This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Battlefield Earth. It's one of the most infamously bad movies of all time, and the hour is getting late, so forgive me for not going into much detail in this first post.
For those of you who don't know, Battlefield Earth was based on the L. Ron Hubbard novel of the same name; before starting Scientology, he was a pulp fiction writer, and the merits of his early fiction are furiously debated (because his batshit insanity clouds the reputation of that early work so hard it's difficult to get a proper consensus, especially as his followers are likely to astroturf glowing reviews). With this novel, he went back to his roots writing pure Sci-Fi (of a less debatably poor quality). Admittedly, there's quite a bit of Scientology bullshit in the novel, but it was streamlined a bit for the movie, the one John Travolta spent 20 years pushing for. And a lot of the bizarre choices made seem to have been demanded by the Co$ (including the constant Dutch Angles, which were apparently done because LRH noticed that the Adam West Batman series often had villain's lairs filmed at an angle and decided every fucking shot needed to be done at an angle.)
I discovered it through the Nostalgia Critic review in 2010, and a few months later, I found a DVD in a record store in Springfield. I picked it up immediately. And I found a copy of 2001 to compensate.
So, here's some shit from the first 25 minutes:
For those of you who don't know, Battlefield Earth was based on the L. Ron Hubbard novel of the same name; before starting Scientology, he was a pulp fiction writer, and the merits of his early fiction are furiously debated (because his batshit insanity clouds the reputation of that early work so hard it's difficult to get a proper consensus, especially as his followers are likely to astroturf glowing reviews). With this novel, he went back to his roots writing pure Sci-Fi (of a less debatably poor quality). Admittedly, there's quite a bit of Scientology bullshit in the novel, but it was streamlined a bit for the movie, the one John Travolta spent 20 years pushing for. And a lot of the bizarre choices made seem to have been demanded by the Co$ (including the constant Dutch Angles, which were apparently done because LRH noticed that the Adam West Batman series often had villain's lairs filmed at an angle and decided every fucking shot needed to be done at an angle.)
I discovered it through the Nostalgia Critic review in 2010, and a few months later, I found a DVD in a record store in Springfield. I picked it up immediately. And I found a copy of 2001 to compensate.
So, here's some shit from the first 25 minutes:
- Our protagonist is introduced yelling "NO!" after being told his father is dead. This is not a good introduction for a character. This works for better films because we at least got some idea of who the character is before this. And, odds are, the filmmaker is competent enough to at least give the audience some investment.
- Speaking of Our Protagonist, he's played by Barry Pepper, and it's like he was told about acting by being told that Daniel Day-Lewis is a good actor and that he should watch some of his films. And the first one he picked up was The Last of the Mohicans and just did an imitation of his Hawkeye and left it at that.
- This movie looks like a 90s cable fantasy series and yet it had a $40 million budget.
- You know, I know that having heads that were largely comprised of bone (with a brain that gets pushed down to their spinal column and a heart that's somewhere near their crotches) was going to be really hard to pull off, let alone the fact that they're apparently viruses (with a vaguely humanoid form), but could they really not do better than making them look like Klingons with really bad dreadlocks and unusually huge foreheads? I'd have an easier time taking them seriously if they were all a race of Crablantes!
- And on that, I should also point out that, John Travolta's performance, well, you know how sometimes decent actors get cast in a shitty movie and give a hilariously hammy performance in it to compensate? It's like he's deciding to play it as the worst auditionee for a production of a Moliere play. All the more bizarre when you consider he was the one gunning for this movie to be made in the first place.
- Dogs are the superior race to man-animals? Obvious joke is obvious.
- And I think I should end on this infamous scene (seriously, why the fuck did they repeat the line "with endless options for renewal" three times?)
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.