Friday, 09/13/02

Operating on the same principle of diminished expectations that allowed me to enjoy Attack Of The Clones, I picked up Battlefield Earth when it started running on HBO recently. There are several things about this flick to which I'd like to call your attention.

First and foremost is Forest Whitaker, as the second in command to John Travolta's conniving alien overlord. Whitaker's great, as always. If you watch it, as I hope you will, he lightens the load throughout his considerable screen time.

Parts of the first half-hour show flashes of wit, presumably lifted from the L. Ron Hubbard novel, as the cave-dwelling humans of a thousand years hence draw funny conclusions from a mishmash of Greek myth, the confused legends of fast food, and wrecked department store mannequins believed to have got what was coming to them. And I enjoyed the sequence where the aliens try to gain "leverage" over a group of humans by figuring out homo sapiens' culinary preferences, settling through flawed methodology on uncooked rat.

That's pretty much the list, but those aren't the reasons I think you should see this movie. They're twofold.

First, there's the specter of old daddy Hubbard. Battlefield Earth's first half is dominated by human preoccupation with "the gods", who purportedly built Earth's cities and abandoned humanity to alien tyranny when humanity did something to piss them off. Bear in mind that L. Ron Hubbard founded a prominent cultlike religion, which continues to enjoy tax-exempt status and abuse federal copyright law to this day. Scientology counts among its adherents the star of the film, which makes it all the stranger that he'd use his box-office clout to produce a picture about humans worshipping and eventually routing false gods dreamed up by sci-fi writers. It's as if James Dobson produced a TV show about the Second Coming, in which Jesus goes to work for People For The American Way.

The real kicker is Battlefield Earth's perspective on terrorism. Released in 2000, there's no way this movie could be made today, because it presents the villains as profit-obsessed monsters with a labor relations problem, namely the good guys, who are set up to succeed only through terrorism. Suicidal terrorism. Nuclear suicidal terrorism. The coup de grace (I'm giving away the ending, but you won't mind) is when a human footsoldier volunteers, clutching a keg-sized nuke, to teleport back to the aliens' home planet and light it up like Krypton. Without taking this step, which our heroes agree on in less time than it took you to pick out breakfast this morning, the aliens will send in their "gas drones" and kill off the resistance, which is to say the whole human race.

I'm not sure if the gas drones in this scenario are supposed to represent American military might, or American popular culture, but the metaphor is amazingly effective either way. Watching this movie the day after Bush's inept Ellis Island address, in which he chides the world's terrorists for insufficiently valuing life, was a revelation.

The terrorists in this movie didn't need the lure of an afterlife with scores of sexpot virgins to send themselves into the breach; they did it to rid themselves and their fellow man of the corporate bastards who were bolloxing up the planet for profit. This movie's subtext couldn't be any clearer if it had Ralph Nader superimposed in the corner translating in American Sign Language. It's a remarkable film. 10:35AM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type