Battlefield Earth (2000)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Never have I ever been so angry while watching a movie and yet so incredibly tired. I don't think I've yawned this much since watching Red Zone Cuba. I should probably preface this by saying I'm a huge fan of the original novel this film is based off of, a 1000 page epic that combines the setting of Planet of the Apes with the storytelling of I am Legend. It's a good book and I highly recommend reading or listening to it. But even after all that I was not prepared for the sheer level of awful that this movie was. Every actor is miscast, every set and costume look too fake, the cinematography literally makes this film almost impossible to watch, the music is unmemorable, every shot is bathed in hideous garish color filters, and the plot holes....oh god the plot holes. Not only are there thousands of things that don't make sense from just watching the movie on it's own, but after reading the book I saw that they deliberately went the extra mile to not make sense! The acting and dialog are the stuff of legends, some times the actors forget to react, or start laughing or howling out of nowhere. And this film might have the cheapest and lamest special effects I've seen that wasn't part of the Syfy channel. And even after all of that I was still so very tired and bored watching this, that's a special brand of bad film making right there. If you can make it through this two hour monstrosity, you have my respect.

Being a huge fan of science fiction movies I am used to seeing productions which are not the best quality. It is hard to make a good sci-fi movie, especially when it involves aliens and requires special effects and heavy make-up. Usually one aspect or another of such a movie isn't so great, especially if the move doesn't have a huge budget. I am used to all of this, but I still wasn't prepared for the terribleness that is Battlefield Earth. It's a movie in which everything form acting to plot to editing is really, really bad.Let's take the acting. Seeing the names of John Travolta and Forest Whitaker one would expect to see performances which are at least decent. Here both the actors are terribly overacting their parts and making what was supposed to be big bad aliens look like parodies of the Klingons. I'm not sure whether it was entirely the actors' fault or if the screenplay just didn't give them enough to work with, but seeing such good actors do such poor job is really sad.The plot is similarly bad. The protagonist has no character besides being good. We don't know anything about him and I found it impossible to care about him. The antagonists on the other hand are just evil and driven by greed and cruelty. The plot is not only really generic, but it takes big leaps without stopping to show how the characters feel about the changing circumstances. Even the design of the alien race is lazy and seems to be a rip-off of the Klingons.Special effects in the movie made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. They look like something out of a low-budget television movie and not a production which was released in movie theaters. Or they look like they were made in the 1980s and not in 2000. Either way, they are truly pitiful and make the movie look even more like a parody.Even the editing of the movie is poor. I suppose the cuts between the scenes were meant to be interesting, but they are annoying, especially considering the fact that the same effect is used over and over again until it becomes unbearable. In addition to this, the movie often goes into an inexplicable slow motion, which doesn't seem to serve any purpose at all.To sum up, watching this movie was an ordeal for me, even though I've seen a considerable number of not-so-good science fiction productions and I'm willing to forgive a lot if a movie has anything interesting to offer. I can honestly say it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Cross my heart and hope to die.

I grew up reading Sci-Fi and still do. Some classic science movies are made to make us think while some, like this one, are made for entertainment. If you relax and enjoy the special effects you would like the movie too. If you begin to question how you think things should look after time or apply scientific reasoning to everything, you will hate it - like most did. Leave the "Oh! That couldn't happen" thoughts out, lighten up, sit back and enjoy a good action movie like I did. I watch it every few months and still don't see why so many people trashed it, I really like it.

This is not nearly as bad as it's been made out to be.The production values are decent. The premise is intriguiging. The execution fine. There's great acting chemistry from Travolta and from Whittaker. The costumes are fantastic - especially the way the alien species are made to look so much bigger than "man-animals" while retaining humanoid form. The sets and special effects may not be awe-inspiring, but they're reasonable nonetheless; in other words, it may not look "cool" but it does the job.My main gripe is that it drags on quite a bit near the end. Also, visually, it's all a bit monotonous and claustrophobic. The payoff is unrewarding too, because the plot as a whole is pretty pedestrian. Good humans defeat the bad aliens, blah blah blah. The movie has little going for it, in fact. It's pretty bog-standard ... but it's by no means awful. It's watchable for the most part.