I read over fifty reviews before seeing this film. They warned me. I didn't realize. I did not realize how bad, how truly and completely bad a film could be. And it's a big budget film! At least "Plan 9 From Outer Space," to which "Battlefield Earth" has often been compared, had the excuse of a low budget. Estimates on this film range from 50-80 million dollars. There is no excuse whatsoever that this made it into theaters.

The opener of this film was incredibly dull. First the title: "BATTLEFIELD EARTH" in green letters, over a picture of the earth. Then some random shots of trees and mountains, all very pretty, but who cares?

Then we see Our Hero. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, whom the natives refer to as "Greener," as in "The Grass Is Always...." He makes his appearance on a white horse, galloping across a pristine mountain range, blond hair flowing behind him in the wind. How corny can you get?

Five minutes into the film, Jonnie's father is dead. So he does a primal scream at the sky and buries Dad. Then he decides, hey, mountain life sucks, so he'll go down and look for a better place to live. But Jonnie's tribe believes that there are demons down in the lowlands. Seems that mankind became selfish, and the gods sent demons to punish them. This necessitates rituals with didgeridoo-sounding horns (shades of the Gungan war horns in "The Phantom Menace," of all things). Jonnie thinks all of this is silly and spends some time jumping around yelling "Demons! Monsters!" to prove how rational he is. The next day he leaves after a tender leavetaking with his girlfriend, who looks a bit like Alanis Morrissette. She gives him a crappy sort of necklace that his mother gave her before she *sniffle* died. Stone-faced, Jonnie leaves.

And runs smack dab into some monsters. No, actually, he spends some time trying to kill a papier-mache dragon in an overgrown putt-putt golf course. Some vagranty people show up, and Jonnie, after first trying to bash their heads in with his five-iron, goes with them.

They wind up staying in a matte painting -- er, city. The vagranty people explain that the mannequins in the mall were people who angered the gods. The three men are sitting around talking about manly stuff like chicks when SOMETHING (cue the evil music) shows up. Big glowing balls of green fire shoot people. Jonnie gets shot and crashes through about fifty plate glass windows in succession just like in "Blade Runner." Then they all get locked up and taken back to Denver.

The Psychlos live in Denver -- it's domed over so they can keep it full of their atmosphere. Now, a word on the Psychlos: they're wearing outfits that look like some kid on crack decided to design for Parliament Funkadelic. They look like GWAR, the heavy-metal darlings of "Beavis and Butthead." They have these huge heads like a cross between the things from "Alien" and the Coneheads from "Saturday Night Live." They have dreadlocks. They have random patches of hair spirit-gummed to their faces -- you can actually see where they cut the patches out of the big sheet of fake hair. Their hands have six fingers, and they look like big floppy clown gloves with talons. They seriously don't move at all except to sort of wave around. They have long Nazi coats and big stompin' KISS boots. But only one -- Our Villain -- has the codpiece. The famed codpiece. It's the size of my head. It looks like something is trying to escape. It's OBSCENE.

But enough of that. The Psychlos took over the world about a thousand years ago (in the year 2000, gasp!) and are riding herd on some humans that they use to do manual labor. Terl, the chief of security, is played by John Travolta in green contact lenses and the Codpiece of the Gods. As we meet him, he thinks he's going to get off this "crap planet" and back to Psychlo. He gleefully promises a bartender whom he's blackmailing that, no, he won't break his promise, which was to keep some *thing* secret in exchange for information...but now he wouldn't need information, now, would he, so he could tell the secret, now, couldn't he? Terl does this a lot -- he's like Space Lawyer. And then he laughs like Pee-Wee Herman with a fake British accent and a dollop of fey Vincent Price BWAHAHAHA thrown in for good measure.

But poor Terl, he's been foiled because he messed with a Senator's daughter, so he has to stay on Earth. Rather miffed, he stalks out only to find that Our Hero, Jonnie, has somehow managed to shoot a Psychlo dead (never mind that he doesn't know the first thing about guns). Terl refuses to believe it, so he asks to see it again. Jonnie does it again. Terl laughs. It's funny. Ha.

Terl has this great idea. He's found some compscans of some kind that show there's gold in them thar hills. Unfortunately, there's also uranium, and uranium makes the Psychlos' atmosphere explode. So he's going to use the quaintly termed 'man-animals' (he says this a lot) to mine it. He also tapes his stupid assistant Ker (Forrest Whitaker, who looks like the Cowardly Lion from The Wiz) explaining the plan so it looks like it's his idea. This gives Terl LEVERAGE over Ker. LEVERAGE is a big concept in this film. It pops up so much that you want to scream. This happened in the book, too.

Meanwhile, some other Psychlos are trying to break Jonnie so they can train him. Of course, he's unbreakable, got the fighting spirit and all of that. So for fun they steal his breath-mask and let him loose in the Psychlo atmosphere to see how long it takes for his lungs to burst. And my gosh, you wouldn't believe how that boy can run while he's holding his breath! He runs for two minutes or so, finds some people, borrows their air for a few seconds, then runs for about five more minutes full out until he gets into some sewers where there's actual air.

Unfortunately he can't get out, and he almost gets shot until Terl intervenes (he's been watching on security cameras or something) and saves him, because he's got plans for this man-animal.

So, the man-animals are going to mine gold. Right? After teaching Jonnie math and all sorts of things, including the Psychlo language, with a plot convenience -- er, a "learning machine" -- Terl drops them all off into the mountains. But, oh, he's got to have LEVERAGE over the man-animals too. So first he finds Jonnie's girlfriend and puts an explosive collar on her and demonstrates another collar on one of the workers just for kicks. Then he decides he's going to show just how evil he is, so he starts shooting legs off cows. I am dead serious. There's a herd of cows wandering around, and he starts shooting them: one leg off of each cow. I nearly vomited. Fortunately the humans had the sense to put the poor things out of their misery. The cows produced the only genuine emotion in me in response to this film other than disgust and hysterical laughter.

For some more leverage: Terl takes Jonnie to a library. After a thousand years, the books are still awfully intact. Jonnie reads from the Declaration of Independence while a statue of Thomas Jefferson watches benevolently from a beam of dusty golden sunlight. Beams of dusty golden sunlight follow Jonnie like flies follow garbage trucks. Then Terl interrupts this sweet little moment by informing Jonnie that the whole entire planet put up precisely nine minutes of fighting against the Psychlos. What, you didn't have it down to seconds?

Jonnie's a smart boy. He wants to get as much gold for Terl as he can without too much work. So he decides -- oop! -- we'll just bop on over to Fort Knox and get some bars of gold. Never mind that the Psychlos have machines that can find gold anywhere: Knox is still full. So they get some bars and convince Terl that -- oop! -- we just smelted it all down and made it into bars; no big deal. Next they decide -- oop! -- we're gonna bop on over to Fort Hood and pick us up some weapons. Never mind that these things have been sitting there for ONE THOUSAND YEARS. They work perfectly! It's great! And there's a flight simulator in working order and a bunch of jets. Piece of cake, right? They actually say that. "Learn to fly in seven days...piece of cake!" And then they all start bouncing around and chanting it. "Piece of cake! piece of cake! piece of cake!" Piece of CRAP.

So this is where it all broke down for me, basically. They're sending some guy with a plutonium bomb on the giant transport platform to blow up the home planet. They're gonna blow up the dome. There's a bunch of fighting and yelling and stuff. No fewer than THREE people sacrifice their lives in noble fashions: the aforementioned plutonium bomb guy, some guy who flies his plane into a Psychlo fighter on purpose, and some other guy who flies his plane into the dome and then blows himself up with a bazooka. Jonnie outruns five Psychlos shooting at him in a hall full of columns and flying debris everywhere, just like "The Matrix." But Terl catches up with Jonnie.

Back up a second. Jonnie, at one point, steals the incriminating videos of Ker and trades them for the key to his girlfriend's neck bomb. He's carrying the bomb around, and while fighting with Terl he manages to clamp it onto his arm. Then he asks for Terl to set his girlfriend free. Terl, with a good old BWAHAHAHA, triggers the bomb and blithely blows his own arm off. Then a bunch of stuff blew up, and the humans cavorted in glee, freed from their oppressors, blah blah blah. The end. Wonderful.

Now let's talk about special effects. Some of them are ok, but let's face it -- they skimped. The costume effects are shoddy. The backgrounds are so obviously matte paintings that the characters seem to wander back and forth between brushstrokes. The Psychlo fighters have blast jets that look like they were produced by the "smudge" tool in Adobe Photoshop. Some of the explosions are all right, but mostly they look like they were produced by cut-rate animation techniques, and the final climactic dogfight is stolen from "Star Wars" by way of "Independence Day." The screen wipes are stolen from "Star Wars" too -- remember those corny ones, where it would wipe in all sorts of ways? This movie's got that. And all the camera shots are tilted. Then there's blurring and flashbacks and shaking, some reverb thrown in to make it all nifty -- it's like they're trying to make it more confusing than already it is.

It's plenty confusing. The dialogue is pretty bad. From Terl hamming it up with "ratbrain" and "man-animal" to Jonnie's girlfriend saying, "I don't believe in fate, but I always knew this was your destiny," and, "I can take care of myself -- I'm not a child anymore," it's pretty much cut and paste. The Psychlos refer to things as "crap-lousy" and speak of "vaporizing" people. My personal favorite is a line from Terl's secretary, a cameo appearance by Travolta's wife, Kelly Preston, with a three-foot-long CGI tongue: "I'm going to make you as happy as a baby Psychlo on a straight diet of kerbango!" -- and then she slurps him all over with her tongue. She even slurps all over the Codpiece of the Gods. Kerbango, by the way, is a glowing green mucus sort of drink favored by the Psychlos.

Scientology? Subliminal messages? Didn't see any, really. This was just a bad movie. If I'd had two robots and a guy in a jumpsuit with me, it would have been perfect fun. But one good thing did come of it: as an aspiring screenwriter, I received assurance that if THIS film could be made, anything I can write will certainly be considered.