Retrospective Film Review

Battlefield Earth (2000) • 20 Years Later

It’s the year 3000 A.D and humanity is enslaved by gold-thirsty alien tyrants, who are unaware their ‘man-animals’ are about to rebel.

Along with his confused look around from Pulp Fiction (1994), John Travolta is most often lauded online for his delivery of the line “while you were still learning how to spell your name, I was being trained to conquer galaxies!” That moment alone places Battlefield Earth among the pantheon of ‘so bad it’s good’ cinema, but unlike The Room (2003) that quote is a rare moment of schadenfreude in an otherwise terrible bad movie.

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 takes place after the thousand-year oppression of the alien Psychlos who have enslaved a near-extinct human race to mine gold for their own planet. Vicious commander Terl (Travolta) spies potential in rebellious Jonnie (Barry Pepper) to lead his experiment in teaching regressed mankind to use alien tech in order to steal resources from under his superior’s noses, while Jonnie exploits this conflict in alien bureaucracy to stage a…