(Review originally written at 19 September 2005)
"Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000" is indeed a bad movie. The story is not logic and filled with quite some plot holes, implausibilities and has written Scientology all over it. Some of the scene's are supposed to be artistic and use unusual camera-positions and editing. I have a feeling that director Roger Christian really at times thought that he was making movie history with creating a new "2001: A Space Odyssey". All of those artistic moments are however pathetically constructed and look only laughable in the movie.
The story is messy and just plain weird. 1000 years ago an alien race named Psychlos conquered the Earth, mainly for our gold. Why they want gold? I don't think its ever explained in the movie. It's amazing to see that in all those 1000 years the deserted cities had barely changed. I mean, nothing in the cities has been overgrown by plants and trees and even lamppost and yes even wooden signs are still perfectly standing like nothing ever happened to them in all those 1000 years. There also is good news for the zoo's, in 1000 years from now all of your iron gates and cages are still standing perfectly and won't even have any rust on it, so you don't have to worry about replacing any in the near future. And yes, old plains can still fly and yes, humans will be able to learn to fly and maneuver them in just a matter of a few hours/days. I am still trying to figure out what it was that killed this movie; The story or the storytelling. Most likely it's a deadly combination of the both.
Still the movie deserves some credit. The special effects are quite good looking and so are the sets. And of course John Travolta is not a bad actor, no matter how odd he looks in the movie. I would hardly call it the worst movie ever made.
The movie has weird character nobody cares about and some awful dialog. It's obvious that Roger Christian just finished working as a second unit director on "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace", since he uses some typical Star Wars scene transitions in this movie. Looks like Lucas inspired the wrong person...
By no means the worst movie ever made, the technical aspects are simply too good for that but the story, storytelling, characters and dialog don't exactly make this a must see either.
3/10
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