Battlefield Earth - Thoughts

I’m gonna have to go into this one in more detail than usual, as it’s not the most popular. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, was released in 2000. The movie did horribly at the box office, grossing a worldwide total of 23.7 million, against its production budget of 73 million. The premise being that earth is overrun by a superior alien race called the Psycholo’s; their intent being to harvest all of earth’s natural resources and send it back to their home-world. A thousand years later, the human race is nearing extinction; evolution has gone full circle, with the remaining survivors being ignorant cavemen who relate everything to the gods. It’s obvious why I’ve kept away from this one as long, but being a diehard Sci-Fi fan I decided to finally check it out.


After watching it last night, and expecting so very little, I must say it wasn’t a complete waste. The sci-fi element was decent, and the movie overall, acceptable. For a hardcore sci-fi fan this should make for average entertainment. Special effects looked poor and I’m assuming that’s owing to budget constraints. The air battle sequence was particularly limited; don’t expect intense Top Gun style dogfights. The runtime is nearly 2 hours, and it does tend to get slow at some points. The one element that really stood out was that the nearly savage humans were able to grasp geometry and high IQ concepts including nuclear explosives, cameras, aviation and the likes in a mere few days.

Thanks to John Travolta who played Terl, the head of Psycholo security on Earth, the narrative process was decently strong. Supported by Forest Whitaker, Ker, his second in command, together they brought to life the Psycholo ideals and way of life. The Psycholo’s I must say are very similar to any human dictatorial corrupt setup. Barry Pepper who played Johnny did a pretty decent job; I don’t think it’s his fault that he was asked to portray a slightly unimaginable script. In the initial parts he portrayed warrior fashion bravery, and then graduated to primitive understanding, finally going on to be a strategic planner.

There’s a good reason for me keeping away from India region release (non-pirated) DVDs; in most cases quality is not as great as the original release. If it wasn’t bad enough trying to go into Battlefield Earth without a bias, the DVD made things harder. Sadly I wasn’t able to place my hands on a Region 1 US release. Picture was average; most standard lighting scenes were decent, but anything that was in dim light or had either a blue night hue, or a yellow dusk/dawn hue was poor. In those scene sharpness was sacrificed. There was moderate use of blue and yellow during the course of the movie as a post processing filter. The audio track was a Dolby Digital 5.1 track, and was good for most part. The musical score was pretty good, adding a good suspense element in various scenes and helping maintain the pace.

My Recommendation: Dicey (If you love Sci-Fi, and can’t be too bothered with the specifics, give it a shot)