Roger Christian’s science-fiction adventure is noisy, muddled and mostly dull. John Travolta and Forest Whitaker offer occasional comic relief, but the tilted images and senseless plotting make 117 minutes feel like a considerable imposition.
Roger Christian’s Battlefield Earth wants the direct pleasures of a science-fiction uprising: people to root for, aliens to oppose and a reason to care who wins. It makes all three harder than they need to be. Adapted from L. Ron Hubbard’s novel, it is a tedious action film whose bluster cannot conceal how little sense the struggle makes. The trouble is not that the premise is old-fashioned. Plenty of adventure stories ask for no more than a decent hero and a threatening enemy; this one cannot make their confrontation interesting.
Barry Pepper plays Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, the human rebel, and gives the film some welcome earnestness. John Travolta’s Terl and Forest Whitaker’s Ker occupy far more of our attention as the alien villains. Their exaggerated performances occasionally suggest a comic partnership that might have worked with firmer direction and less indulgence. We laughed at their shared bluster, but the joke wears thin when we are also meant to regard these figures as formidable opponents. The humans struggle to compete for our attention, leaving Barry Pepper’s determination looking increasingly thankless.
Giles Nuttgens’s cinematography is persistently tilted, a choice that becomes tiring well before it becomes expressive. A slanted frame can make danger feel immediate, but using it so insistently makes it difficult to tell which moments deserve our attention. The muddy images compound that difficulty, particularly when the action becomes busy. We were irritated by the effort required to follow the fighting, because the framing keeps distracting us from it. Roger Christian provides plenty of violence without making its immediate stakes clear.
Patrick Tatopoulos, responsible for both production design and costume design, supplies some of the film’s more worthwhile work. There is pleasure in the creature designs, which give the alien antagonists a physical presence that their dialogue cannot sustain. The effort to make this setting feel unlike ordinary human surroundings deserves better photography. Much of that work is difficult to appreciate amid the muddiness and frantic action, leaving the designs to make a brief impression when we need time to examine them.
The screenplay by Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro has a more basic problem: the decisions needed to keep the story moving are difficult to believe. Science fiction can invent its own rules, but we still need to understand why people take a risk or fail to recognise one. Here, the predictable plotting and strained dialogue make the characters seem slow to grasp things simply because the next bout of action requires it. Barry Pepper cannot supply a convincing motive through determination alone. Even a broad adventure needs choices that seem to belong to the people making them.
Robin Russell’s editing does little to clarify the action, and the frantic passages somehow fail to prevent the film from feeling slow. The scenes do not build enough anticipation to make the violence exciting when it comes. Elia Cmiral’s music adds emphasis where the scenes need suspense; we are still trying to work out why these confrontations matter. At 117 minutes, the film gives its thin conflict more time than it can use.
Against the ordinary standards of an action adventure, these are substantial failures. Most critics have little patience for it, and we share their objections to the muddled storytelling and overplayed villains. There is enough commitment in the acting and design to make the waste dispiriting, but little reason to endure it for the occasional laugh. Do not choose it on the promise that a bad film will at least be funny.
