"Battlefield Earth"

L. Ron Hubbard's pulp sci-fi classic comes incomprehensibly to the screen starring Scientologist John Travolta.

By Andrew O'Hehir

May 12, 2000 | The first thing to talk about with "Battlefield Earth" is not the subliminal messages allegedly sneaked in by the Church of Scientology. (If they're there, they don't work.) Nor is it John Travolta's unintentionally (I presume) hilarious performance as a villain who's part community-theater Iago and part Rastaman pimp. It's hair. There's more of it in this movie than in the sink trap at Supercuts.

First there are the heaping dreadlocks of the Psychlos, the evil alien race that rules the Earth in the year 3000. Then there are the flowing, Manson-era tresses of the rebellious humans led by Jonnie (Barry Pepper), who sports the rawhide trousers and bad attitude of Billy Jack. I found a picture of director Roger Christian on the Web, and he's got golden Fabio locks. (Most Hollywood directors, by contrast, resemble trolls who got trapped in the tanning booth.) Everybody in the film, in short, looks like they know where to find truly excellent weed.

If you're the kind of sci-fi fanatic who has to see every new futuristic action movie no matter how crummy it is -- and I come pretty close to that category myself -- then of course you'll check out "Battlefield Earth" regardless of how many cheap jokes critics crack at its expense. The action sequences are acceptable in a generic, Sci-Fi Network way and the Psychlo costumes at least look cool. But don't say you weren't warned.

I imagine the novel on which the movie is based, by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, is ludicrous trash (although I haven't read it and have no intention of doing so), but I doubt it's as incoherent, as hysterical or as flat-out gratingly loud as Christian's movie. For one thing, an author can't subject you to shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of "The Matrix" or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that "Battlefield Earth" was directed by a software program that absorbed and reprocessed the standard sci-fi elements of the past 30 years: grimy spaceships, alien overlords, the human race reverting to barbarism, someone reading the Declaration of Independence and making sense of it. Sure, Christian has that luxuriant coif and an illustrious risumi (he was art director on "Alien"), but how can we be sure he's not a hologram or a CIA personality graft?

Christian has supposedly directed eight other films. Now, I pride myself on my appetite for trash culture, and I'm damned if I've so much as heard of a single one of them. Come on now: "Masterminds" with Patrick Stewart? "Underworld" with Denis Leary and Joe Mantegna? "Nostradamus" with F. Murray Abraham and Rutger Hauer? Those don't exist; they were invented to sound vaguely plausible, like something you might have noticed on the USA Network's schedule one night, and planted on the Internet Movie Database after the fact. If you believe you have seen them, can you prove your memories were not implanted by an alien race from the 31st century?

OK, maybe those Scientology mind-control rays have affected my judgment after all. The first 20 minutes or so of "Battlefield Earth" are quite enjoyable, if you have a weakness for the cheapo decrepit future envisioned by the "Planet of the Apes" series. Jonnie and sultry babe Chrissie (Sabine Karsenti) live in a primitive human settlement high in the mountains, where they were driven after humanity was abandoned by the gods, as their legends tell them, and demons came from the skies to conquer the world. Pepper, a Canadian actor who's had supporting roles in "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Green Mile," is well cast as a hooting, growling, half-wild man; with his narrow, pointed face framed by all that stringy hair, he looks like he's part wolverine.

When Jonnie leaves the mountains to explore the truth behind the legends for himself, he finds that hoariest of post-apocalyptic clichis, a ruined 21st century (or so) city that for some reason has not disappeared or been buried over the course of 1,000 years. (Does anybody besides me think that an enormous amount of science fiction derives from Stephen Vincent Benit's short story "By the Waters of Babylon"?) As Jonnie stands gazing at an abandoned automobile, another hunter-gatherer type tells him about the gods who drove chariots to and from caves with golden arches.

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