The film is set in a rainy jungle in Panama. I suspect it rains so much as an irritant, to make everything harder to see and hear. Maybe it’s intended as atmosphere. Or maybe the sky gods are angry at the film.
We are introduced to the hard-assed Sgt. Nathan West (Jackson), a sadistic perfectionist who is roundly hated by his unit. When various characters are killed during the confusion of the storm, there is the feeling the deaths may not have been accidental, may indeed have involved drug dealing. A former DEA agent named Tom Hardy (Travolta) is hauled back from alcoholism to join the investigation, teaming with Lt. Julia Osborne (Connie Nielsen).
The murders and the investigation are both told in untrustworthy flashbacks. We get versions of events from such differing points of view, indeed, that we yearn for a good old-fashioned omnipotent POV to come in and slap everybody around. There are so many different views of the same happenings that, hell, why not throw in a musical version?
Of course, there are moments that are engaging in themselves. With such actors (Giovanni Ribisi, Taye Diggs, Brian Van Holt, Roselyn Sanchez, and even Harry Connick Jr.), how could there not be? We listen and follow and take notes, and think we’re getting somewhere, and then the next scene knocks down our theories and makes us start again. Finally we arrive at an ending that gives a final jerk to our chain and we realize we never had a chance.
What is the point of a movie like Basic? To make us feel cleverly deceived? To do that, the film would have to convince us of one reality and then give us another, equally valid (classics like Laura did that). This movie gives no indication even at the end that we have finally gotten to the bottom of things. There is a feeling that Basic II could carry right on, undoing the final shots, bringing a few characters back to life and sending the whole crowd off on another tango of gratuitous deception.
Battlefield Earth
(DIRECTED BY ROGER CHRISTIAN; STARRING JOHN TRAVOLTA, BARRY PEPPER; 2000)
Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way. The visuals are grubby and drab. The characters are unkempt and have rotten teeth. Breathing tubes hang from their noses like ropes of snot. The sound track sounds like the boom mike is being slammed against the inside of a fifty-five-gallon drum. The plot …
But let me catch my breath. This movie is awful in so many different ways. Even the opening titles are cheesy. Sci-fi epics usually begin with a stab at impressive titles, but this one just displays green letters on the screen in a type font that came with my Macintosh. Then the movie’s subtitle unscrolls from left to right in the kind of “effect” you see in home movies.
It is the year 3000. The race of Psychlos have conquered Earth. Humans survive in scattered bands, living like actors auditioning for the sequel to Quest for Fire. Soon a few leave the wilderness and prowl through the ruins of theme parks and the city of Denver. The ruins have held up well after one thousand years. (The books in the library are dusty but readable, and a flight simulator still works, although where it gets the electricity is a mystery.)
The hero, named Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, is played by Barry Pepper as a smart human who gets smarter thanks to a Psychlo gizmo that zaps his eyeballs with knowledge. He learns Euclidean geometry and how to fly a jet, and otherwise proves to be a quick learner for a caveman. The villains are two Psychlos named Terl (John Travolta) and Ker (Forest Whitaker).
Terl is head of security for the Psychlos, and has a secret scheme to use the humans as slaves to mine gold for him. He can’t be reported to his superiors because (I am not making this up), he can blackmail his enemies with secret recordings that, in the event of his death, “would go straight to the home office!” Letterman fans laugh at that line; did the filmmakers know it was funny?
Jonnie Goodboy figures out a way to avoid slave labor in the gold mines. He and his men simply go to Fort Knox, break in, and steal it. Of course it’s been waiting there for one thousand years. What Terl says when his slaves hand him smelted bars of gold is beyond explanation. For stunning displays of stupidity, Terl takes the cake; as chief of security for the conquering aliens, he doesn’t even know what humans eat, and devises an experiment: “Let it think it has escaped! We can sit back and watch it choose its food.” Bad luck for the starving humans that they capture a rat. An experiment like that, you pray for a chicken.
Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can’t recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look purchased from the Goodwill store on Tatoine. Travolta can be charming, funny, touching, and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep? The Psychlos can fly between galaxies, but look at their nails: Their civilization has mastered the hyperdrive but not the manicure.
I am not against unclean characters on principle—at least now that the threat of Smell-O-Vision no longer hangs over our heads. Lots of great movies have squalid heroes. But when the characters seem noxious on principle, we wonder if the art and costume departments were allowed to run wild.
Battlefield Earth was written in 1980 by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The film contains no evidence of Scientology or any other system of thought; it is shapeless and senseless, without a compelling plot or characters we care for in the slightest. The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.
Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies. There is a moment here when the Psychlos’ entire planet (home office and all) is blown to smithereens, without the slightest impact on any member of the audience (or, for that matter, the cast). If the film had been destroyed in a similar cataclysm, there might have been a standing ovation.
Beautiful
(DIRECTED BY SALLY FIELD; STARRING MINNIE DRIVER, JOEY LAUREN ADAMS; 2000)
Beautiful should have gone through lots and lots more rewrites before it was imposed on audiences. It’s a movie with so many inconsistencies, improbabilities, unanswered questions, and unfinished characters that we have to suspend not only disbelief but intelligence.
The movie tells the story of Mona, a girl who dreams of becoming a beauty queen and grows up to become obsessed with her dream. Her life is not without difficulties. As a child from Naperville, Illinois, she is graceless, wears braces, chooses costumes Miss Clarabell would not be seen in, cheats, and is insufferably self-centered. As an adult, played by Minnie Driver, she gets rid of the braces but keeps right on cheating, until by the time she becomes Miss Illinois she has survived her third scandal.
Sample scandal. A competitor in a pageant plans to twirl a fire baton. Mona paints the baton with glue so the girl’s hand gets stuck to it, and then dramatically races onstage to save the girl with a fire extinguisher. Don’t they press criminal charges when you do things like that?