Battlefield Earth is feeling less lonely

Rating: Null/10 (26 July 2013)

The only good news here is that sometimes a movie can do everything so wrong it becomes as revealing about what works in a film as one by a master.
In just the awful expositional slab of voice-over monologue, we find out that aliens exist and have destroyed the moon, the Earth is an uninhabited wasteland, humanity lives in Saturn, and our protagonist has had his memory wiped off. This is just indicative of the overall mess that follows. The film is a hodge podge of seemingly every sci-fi movie made in the past 50 years. Individual moments recall everything from Dune to Riddick to The Matrix to 2001, but the main effect is closer to Battlefield Earth.
Overall the effect it has on me is like watching a kid create a story and world around his toys. He looks immersed setting up who did what, but it's all a framework for bumping noises. I'm illustrating this in three areas, though the film is bad from start to finish.
In the connecting logic: an enterprise with an estimable cost in the trillions is operated by two people on the ground, so far as they know anyway. One of them flies around repairing things, by himself. During a crisis, with a hydrogen plant in flames after sabotage and one of the drones missing, he takes off to relax in a cabin in the woods. Basically everything about the mission makes as much sense as Planet of the Vampires. Later some of this is reconstituted by an even dumber twist.
In the emotional gravity: our hero's love of his life is shot at one point and dying. How is this dealt in the film? Simple, Cruise flies off to another station, sneaks in, picks up medicine and flies out to her again in time to save her, in essence reversing fate. The gravest action is rolled back without consequence, removing any weight of subsequent grave happenings.
In the cinematic gravity: in good action films, when things crash or explode we feel this by having the camera tethered to the forces. Watch the scene where Cruise is chased by the drones-the motion and impacts are poor, the situating of our eye is as dopey as rear-projection in its time. The environments are mediocre throughout. This is the biggest failure, because even the dumbest action film can excite if we are placed the right way.
Something else.
A movie steeped in technology recasts technology, in the gnostic trope usual in sci-fi, as the crazed demigod in the sky sucking up the planet's energy, imprisoning the self. Peace is equated with nature and playing old records, after one has sacrificed himself in the 'temple of his gods', dying what in Walt Whitman's time was called a 'good death'. Since then, the concept has gone from Yankee Protestantism to Salafi Jihadism, you'd think bringing into crisper focus the absurdity of it, but no.
Just mentioning these as more indications of the short-sightedness here.