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  Richard
  
Attwood
Battlefield Earth
USA, 2000
[Roger Christian]
John Travolta, Forest Whitaker, Barry Pepper
Action
  
Okay, so you�ve probably heard from at least one person just how dire this movie was. Widely lambasted as the worst film of the year, and often cited to be worthy of a much more damning accolade. Well, it�s honestly not as bad as all that; and no, that doesn�t mean that in fact it is worse. However it is a bad movie, there is really no doubting that and it is apparent that a lot of cash was wasted on making it.

Mankind has been enslaved by the Psychlos, a cruel alien race who took about 20 minutes to conquer the Earth�s armies. The remaining humans live in tribes outside the alien cities and have regressed to a hunter-gatherer society. One of these wild humans, Johnny (Pepper), is captured by the aliens and enslaved. However, he is determined to get free and fortunately is chosen by the Psychlo security chief (Travolta) who needs to educate a human to mine without supervision in radioactive areas. Soon he uses his new knowledge to try and break free.

The special effects are obviously expensive but frequently look exactly like the CG they are. The alien costumes are silly, as instead of making them toweringly menacing they come across as ridiculous and unwieldy in their platform shoes. The main storyline is uninspired and often inexcusably stupid, especially towards the end, but I found the parts with Travolta and his sidekick Forest Whitaker continually trying to doublecross each other to be actually quite fun. Travolta overacts (although Whitaker is as good as usual) but his character is delightfully self-centred and irrational, only becoming annoying in the segments when he deals with humans.

So yes, it has very few redeeming features and is really quite bad. But to be fair the number of ideas it has is no fewer than you could find in
Planet of the Apes and the implausable ending elicits no more groans than that of Independence Day. What is most unfortunate however is the climax featuring humans depicted as noble martyrs when flying planes into the alien�s most important infrastructures. Ooops.
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