stature by wearing Kiss-style platform boots.

The primary reason Battlefield Earth is one of the worst movies in modern cinema is not because the acting/directing/special effects and costuming were bad.  Sure, with all of that going against it, BE was going to go down as a wretched film, but it could have built a cult following if it wasn't so inept.  You see, the man-apes are acting like they're in a B-movie update of Planet of the Apes, but the Psychlos are acting like they are in a wry, British comedy about ne'er do wells who keep stabbing each other in the back (only, you know, ridiculously unfunny).  Travolta's accent doesn't help.  There are two completely incompatible tones at work in this movie, and neither one is good; the man-animals are never inspiring or clever, and the Psychlos are never evil or funny enough to make their backstabbing interesting.  Funny-bad movies typically get that way because they are played straight, but are absolutely ridiculous.  This movie tries to poke fun at the villains by making them petty and stupid, but their efforts to ridicule anything pale in comparison to the pure hate that your creative mind will come up with.

But is this the worst movie ever made?  I doubt it, but it certainly deserves to be in the competition.  If you are too stupid to take my advice and leave this one alone, do yourself a favor and put it on when you plan on falling asleep or passing out.

Still not convinced?  Well, let me tell you how awful this movie is.  When Terl drops off Jonnie to mine gold, he leaves a monitoring drone to make sure they are working.  Jonnie's plan is to travel to another location and teach all his caveman friends how to fly fighter jets because, obviously, they haven't rusted and turned to dust over the past 1000 years.  And they certainly weren't used to fight the Psychlos 1000 years ago, and are technology that they are not prepared to battle.  But what about the gold, Jonnie?  Don't worry about it.  He's just going to fly to Fort Knox and pick up the amount that Terl demanded from the mine.  You might be asking yourself how stupid these man-animals are to hand over bricks of solid gold and expect someone to believe that they were mined that way.  Apparently, not as stupid as Terl, who accepts the gold without question and apparently never checks his monitor drone to see if some man-animals took a flying vehicle for a joyride of a few thousand miles.  What does it use for fuel?  Stupidity?  Thank goodness that these gold-hungry aliens haven't found one of the largest (and most famous) stashes of gold in the world in their 1000 year reign!  Uh-oh...I think I taste bile.  Time to forget about this movie again.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Woo!  Let's hear it for remakes!  WOO!  Yeah...I may be overcompensating.  Let's hear it for train-based thrillers, then?  Woo...?

In the mid-70s, Walter Matthau starred in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.  While making a movie about criminals with a master plan was certainly not new at the time, the sarcastic and light-hearted tone of the main characters added some unexpected levity to a subject matter that would normally have been deadly serious.  It is that tone, more than the crime itself, that made One Two Three a success.

Fast forward thirty years or so, and it is naturally time to remake this movie and update it to modern times.  The Taking of Pelham 123 (check it out --- the numbers aren't spelled out any more...edgy!) makes a few important departures from the original film.  Four armed men seize control of the New York subway train leaving Pelham station at 1:23, led by a man who will eventually identify himself as "Ryder...with a Y" (John Travolta).  Ryder alerts the on-duty train dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington), and demands $10 million in ransom for the hostages he has.  The city of New York has one hour to comply before Ryder starts killing hostages.  That's all well and good, and the mayor of New York (James Gandolfini) is willing to pay the ransom, but how does Ryder expect to escape?

I am not the biggest fan in the world of Tony Scott's direction, but the man has made some pretty good movies over the years.  This might not be one of them.  The movie has plenty of scenes shown in fast motion, often followed up with extremely blurry slow-motion shots.  Is it because the camera is showing things passing by from the train's perspective, and then slowing down to show something important?  No, I think it's done simply to look cool.  And it does, it just doesn't have anything to do with the story or characters, and that irritates me.  The rest of his direction is fine, I guess.  I think he hasn't been bringing out the best in Denzel in their past few collaborations, but even mediocre Denzel is still pretty solid.

This is the third time Tony Scott has directed Denzel Washington, after Man on Fire and Deja Vu, and I am very surprised that they keep working together.  Sure, Man on Fire was awesome, but Denzel is capable of a lot more than what Scott demands of him in these thrillers.  Yes, he was fine in this movie.  His character was changed significantly from the original film to add depth and moral ambiguity, and Washington conveys those differences well.  It's just not a great role in a great movie.  John Travolta is partly to blame for that.  I hate it when Travolta plays villains.  For some reason, playing morally bankrupt characters gives him a license to overact and deliver incredibly stupid lines.  It all began back in Broken Arrow, and he has managed to find the most ridiculous lines in every mean character he's played since.
(Link) View more Riley Hale Sound Clips and Vic Deakins Sound Clips
This movie's winner for my "John Travolta 'Yeah...ain't it cool' Award" is:

"[Walter Garber] sounds sexy.  He'd be my bitch in prison."

Thanks for the insight, John.  Basically, Travolta misses the mark on being sinister and instead is an over-animated egomaniac with a "cool" mustache. The supporting cast is full of really good actors, but their characters aren't too spectacular.  James Gandolfini is the best of the bunch, with Luis Guzman and John Turturro playing pretty vanilla characters that are there just to propel the plot.  That really disappointed me, since I like all three actors.

I would also like to call out Brian Helgeland's script.  While Helgeland is capable of some pretty great work, he leans more toward bad writing.  This isn't one of his better efforts.  Since the movie is a remake it's easy to see what was changed in the script.  Helgeland added copious amounts of profanity, unnecessary car crashes, and the typical movie stereotype of New Yorkers (you know...loud-mouthed jerks).  Personally, I think the writing matches up pretty well with Scott's jittery camera work, but it's not terribly thrilling and just turning up the attitude of the bad guys doesn't fix that core problem.  And what was with changing the names of the bad guys?  In the original, the villains had code names, so they couldn't be identified; they went by colors, an idea later copied in Reservoir Dogs.  Instead of sticking with the original smart idea (and drawing comparisons to Dogs), he came up with..."Ryder with a Y"?  What, am I supposed to infer that this train rider is a rebel because he's only sometimes a vowel?  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  My least favorite thing about the plot is Ryder's motive. SPOILER: Ryder is already rich, and doesn't need the ransom money.  He already has $2 million, and it's been invested in gold for about a decade.  This is all just to make him obscenely wealthy.  What a boring motive for a villain.

This isn't a bad movie, but it's just not that great.  They updated a movie by removing all the charm from it, replacing it with random F-bombs and Travolta-stache.  The cast is very talented, but the script isn't very interesting, which is hard to do with a heist movie.  It is fast-paced and manages to keep the puzzle pieces falling slowly enough so that there is always something to learn, but it's just not enough.  This is just a bland product with some good ingredients.

Carrie

I knew it!  And now, thanks to Carrie, I can prove it!  What is "it," you ask?  "It" is the fact that girls love being naked in the women's locker room.  The title sequence for this movie is one long slow motion sequence, filled with laughing, bouncing, and a complete lack of concern over full frontal nudity or wetness from the showers.  If I had seen this scene when I was in high school, it would have BLOWN MY MIND.  As it is, I'm a married adult now, so I just thought it was an...interesting way to begin a horror movie.

Not surprisingly, Carrie is about Carrie (Sissy Spacek), a high school student that is bullied at school by the other girls and bullied at home by her crazy religious mother (Piper Laurie).  Basically, Carrie sucks at life.  Things get worse when, in the gym shower, she gets her first period and freaks the hell out.  Her classmates helpfully heckle her and bombard her with tampons.  Did you know that girls mature faster than boys?  Apparently, Carrie had never heard of a period before that day.  I don't blame her for being frightened; if I noticed blood seeping from my naughty bits, I wouldn't be calm either.  Her classmates behavior gets them in trouble with the gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), who forces the girls to serve detention with her or lose their prom privileges.  Most of the girls --- particularly Sue (Amy Irving), Norma (PJ Soles), and Helen (Edie McClurg, who never played a young woman again) --- were willing to take detention, but the head Mean Girl, Chris (Nancy Allen) refused on general principle.  And she vowed revenge on Carrie for not really being the cause of her not being allowed into prom.  Sue, on the other hand, felt really bad about the whole ordeal and convinced her boyfriend, Tommy, to take Carrie to prom.  Meanwhile, the evil Chris hatches a plan with her dim-witted boyfriend (John Travolta) to publicly humiliate Carrie and finally punish her for existing.  Little do they know that Carrie has special powers, powers that get stronger when she's upset.  MWA-HA-HA!

Carrie is the first film to be adapted from a Stephen King novel.  Personally, I'm not a huge King fan; I've tried, but I just can't get past the recurring theme of drunken writers, the unexplained supernatural phenomena, or his habit of being self-referential.  Normally, I find the movie adaptations of his work to be pretty horrid (Dreamcatcher...***shudder***).  Of course, with over 120 writing credits on IMDB, the man is bound to have some good stuff on occasion, and I think Carrie qualifies as one the better King films.

 The acting and direction in the film are pretty solid.  In the lead role, Sissy Spacek is annoying, frightening and sympathetic at the same time.  I think the best part of her performance was when things went wrong at prom; I normally don't find bug eyed, stiff limbed performances compelling, but she reminded me of a velociraptor.  That's probably not the most flattering thing to say about a performance I liked, but there was definitely something cold and reptilian in the climactic prom scene.  Piper Laurie also turned in a good (albeit one-dimensional) performance.  I'm pretty sure that she has a lock on the Crazy Mother in Film award for the 70s.  Spacek and Laurie were so convincing in their respective roles that they were nominated for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards, respectively.  Horror movies occasionally get a little respect at the Oscars, but this was the first horror film to earn two acting nominations.

The rest of the cast, however, was pretty mediocre.  PJ Soles was...well, if you've seen her once, you get the idea; there's nothing wrong with that, but nothing noteworthy, either.  This was the first time I had ever seen Nancy Allen outside of a Robocop movie.  Apparently, she was pretty at some point, but not pretty enough to get away with the crap her character pulls in this movie.  As for young John Travolta, I have to say that I'm shocked he had a film career after this.  Aside from having the earliest utterance of "git er done" I have heard in film, Travolta turns in a performance that makes his Barbarino look like a genius.  Brian De Palma directed the film and I guess he did a pretty decent job.  After all, his two main actresses earned Oscar nominations, so he couldn't have done a bad job, right?  I can see De Palma's style at work, with his use of slow-motion in key scenes, but overall I wasn't too impressed.  I think my biggest problem with De Palma's direction here is his frequent homages to Psycho.  Carrie's high school is Bates High and every time Carrie uses her powers, the slasher music from Psycho is played.  Naming the high school after Norman Bates is fairly subtle and clever, but the musical cues just felt lazy; using such recognizable horror movie music to indicate that Carrie's powers might be dangerous is overkill and those scenes would have been better served with an original composition.

The strength of this movie is its ability to catch you off guard.  For most of the film, you want to root for Carrie and you're glad to see her coming out of her shell for a bit.  I also agreed with Miss Collins, who sympathized with Carrie, but also felt the urge to smack her.  And she did.  The first two-thirds of the film is pretty low key and you just know that something bad will happen at prom.  When it does, though, this movie definitely under-promised and over-delivered.  The scale of Carrie's rage is pretty shocking the first time you see it.  And if that doesn't affect you, Spacek's nonverbal acting should; as I said before, she seems inhuman in these scenes.  As effective as the ending is, though, the rest of the film has a lot of generic and predictable moments that diminish the payoff of those final scenes.  Still, this is a classic for good reason.

From Paris With Love

John Travolta has been nominated for two Oscars for Best Actor; these nominations accompanied his biggest successes, Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction.  I mention this because I appreciate Travolta in those movies.  At his best, Travolta exudes a casual cool that makes even a disco movie fun to watch.  I also mention this because it is hard to recognize that talent in most of his movies.  Travolta has a tendency to split his acting chops; either he is trying too hard to be serious, or he chews on scenery like a bad dog when he is trying to play a bad-ass.  From Paris With Love is definitely one of the latter occasions, and spraying him with water won't help.


James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is the personal aide to the US Ambassador in France, but he is secretly a low-level gopher for the CIA.  After several menial jobs, he is given a serious one; he is to help Charlie Wax (John Travolta) with whatever his mission is.  The mission never really gets much clearer than that, I'm afraid.  This is partly due to a poor script, and partly because Wax tends to lie to Reece.  At first, it appears to be a politically motivated series of drug busts, but Wax later claims that it has everything to do with terrorists.  I'm sure many terrorists get their money from drugs, but I doubt that the Asian mobs have many dealings with Islamic terrorists.  It assumes a level of cooperation between secretive brotherhoods that I find unlikely at best and insulting to my intelligence at worst.  Reece doesn't do a whole lot except react to Wax's bad-assery.  There are many instances of this, as Wax kills about thirty people in this movie, without pondering repercussions or worrying about innocents.  Wax isn't really a good guy so much as he is a weapon that has been sicced on his enemies.  As the movie progresses, Reece becomes more involved in the action and more confident in his life-or-death choices.  Eventually, he follows his own instincts instead of Wax's, and is proved right; that means that he is the only person between a group of people and death by terrorists.

If the story sounds vaguely familiar, it should.  This is just another slight tweak on the traditional buddy cop flick formula; as best exemplified in Lethal Weapon, there is one crazy-dangerous guy and one by-the-book type, only here the by-the-books type is also completely inexperienced.  Changing just that small experiential dynamic hurts this movie a lot.  Reece is relegated to doing next to nothing but complain for about an hour of the movie, while Wax does his thing.  If they had similar levels of experience (although, doesn't the boring cop usually have more experience?), then Reece could justify arguing with Wax, but he just keeps taking the craziness with a passivity that is similar to fraternity hazing.  Reece may not like what Wax is doing to/with him, but he's got to deal with it or else he'll never be part of the club.  This also has the side effect of making Wax's decisions seem like the only correct decisions.  There is a brief scene involving the French police and a bomb that tries to balance that a little, but it is nowhere near effective enough.

It's sad that this movie came from such excellent action movie stock.  Luc Besson is a great action movie writer, with credits ranging from Leon: The Professional to The Transporter, to Taken, to the best French language action movie ever, District 13.  Director Pierre Morel has only two other movie credits, but they are the excellent District 13 and Taken.  Given that information, I would assume this movie would be completely awesome.

Instead, we end up with a fairly generic template and John Travolta overacting.  I'm not complaining about that, mind you.  I actually enjoyed a decent amount of Travolta in this film.  If you paired him up with a suitable villain, like a drugged up Nicholas Cage or a 1990s Gary Oldman role, this movie could be a guilty pleasure.  Instead, nobody tries to match Travolta's energy and the story ends up feeling limp.  A big part of this is the fault of Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  He underacts in a movie that has absolutely zero use for subtlety, and his character's cleverness fails to jibe with his character's naivety.  That is partially the writer's fault, but his acting is so distinct between his clever self and his over-his-head-in-trouble self that it just detracts from the film as a whole.

There is, not surprisingly, a lot of action in this movie.  Some of it looks pretty good, I'll admit.  Most of it apparently caters to Travolta's age and fitness level, though.  I'm almost 100% certain that he does not have more than three seconds of continuous action footage in this movie.  It's edited well and looks pretty good, but after a while I noticed that there were no establishing shots or zoom outs to show that the actors actually worked out for their roles.  That's not a huge problem for me, but it stands in stark contrast with the parcour-crazy Besson/Morel collaboration, District 13.  That may be an unfair comparison, but I am very surprised that the same creative team was involved in both.

The advertisements for this DVD claim that this is the "coolest Travolta since Pulp Fiction."  That's a blatant lie.  His character in From Paris... is clearly more derivative of his "Yeah, ain't it cool" character from Broken Arrow than his Jackrabbit Slims-loving character from Pulp Fiction.  The sad thing is that Travolta is by far the best thing about this movie, despite some pretty lame lines and less than legit action sequences.  The plot here is poor and unnecessarily convoluted (I didn't even bother discussing that mess), but Travolta is entertaining enough to make it watchable.