06/05/2017

Battlefield Earth

                       
John Travolta stars in one of the dumbest science fiction films I've ever seen. It's the future, and humanity has been taken over by aliens who are mining Earth's gold, for some reason. Humans have been pushed back into the stone age, despite living around so much shit that is still around - like cars, old courses, whole cities, working guns and planes, etc. 
The aliens seem to have some kind of corporate structure, but at the same time they're very primal and remind me of Uruk hai but dumber. I don't know how they've mastered space travel, or even structured society, as none of them seem to do what the others say, and on all levels of command they're slacking off of betraying one another all the time. Everyone in this film are idiots, basically, which is one of the major problems (that and the terrible concept execution, the hammy acting/dialogue, and the poor casting). 
                   
                   
John Travolta's character is an alien with a convoluted plan to steal gold and then get a raise, and get to leave Earth, or fire his boss and get to leave Earth. I don't know, I tuned out. He wants to leave Earth, and he's going to secretly mine extra gold to do something for reasons possibly but not necessarily connected to the leaving Earth thing. 
So that's the antagonist. The protagonist is a male human who gets made more clever by Travolta's alien machine so that he can mine gold, I think. Then he goes to a library and figures out how to fly planes. Then other things happen, but I've left the room. There are also other characters. 
I don't think you'd enjoy this movie unless you appriciate ones that are so bad they're good. I liked it for this, as the entire thing is played straight, and the few moments of intended comedy are delightfully cringey. Watched as an actual cohesive story though (or gods forbid a sci-fi film) it doesn't even begin to hold up.
                          
Battlefield Earth: 7.5