"The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

Christian is a wretched and maddening director, who has the weirdest habit of picking odd angles for certain shots, and then HANGING ON THEM FOR AGES, WELL AFTER WE GOT THE POINT. There are sections of NOSTRADAMUS so inept, they are truly breathtaking. I don't understand why this man hasn't been busted down to television yet. (There are many directors in television who are easily superior to him.)

There's am awesomely flattering profile on BATTLEFIELD EARTH's producer in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine that shamelessly sucks face with him -- the article's talented but loathsome author, Lynn Hirschberg, must be running scared in the wake of being dropped by Vanity Fair over her Seinfeld article, to produce such a relative puff piece. (Oh, the producer in the article isn't Travolta, although Travolta was one of the producers as well. I forget the guy's name.)

The special effects were great, Barry Pepper's character was pretty good, and the actual rebellion was worth the build-up . . . and the build-up and the build-up and the build-up.

All in all: 3.5/5

Actually, the only bad thing I had to indure in this film was the trailer for THE X-MEN, which could quite possibly be the most over-blown movie of the year, and already the most over-blown movie since Lucas's little art house film from last year.

August

Anyway, in no particular order, these are the sci-fi films of the past few years that I enjoyed:

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT
STAR TREK: INSURRECTION (not great, but I still liked it)
MARS ATTACKS! (okay, okay . . . guilty pleasure)
SOLDIER (so sue me!)
THE ARRIVAL
GALAXY QUEST
STAR TREK: THE WRATH OF KAHN (so it for the first time several months ago)

On the low-budget, direct-to-video front:
FUGITIVE MIND
THE SILENCERS (1996, with Jack Scalia. One of the most ambitious low-budget movies ever made)

Of the ten films, BATTLEFIELD EARTH would place at, perhaps . . . #7. FIRST CONTACT is the best sci-fi movie I've seen since the original STAR WARS (IMO).

August

I can't speak for the novel, which I haven't read, but I often got the impression there was a dense and captivating, if preposterous, story in there -- that didn't quite get made. I'd be curious to read the book now, actually. The finished movie is suggestive of so many different influences, including the PLANET OF THE APES movies, BLADE RUNNER (which I think Hubbard couldn't have seen when he was ready to publish it -- not sure of the timeline here), and Colin Wilson's "Spider World" novels. But the undercurrent is so individualistic, so psychologically unique (and we can rest assured that L. Ron Hubbard was probably at least slightly insane -- just try and read his "Fear," not to mention his precepts of Scientology), that there's clearly the germ of something amazing in here. A germ that got stamped out.

Director Roger Christian knows he's making an action movie, so he doesn't hang on shots for quite as long as he prefers to do, but he DOES pick infuriating angles -- the whole movie looks like they forgot to prop the camera up, everything's at a peculiar angle, just like Ebert said. Additionally, the later special effects sequences with the airplanes -- both "training" and "live" -- were very nearly inducive of motion sickness. I haven't felt so groggy since the Godard version of BREATHLESS. And then there's Christian's deranged use of slow-motion, and his utter inability to film or edit an action scene. The last half hour of the film is almost completely incoherent, because it's all tussles and chases, things Christian has no clue as to how to make. I'll give him this: he is slightly better than Michael Bay. But he clearly thinks he's being "stylish," and he's not -- he doesn't even have the wherewithal to succeed at being pretentious.

Elia Cmiral's score is huge and broadly written, and generously, loudly mixed into the final soundtrack as well. Not particularly tuneful, but I liked it, and might buy the album someday, though there are more important ones I still don't have.

Lighting and design are phenomenally ugly. Christian's obviously shooting for a kind of BLADE RUNNER look, but he and his cameraman don't have the acumen -- either that, or Christian simply meant to copy certain shots from BLADE RUNNER, but obscure the lighting so much that no one would notice. (He goes so far as to quote Joanna Cassidy's death scene, crashing through the many panes of glass. To say that he lacks Ridley Scott's imagination and finesse is to understate the situation.) I wonder if this isn't the Curse of Patrick Tatopolous, the production and costume and creature designer, who also created the look of the recent awful GODZILLA (1998). Actually, in fairness, his work is better than the movie as a whole -- I kind of liked the looks of the aliens and certain of the sets.

I laughed out loud at too many scenes throughout this movie to remember -- the incongruous dialogue, the ridiculous setups, but the whole debacle comes down to one man (other than Christian): John Travolta, whose villain performances have always been extremely affected and effete, but who manages to outdo himself here. If he were not a producer of the film, and Christian his hired gun, he would NEVER have been allowed to get away with what he does here. I haven't seen anything this eccentric in years, and it's not GOOD-eccentric, like your average Gary Oldman or Christopher Walken, or recent Brando. At the same time, I have to admit it was fascinating. Travolta, rescued as he was by Tarantino and PULP FICTION, will have to do some pretty serious jumping through some pretty major hoops to get anyone to take him seriously, ever again. But I'm not sure he cares. He already makes twenty million a picture (he graciously dropped down to five for BATTLEFIELD EARTH), he's going to go on being regarded as a major star probably for decades to come, but this marks the end of his being taken seriously as an actor. (He never really was an Actor anyway -- more of a Performer. And he can be a good one, I admired him in BROKEN ARROW -- a movie I otherwise hated -- and FACE/OFF. Both directed by John Woo, who would never have allowed him to camp like he does in BATTLEFIELD EARTH.)

Forest Whitaker is one of the best actors in America, and it's faintly bizarre to see such a grounded performer playing second banana to the ridiculous Travolta -- they often seem to be in completely different movies. (I worried at an early scene when it appeared Whitaker was going to be dispatched -- there goes what spark this is going to have, I thought. I won't tell you what does happen with Whitaker, but it's ultimately one of the few satisfying things in the picture.)

Barry Pepper turns out to be a credible action hero -- he looks amazingly like the young Tom Cruise from some angles -- and he handles his potentially absurd role with some aplomb. Between this, his vaguely psychotic sharpshooter in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and his humane guard in THE GREEN MILE, he's shaping up to be quite a decent actor. No small range on this boy, so far.

No one else in the cast really registers. Kim Coates is saddled with the thankless "chick" role; one of the movie's few saving graces is that it doesn't foist too much of her on us. Although she got from me one of the biggest (unintentional) laughs in the movie, when she tells Barry Pepper "I always KNEW this was your destiny!"

Frankly, I thought BATTLEFIELD EARTH was so bad, I almost can't wait to see it again. I haven't howled like that in a LONG time. And I kept thinking of another recent SF movie that treaded an equally thin line, yet was clearly as much deliberate parody as pure action film: Paul Verhoeven's brilliant STARSHIP TROOPERS, which I watched again just last week. I never get tired of that one. And I think that if someone like Verhoeven or Woo had made BATTLEFIELD EARTH, and someone OTHER than Travolta had played Terl -- an excellent villain role, by the way, I thought he was potentially very interesting -- then I'd think it a masterpiece, or nearly one. The story seems to me so VERY strange and inventive that the right team could have made something really excellent out of it. Instead, they've made something ... damned peculiar.

I mean... a race of Bob Marleys invaded Earth and one of them is played by Tony Manero?

I was struck throughout the picture not just how stupid IT was, but how stupid the aliens THEMSELVES are. How'd they ever MANAGE to take over the world? Jeez.

I was just thinking today how Travolta's performance compares with another extremely mannered performance of an alien: Enrico Colantoni (sp.?) in GALAXY QUEST. But that was SUPPOSED to be a comedy.

quote:

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If Ed Wood had lived, and been given this kind of money, this is surely close to what he might have produced.

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I don't think that the movie went "over the edge" ENOUGH! If you've read the book, then you would know that Travolta's (and the script's) version of Terl wasn't even close to being as nasty as the character is in the book. Terl is evil, Evil, EVIL! (read sinister). His scheming never ended. He had schemes within schemes within schemes. I know only so much could be shown on screen, with a 2 hour run time. The elapsed time that passes in the movie only seems like a few days, at the most. In the book, all the events that took place in the movie, were spread out over several years. To me, THAT's what made the effect of the movie come up short. It seemed that there was only about 40% of the first half of the book in the movie. Hmmmm....maybe they'll "learn" a little bit and it'll come together a little bit better for the 2nd part.

Having read the book, I was STILL confused by the story line.

I was bored within the first 10 minutes.

I was deafened by the constant shots of the psychlo ships whizzing by the oddly-tilted cameras.

Although, like his H'ness, I laughed incesantly at things that shouldn't have been funny...and simply forwned at things that WERE supposed to be funny (and just got annoyed with the wench with the tongue).

The novel is incredibly dense, with a LOT of thigns happening over a great period of time. It made those pesky human animals flying F-4 Phantom jets at least marginally believable...Kerr was much more sympathetic and Terl much more evil, not campy.

Is it me, or has there been a trend of late to make what could be interesting and/or terrifying characters campy? Sleepy Hollow with the bumbling Johnny Depp comes to mind.

I thought the film was positively HORRIBLE, but I must agree once again with his H'ness regarding a movie he mentioned briefly: STARSHIP TROOPERS. Certianly the acting left a LOT to be desired in that film, but the storyline and the parallels between the Allied/Axis conflict known as WWII cannot be denied (down to the hokey newsreel propaganda films meant to seduce young people into giving up their lives for a meaningless (at least in the long term) cause.) An EXCELLENT film with an equally wonderful Poledouris score. Cmiral's score for BE has some good moments and I do like it. Pity I can't say that about the movie itself.

starblade: I had a definite SENSE of Terl's schemery, which is why I said he seemed to be a potentially great villain role. And so I concur with Mr. InSanDiego that the project would have been infinitely more viable as a miniseries (they learned to fly the planes in SEVEN DAYS?)

But I disagree with him about the acting in STARSHIP TROOPERS. Except for the vapid Denise Richards, I thought the young actors were fine. There was something monochromatic (or monomaniacal) about their performances, but ditto their characters -- the adults weren't much different, just handled by ace vets like Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown. (Nifty cameos by Rue McClanahan and Marshall Bell, too, and I liked the subtle sarcasm of the inducting officer with the missing leg: "We need all the pilots we can get! ... Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!")

The thing is, the acting in ALL of Verhoeven's films tends to be kind of stylized, and the work of the five veteran actors above, who are certainly capable of subtler acting, suggests that Verhoeven encourages a particular kind of approach, a borderline hysteria at times, but which I thought was quite appropriate to the project. (Think as well of the baddies in ROBOCOP, especially Kurtwood Smith -- I love his "Guns, guns, GUNS!" moment -- that was a part originally slated for Ironside, in fact, but he walked off because he hated Verhoeven. I guess they made up, he's in TOTAL RECALL too.)

Paradoxically, though, star power being what it is, the picture would have done twice the money if it were, say, Tom Cruise (although he's too old for it) instead of Casper van Dien. (As if Cruise would have done it. No way, I'm sure. Too much like TOP GUN and too many bugs to compete with.)

As I said, it's a weird business.