I had a really sick feeling in my stomach when I rented this, like I had just agreed to shoot my evening in the head. But maybe, just maybe, thought I, "Battlefield Earth" would live up to the anti-hype and be enjoyably bad. I wasn't disappointed. Some imponderables:

- What did John Travolta think he could gain by occasionally affecting the voice of the comic book store owner from "The Simpsons"?

- Interestingly, the Psychlos don't credit humans with enough intelligence to be able to figure our how to pull the trigger of a gun -- even THEY call it "Euclidian Geometry." There must have been a Euclid on Psychlo, too.

- If the Psychlos had referred to their "Home Office" only once, maybe most of the audience would have missed it. But after five or six references we start to think, "Oh, like in Letterman...."

- In one perplexing scene, Terl latches explosive dog collars onto Johnny's friend and his fiancee for "leverage." If J steps out of line, he'll press a button on his remote and blow their heads off. Very clever, for you see, Terl has seen that Johnny is the only dangerous human on the planet -- he has learned everything about the Psychlos, has shown an impressive ability to fight his way out of life threatening situations, has given clear evidence of his intention to do whatever it takes to kill Terl and all his kind, and, in fact, has on two occasions had a blaster pointed directly into Terl's face. (Ok, once the blaster wasn't loaded, but nonetheless....) Leverage is clearly necessary. But I don't know -- if I'm Terl, I'm thinking that one of those dog collars should maybe have gone around *Johnny's* neck.

- The Learning Machine. If he wants Johnny to learn how to speak Psychlo and operate mining equipment, why would he strap him into a learning machine that teaches him not only that, but all known Psychlo history, science, tradition, math, weaponry, etc. Even "Euclidian Geometry."

- This is 1000 years after the fall of human civilization. In dilapidated, often roofless buildings -- in DENVER (where, I hear, it snows occasionally) -- the following things have survived and remained in nearly mint condition: books, light bulbs, projectors, machine guns, figher jets (all fueled up, oiled, tuned, and ready to go). Well, the books at least were in a blown up library in Denver. The rest were in Kentucky, I believe. But come on. No rust, no dust, hardly a cobweb.

- How many instruction manuals does he read in this movie, and how did they last 1000 years?

- Never mind that the jets in this movie still run perfectly. Never mind how these cavemen could figure out in a couple of weeks how to fly them like a pack of Top Guns. How did they even taxi these things out of the bunker?

- They've been occupying our planet for 1000 years and have never bothered to learn our language? You'd think that after that long a couple of them at least would have learned it by accident.

- When Terl left them with a mining ship and left, saying, "even though I won't be here, I'll be watching you," what exactly did he mean? Did he not notice them flying back and forth from Colorado to Kentucky to DC? Anyone who's ever blown a tank of gas in his Dad's car knows how easy it is to get caught joyriding. And besides, wouldn't a ship so advanced have something equivalent to a GPS -- geez, we even have that in cars today.

- When he's first captured, how does Johnny know what the button cameras do? He's a caveman. He and all his ancestors have lived in caves for 1000 years. He doesn't even know what electricity is. It would be almost impossible to explain to him that it is possible to transmit his image to a remote location via "pictogram" (as they are called). For heaven's sake, you could have placed a whole film crew in the room with them and they would have had no idea what was going on.

More: the picture of his girlfriend, the animatronic tongue, the evidence of blue screen effects where apparently no special effects were even used, etc, etc, etc. You couldn't go five minutes in this movie without saying, "Wait a second -- why didn't they just--"

I give it a billion turkeys.