Battlefield Earth
Created | Updated Jun 21, 2003
All this talk about Battlefield Earth: Does it have subliminal messaging? Is
it really that bad? All is revealed...
Looking at a wonderful poster of a certain J. Travolta with green eyes and a fairly elongated forehead, I was not sure exactly what to expect from the film. Being a scientology critic, I was doubtful that a Hollywood version of Hubbard's work starring a follower could be anything but crap. But was it awful enough to be funny? Yes. Oh yes!
The film is a crossover between Seven Years In Tibet, Total Recall and Lost in Space... a very dangerous combination. The year is 3000 and 'man is an endangered species'. Talk of demons and Gods exists, so our appointed hero for the film sets out to defeat the demons. Now, these demons are really
evil... there are several ways to prove this. Firstly, they are called 'psychlos' and come from 'Psychlo'. If you study their name carefully, you'll notice the word 'psycho' is embedded within it, which of course means they are evil! They also have bright green eyes, are all fat, call us 'man-animals' and they even dare to call our hero 'rat-brain'. Finally, they wear tight leather garments. This and their awful hygiene is what leads to their inevitable downfall, of course.
There are three major types of scenes: ones with lots of information about plans; cliched movie scenes (loss, romance, 'how evil we are' etc.); and then there are the inevitable jam-packed action scenes. These are the most confusing. They involved many different goings-on and are impossible to follow... you have to see the film several times to get the plot and I would NOT recommend doing that ;-).
The planet Psychlo is destroyed by one nuclear missile
which 'reacted' with its atmosphere. Now, I don't have a degree in Nuclear Physics, but I don't know of any chemical that would cause a whole planet to explode due to radioactivity. Neither have I seen fire burn without oxygen which seemed to be the case in the 'dome' the 'man-animals' were trapped under. But it was all rather interesting, until the plot started drifting again :-). For some
reason, all the scene changes were done with the fantastic side-swipe
effect... where the new image magically comes out from the centre of the old one. What genius!
The most comical scenes are when the Psychlos burst out in 'hey we are so evil' laughter. They were just so convincing that the audience thought they'd join in ;-). They were definitely the highlights of the film! So this was the general gist of the film... one minute you'll be bored stiff, suddenly you'll convulse with laughter, and then you'll be struggling to understand what's just happened... a brilliant film.
One worrying thing is that my friend Olli noticed I had quite a large smile on my face after the film. I claim this is because of the relief that it's finally over, but was there subliminal messaging? Who knows?!?
SUBLIMINAL: Hubbard is God. Hubbard is your leader. Come join the
scientologists.
Give us money. Have your brain washed out for just$50,000. SUBLIMINAL
