4/25/2014

Battlefield Earth (2000) - Spectacular sci-fi disaster from John Travolta and Battlefield Earth-Roger Christian



+ 2nd Worst Movie of the Decade


John Travolta's huge, blue head stares you down menacingly, if you dare look at the poster for Roger Christian's Battlefield Earth


QUICK REVIEW:

The year 3000: Man is almost extinct and live in tribes in fear of the psychlones, the aliens who have taken control.
Aesthetically, Battlefield Earth is excruciating; endless wipes, nauseating Dutch angles and disgusting-looking characters. Plot-wise, the film is a mess. Star Wars is the role-model for the travesty, which director Roger Christian (The Final Cut (1996)) who was recommended for the project by George Lucas, had received his only Oscar in 1977 for, (set and art direction on the first Star Wars.) But Earth doesn't have any of the mythical values involved in it that Star Wars lived and still lives on. To be (...) poetic; where Star Wars looked to the stars, Battlefield Earth just stared at earth.
It's an awful muddle, and truly bizarre to see the steel-threads-coming-out-of-their-noses-clad stars (John Travolta and Forest Whitaker) ramble on and on in scenes that are either pointless or just end very suddenly.

 

Related post:

 

The 2000s in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Forest Whitaker and John Travolta in bizarre costumes with jockstraps (or boners) in Roger Christian's Battlefield Earth

To cap it all, Earth is plastered with God-awful 'music' (by Czechoslovakian Elia Cmiral (Piranha 3DD (2012)) and a headache-inducing, noisy finale. Really a bad film.
For anyone interested in fascinating train-wreck kind of trivia from the world of film, look no further: Battlefield Earth came to be largely through its Scientology-believer star Travolta's pushing it around Hollywood for years. When it lost upwards of 70 mil. $ - some of them funded out of Travolta's own pockets, - and its production company Franchise Pictures were found to be conducting fraud with bloated budgets, the real battle began.
Battlefield Earth is notorious as the biggest flop bad movie of the new millennium; it currently sits on slot # 74 in IMDb's bottom 100 list, and it 'won' a record-breaking 7 Razzies in 2001; another one in 2005 for Worst 'Drama' of Our First 25 Years, - and then again in 2010, it won its last one yet, as Worst Picture of the Decade. - Ouch!




Here's the trailer

Budget: 73 mil. $ (plus reportedly 20 mil. $ in marketing)
Box office: 29.7 mil. $
= Disaster

What do you think of Battlefield Earth?
What is your favorite worst film?

No comments:

Post a Comment