Battlefield Earth Is a Camp Delight for Puny Man-Animals Everywhere

Everybody knows the broad strokes of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s careers. We’re all familiar with the giddy highs and agonizing, seemingly unending lows but over the course of this project I’ve come to understand Cage and Travolta’s career trajectories on a granular level. 

Because I am so pathologically, unhealthily invested in both men’s careers everything they do is amplified. The highs are higher while the lows, the many, many lows, are even more painful, punishing and perverse. 

I didn’t just enjoy Travolta in Pulp Fiction. I felt proud of him because he manage to crawl out of the gutter professionally and create something enduring and iconic. On a similar note, having gone through this wonderful journey of discovery with you I am freshly mortified by the surreal incompetence of Battlefield Earth, a cinematic ugly duckling that stubbornly refuses to turn into a swan. 

It’s hard to overstate the sheer immensity of Battlefield Earth’s failure. It failed in every way a movie possibly can. Travolta had made plenty of massive bombs before Battlefield Earth but none were as agonizingly personal and devastating to his career and image as Travolta’s poignantly pathetic tribute to L. Ron Hubbard, the supposed literary genius who founded the controversial celebrity slave cult Travolta belongs to, Scientology. 

Have I mentioned yet that Travolta belongs to a controversial celebrity slave cult called Scientology? Because he does and, to be brutally, it does not reflect terribly well on him, nor does the fact that many of the millions Travolta made as one of the greatest movie stars of all time went directly to the controversial celebrity slave cult he was helping keep solvent with great gobs of cash. 

Being a true believer in crazy things like Xenu and Body Thetans and L. Ron Hubbard’s literary talent, Travolta wanted to do more than just give money to Scientology. He wanted to evangelize on behalf of L. Ron Hubbard’s genius as a storyteller as a way of bringing philistines and non-believers into the fold. 

That Terl got his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before “Weird Al” Yankovic seems unfair!

Travolta insisted that he was not using Battlefield Earth to proselytize on behalf of his for-profit “religion.” He claimed that he was just telling a fun adventure story that, in a funny twist, happened to be written by the founder and architect of Scientology, a man who, depending on your perspective, was either a b or c list pulp writer who stumbled onto a profitable grift or a genius on par with William Shakespeare who unlocked the mysteries of the universe and the human mind and was kind enough to share them with acolytes for a steep fee. 

But if science-fiction fans flocked to Battlefield Earth the next step was the book that inspired it and then Hubbard’s other works, including the key texts of Scientology like Dianetics. 

Battlefield Earth can consequently be understood as an act of religious devotion first and a movie a distant second. 

Travolta believed in Hubbard’s God-like powers strongly enough to look at a 1050 page novel that’s primarily about the bureaucratic travails and corporate machinations of an asshole Giant Dreadlocked Space Werewolf Middle Manager with the world’s shittiest personality and see an irresistible tale of action and adventure that would captivate moviegoers around the world. 

The asshole Giant Dreadlocked Space Werewolf Middle Manager with the world’s worst personality is Terl (Travolta), an ambitious corporate shark who graduated at the top of his class at the academy (something he brings up at every opportunity) but has been languishing on a sad, ugly planet called Earth as punishment for apparently having had sex with a powerful Psychlo Senator’s daughter. 

Imagine the most obnoxious person at your office or the member of your family that you hate the most. Then multiply their awfulness by infinity and you have the average Psychlo.

Planet Psychlo is a planet made up exclusively of people who fucking suck. They’re evil and scheming and dishonest and enslave humanity but beyond that, they’re just fucking dicks. They’re crude. They’re coarse. They’re stupid. They can’t dress for shit. I can’t even imagine how bad they must smell. I bet they litter and all would have voted for Trump and made a big stink about having to wear a mask. 

Terl is Battlefield Earth’s larger than life villain, its Darth Vader. But where Darth Vader was a famously imposing figure Terl is what I would deem a fucking idiot who stops just short of giving Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, the film’s hero, a book entitled How to Defeat Psychlos: A Step by Step Guide to Successfully Rebelling Against Evil Space Monsters, followed by additional books with titles like A Further Guide to Defeating Psychlos and What To Do After You’ve Definitively Defeated the Psychos Using Strategies From the Previous Two Books in This Series along with a machine to teach him how to read books on the faulty logic that man-animals are so dumb that even after reading those books they still wouldn’t know what to do in battle. 

As the film opens in the year 3000, our loathsome bureaucrat is excited about finally getting to leave the ugly, primitive shit hole we call home for bigger and better and douchier things. 

Unfortunately for Terl, every Psychlo in the world is a worthless piece of shit who lives to inflict hurt on others. They’re a species of fuck-nuts and douchebags so instead of getting a promotion Terl is punished for an ill-conceived indiscretion with a powerful politician’s daughter by being stranded on planet Earth indefinitely. 

Travolta reportedly played a big role in creating the universally mocked, reviled look of the Psychlos, a glaringly ugly hodge lodge of styles borrowed from Nazis, bikers, Nazi biker gangs and Rastafarians. Oh, and for that final understated touch Travolta has Frankenstein bolts on his forehead for some reason. 

The same was apparently true of his look in The Fantatic. Travolta is such a famously charming and likable celebrity that I suspect that he thinks that in order to successfully separate himself from his image and persona and successfully play a bad guy he needs to go as big and broad as possible and look and sound nothing like the icon the world fell in love with in the mid-1970s. 

“Big” doesn’t begin to do justice to Travolta’s performance here. He yells many, if not most of his lines. When he’s not shouting his villainy from the mountaintops he’s cackling maniacally. Terl never laughs. Laughing isn’t flamboyant enough for this foppish Junior Executive type from outer space so he spends much of the movie cackling with misplaced glee over some stupid stunt that’s sure to fail on account of him being an interplanetary dullard, a half-wit from beyond the cosmos. 

To get off Planet Earth Terl decides to force puny-man-animal slaves to furtively mine gold that he can use to buy a better life on a less terrible planet. 

Terl has a very negative opinion of man-animals. That’s understandable. Despite what Battlefield Earth would have you believe, we’re a pretty crappy species. The only reason I found myself even half-heartedly rooting for humanity is because Psychlos are the most insufferable alien shit bags in the universe, so any species, no matter how crappy, is going to tower above them morally. 

Terl doesn’t think man-animals, who have devolved into a primitive, caveman-like state after being defeated by Psycho invaders a thousand years beforehand, are smart enough to mine gold so, in a trademark fit of poor judgment, he hooks up Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (a hilariously miscast Barry Pepper) to a machine that essentially gives him all the knowledge and wisdom in the universe, inexplicably confident that he will not use it to rise up against his evil alien oppressors. 

How could he? Why would he? Whoever heard of a puny, rat-brained man-animal ever gaining leverage over an excessively cocky Psychlo middle manager? At least that’s what most of Terl’s dialogue would have you believe. 

The information machine transforms our hero from caveman simple to Einstein smart. Like John Travolta in Phenomenon, he goes from dunce to super-genius. Before you know it he’s babbling about “the basic foundation of Euclidian geometry” and coming up with brilliant schemes to defeat the Psychlos once and for all using a special machine that teaches his fellow humans how to fly planes. 

In its third act a perversely banal story about bureaucracy and middle management involving nine foot tall evil lycanthrope monsters who will do anything to keep their schemes a secret from the home office finally gets around to ripping off Star Wars. 

Travolta saw Battlefield Earth as a franchise like Star Wars or Star Trek but the Psychlos would be more intimidating adversaries for our heroes if they weren’t incredibly stupid and incompetent. 

Our heroes, meanwhile, would be more memorable and less laughable if they weren’t cavemen and women who skipped a couple thousand years of human evolution thanks to learning machines deus ex machinas. 

When movies are mocked and maligned to the extent Battlefield Earth was it’s tempting to say that there’s no way they could possibly be as bad or misguided as their reputations suggests. Apologists and defenders insist that the reviled flop was an innocent, unfortunate victim of bad buzz or bad timing or bad press. 

Not Battlefield Earth. It’s so bad it’s a goddamn miracle it exists. It’s a film of bold choices that are universally wrong, beginning with thinking that a novel this perversely banal and weighed down with weird office politics was begging to be adapted for the big screen. 

Is Battlefield Earth as bad as they say? This might be hard to believe, but it may even be worse. 

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