Hacker Cinema
Battlefield Earth
2000 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Roger Christian
Science FictionActionAdventure
In the year 3000, man is no match for the Psychlos, a greedy, manipulative race of aliens on a quest for ultimate profit. Led by the powerful Terl, the Psychlos are stripping Earth clean of its natural resources, using the broken remnants of humanity as slaves. What is left of the human race has descended into a near primitive state. After being captured, it is up to Tyler to save mankind.
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32 comments on Hacker News
It's simple: When there's money to be made, the folks with the money to make, will pull out the stops to game the reviews. We have seen this in just about every review system ever (except Consumer Reports). They game it, milk some money, until everyone figures out it sucks, then abandon it. The reviewers count on getting brought.
I really miss Mr. Cranky[0, 1]. Here's his review of Battlefield Earth[2]:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Cranky
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20120503072554/http://www.mrcranky.com/content/mr-cranky-review-archives
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120926010236/http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/battlefieldearth.html
I haven't seen Covenant or Romulus yet. I saw Prometheus, and it was really bad, but in a complicated way. It wasn't a completely terrible movie that you can just dismiss as garbage like Battlefield: Earth and not think about again. It was beautifully shot, and a visual feast to watch. There were some really great scenes, like the robo-surgery scene. But the characters were frequently stupid, and the script was bad because it made the characters do idiotic, incompetent things that should only be seen in a B-grade horror movie. Ridley should have known better, and should have done a better job making sure the script he was working with made sense, so I'm very disappointed with him. He didn't do this with the first "Alien" movie at all.
Then he apparently did it again with Covenant: I haven't seen this one yet, but what I've read says he didn't really learn his lesson from Prometheus, and made another great-looking movie with high production values and a poor script. So I haven't been in a hurry to see it.
Romulus seems to have good reviews so far, and a different director, so I'd like to give it a chance. I just haven't had a chance to see it yet, but it is high on my list of films to watch soon, along with the new Quiet Place movie.
In the year 2000, the Internet wasn't as it is today. Most weren't on it, and it was still mostly just a bunch of people talking to each other, not commercial in nature.
Point is, when Battlefield Earth came out, no one really discussed how it was a Scientologist film, certainly not mainstream media, and not the general public. Yet certain corners of the Internet did, and there was all sorts of conspiracy theory style concern thrown around.
Some said that it had subliminal messaging, designed to lure people into scientologist's hands. It didn't have 1st order, or 2nd order level subliminal messages, but deep, deep 5th or 6th order messages, utterly undetectable mental memes that would be unpacked by your unconscious, and lead you deeply into their fold! Post-watch, you'd be primed to clutch your arms around their ideals, and you and yours would be theirs.
Whatever this 5th or 6th level subliminal messaging was supposed to be, or even what this gibberish meant, I wanted no part of it. So when some of my friends went to watch it, I thought of several questions to ask them, prior and post, and cleverly discussed a few topics with them. I was hoping to get a pre-watch view on topics that might be changed, and then get a post-watch view after.
I sort of post-watch interviewed them all, casually asking questions, and detected no real significant deviation. Still, I was uncertain and didn't see it in theatres, where supposedly the surround sound, large screen, and "socially derived, shared audience mega-cues" had the most "devastating impact".
Anyhow. My point is, this movie's descriptions in this post makes me think of that. All this discussion of it being wonderful gibberish has me recoiling in Battlefield Earth horror, my normally inquisitive self is now huddled in fear under a bed of paranoia.
The worst part is, even if I don't see it... well you'll all be changed around me, and now the world is different, regardless. That's how they get you, you see. Even those unvarnished by such machinations, fall prey to a changed society, akin to standing on shifting sand, you follow where the soil takes you.
And yes, I haven't seen Battlefield Earth yet.
Renting a movie with Mom and Dad was a special kind of excitement as a kid.
Walking around the store, looking at all the covers to try and figure out what we were going to watch. Usually, you had seen a preview for any given movie, or had at least heard about it, but there was still a lot of "rolling the dice", especially if the actor was famous: I saw Battlefield Earth because the cover looked cool and I liked space sci-fi, but the movie itself made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
For an intentionally terrible book, there's Atlanta Nights (https://archive.org/details/atlantanights0000teat ). A bunch of authors got together to write the worst book possible. It has pretty much every kind of awful prose in existence, including an early case of AI generation.
For awful but readable books:
Most anything by Dan Brown, but for the audience here, Digital Fortress will make you tear your hair out in frustration if you know anything at all about cryptography. The climax of the book seems to be made for a movie and is a completely nonsensical sequence in which people stare at a screen showing attackers bypassing a firewall, as if it were a wall that can be slowly drilled through.
For me that was the book that did it. If Dan Brown couldn't take 10 minutes to research the simplest basics of the subject he based his book around, imagine what the quality of the rest of the work is like.
Ender's Game I rate as a fairly enjoyable but puerile teenage power fantasy. But after that comes Speaker for the Dead, which to me is absolutely awful. Ender turns into this insufferably saintly martyr, who acts as some sort of Gordon Ramsay, only fixing an awful colony instead of a restaurant. Everyone in the book is insufferable and a complete moron, except for Ender of course who knows how to fix all those awful people.
And maybe Battlefield Earth. I've never read the entire thing, but here's a quote:
“His valet! In the rush of getting him off, his clumsy damned valet had put the wrong boots on him. Oh, when he got home ... when he got home he would have the oaf punctured! Worse. Dragged through the streets and bitten to death by small children.”
I don't have to be an actor or movie director to tell you confidently that "Battlefield: Earth" is a bad movie.
The only movie I've ever seen that's worse than Battlefield Earth is Wandering Earth. Evidence, of course, than any movie whose title ends with "Earth" is bound to be hot garbage.
I went to see Battlefield Earth in the theater with a friend. Yes, it was awful.
Battlefield Earth was responsible for teaching me to check reviews before seeing a movie.
Fun fact: It won the Razzi as "Worst 'Drama' of Our First 25 Years" and the 50th is just seven years away.
Quoting Rita Kempley of The Washington Post commented: "A million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth. This film version of L. Ron Hubbard's futuristic novel is so breathtakingly awful in concept and execution, it wouldn't tax the smarts of a troglodyte."
made me thinking, those working in the Sea Org sign a Billion Year contract[0] (even some eight-year-olds are signing those, after all the cult doesn't believe in the concept of children[1]), then it should easily be possible for the cult to come up with a Oscars-worthy remake within the next billion years...
Here's a few Youtube channels by former cult members, some of them grew up in it
* https://www.youtube.com/@GrowingUpInScientology * https://www.youtube.com/@blownforgood * https://www.youtube.com/@KelliCopter * not a Scientologist but also discusses other cults https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwU7HOfuSL5LKf6ixFYuH6be8Bw_nX8C1
If you can't have enough of that rabbit hole, read about cults like NXIVM, Thirteen Tribes and FLDS. So much of it is luring in even the most intelligent people when they are vulnerable and it evolves into a play for power and control.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329600246_The_Eternal_Commitment_Scientology%27s_Billion-Year_Contract [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJdXkR8e_a8&list=PL83GIJOYK-h_2NdHB4eue-fQcrg65TmJc
I've never seen the movie, but as a child, Battlefield Earth was one of my favorite novels. I read it maybe ten times before age 20. I think it's a fairly childish and simplistic novel, but it is VERY long, and that is what I was looking for as a 13 year old voracious reader in the 90s.
I moved on to LRH's 'Mission Earth' decalogy. It's substantially weirder, with some sexual themes that seemed to my teenage self to be pretty far out of left field. But, again - it was very long. It gave me months of reading about a sci-fi world, which was basically the only thing I was looking for.
Sadly, in the 11 years since the article was published, the Battlefield Earth official movie website has gone dark. This little section of the book's website seems to be all that's left:
https://battlefieldearth.com/battlefield-earth/#movie
Around 1985, I bought a used paperback copy of Battlefield Earth, and it had a tear-out form to "Order the soundtrack of a book!" as it was "Soon to be a major motion picture!"
Loved the book, but never ordered the soundtrack, and the wait for the eventual movie was about as long as the wait for more Star Wars after Return of the Jedi.
And maybe even more disappointing.
*Looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Jazz and there are a couple of songs on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/7jbIrqG028aV3uxNy56ZZg?si=CD7XwX1TTYKYwYb3uIX_ng Oh, wow. Umm. I'm so glad my teenage-self didn't spend money on that. :-D
(1) You are correct in that placing both of those questions into Google doesn't quite get you anywhere near the answer that I imagine ChatGPT gives you (as you point out). Although, Google does "infer" which Bush you are talking about, there isn't a clear "this person is older" answer, you have to dive into the wiki pages basically to get the answer.
(2) Counter. I asked it the other day "how many movies were Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in together" and the answer ChatGPT gave was 2 ... not only is that wrong it is astonishingly wrong (IMO). You could be forgiven for forgetting Ithaca from 2015. I could forgive ChatGPT for forgetting that one. But You've Got Mail? That's a very odd omission. So much so I'm genuinely curious how it could possible get the answer wrong in that way. And for the record, Google presents the correct answer (4) in a cut out segment right at the top, a result and presentation very close to what one would expect from ChatGPT.
I don't know about other use cases like generating stories (or tangentially art of any kind) for inspiration, etc. But as a search engine things like ChatGPT NEED to have attributions. If I ask the question "Does a submarine appear in the movie Battlefield Earth?" it will confidently answer "no". I _think_ that answer is right, but I'm not really all that confident it is right. It needs to present the reasons it thinks that is right. Something like "No. I believe this because (1) the keyword submarine doesn't appear in the IMDb keywords (<source>), (2) the word submarine doesn't appear in the wikipedia plot synopsis (<source>), (3) the film takes place in Denver (<source>) which is landlocked making it unlikely a submarine would be found in that location during the course of the film."
The Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan question/answer would at least more interesting if it explained how it managed to be so uniquely incorrect. That question will haunt me though ... there's some rule about this right? Asking about something you have above average knowledge in and watching someone confidently answer it incorrectly. How am I supposed to ever trust ChatGPT again about movie queries?
Book is masterpiece! So many things, plot twists and characters.
Movie is cut-down version of book to fill in 90 mins.
Another example of supreme disappointment is "Battlefield Earth" movie. If you're fan of a book - don't watch it!
I actually enjoyed Battlefield Earth. I enjoyed the movie because I immensely enjoyed the book. I almost always like SF that in large part written from the point of view of aliens. And some scenes in the movie were quite additionally surprising in showing the character of alien protagonist.
I know native speakers can't not cringe on this movie. And there's an issue with who the author of the book was and what he did. And people can't get out of human perspective while watching this movie and can't believe how aliens can be this stupid to underestimate humans. In the book it's way better shown that aliens have as little respect for and interest in humans as workers do for the monkeys when the go out to clear the jungle with bulldozers and quibble between themselves over pay and job security.
Book have many detailes way more flashed out, so knowing stuff from the book, movie looked way less stupid to me than to average viewer.
After giving up 2.5 episodes in, the only thing I can compare this show to is Battlefield Earth.
It's incredibly, spectacularly bad!
Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy
Battlefield Earth (the book, definitely not the movie)
The Land: Founding - Aleron Kong
Steel World - B.V. Larson
Ready Player One / Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline
Twinborn Chronicles - J.S. Morin
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
> I think more lines need to be drawn here. The claim is "did he say it" and the answer is "yes".
> If they wanted to fact check whether "Biden said he didn't care about young people in a disparaging way", that would be fine, but it also is just a moral judgement.
But the literal claim "did he utter these words" is practically meaningless. By that standard, if you once said "I don't understand people who think the movie Battlefield Earth is great, it's a waste of time." I could say "tjs8rj said 'the movie Battlefield Earth is great,'" or "tjs8rj said 'I don't understand people,'" and you'd have to fact check that as a "yes," even though I inverted your meaning. What people really care about is what's was meant.
> The actual problem here is that Snopes doesn't apply this standard evenly. For a democrat, it "requires context", for a republican, it's just "100% true".
I'm not convinced that's actually the case.
Two thoughts:
1) I think the view that “90% of people are crap” is incredibly misanthropic, cynical, and a view that would likely make the world a worse place if widely adopted.
2) I think enjoying the 90% of crap is maybe more important than enjoying the 10% of not crap.
Being able to enjoy bad movies, bad music, bad art, bad everything is great. Who wouldn’t want to increase the amount of things they could enjoy by 2x or 3x or 9x? I watched Battlefield Earth recently and it was a blast! One of my favorite shows is How I Met Your Mother (which is "crap" if you define "crap" as "less than the 90th percentile in that medium"...it's prolly a 70 or 80th percentile show).
Why be an elite who turns their nose up at things when you can enjoy both the things the elites like AND the things they sneer at? Sign me up for the trash!
Why is Comic Sans so reviled? Is it because it is one of the few fonts you are able to name?
It's like the mainstream view that ET is the worst game of all time. It is bad, yes, but not even close to the worst game of all time. Not even the worst mainstream game of all time.
Stop font is far worse than Comic Sans, and that garbage was showing up all the time in the 90s well into the 2000s.
https://fanart.tv/fanart/movies/5491/hdmovielogo/battlefield-earth-50941e2592c41.png
Actually it's any name, even the name of the reviewer, as the test they conducted showed.
the issue is that humans don't understand multi-variable statistical analysis, whether in the form of ANOVA or machine learning training, so they try to pack everything down into two or sometimes three variables of output.
And that's fine if you are pulling from a population that's homogenous. But if there are two or more discrete subpopulations, you want to control for them or represent them separately, not just ignore them or pretend they reflect the information you want.
Anyway if the reviewer name is enough to throw the results, it may suggest that guys praise more movies, rather than movies with male character's get more praise.
I just looked at the first page of 10 star reviews of battlefield Earth and none seemed to be female, just saying.
What a travesty that was... L Ron Hubbard is very hit or miss, but the actual Battlefield Earth novel was one of his better efforts.
I'd like to see a Final Blackout[1] movie adaptation...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Blackout
Jaron Lanier: Why people should pay more attention to me and not Web 2.0
When I noticed myself getting mean online I thought, “Something has gone terribly wrong.” It was obvious the rest of the ARPAnet had a social problem, not just me being some sort of asshole.
My book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is ruffling virtual feathers across the ARPAnet. And so it should, because I invented virtual reality. Wikipedia, which is a tissue of lies, says so. Prospect magazine’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll lists me. Also, my hair is much better than yours. And I’m fifty. According to Wikipedia, so I’d better change my birthday.
Today, the web is a bland place. It’s all user-generated content — silly clips on YouTube, spiteful anonymous comments on blogs about my books, endless photographs of people at a bar with their friends or up a mountain with an ironing board. It was much better back in the early days of the ARPAnet, before we let the commercial users on. These words will mostly be read by numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. You know, the peasants. Virtual reality is far more ennobling, but you never hear people talking about that any more.
The ARPAnet only creates banal mashups of old culture. Salvagers picking over a garbage dump. Only the old-world economy of books, films and newspapers creates original content like Lawnmower Man or Battlefield Earth. Everyone knows that real artists have no influences. This stuff the kids are into these days is just noise!
The ARPAnet is also killing music, according to my good friends at the RIAA. Did you know there’s no music in Spain any more? It’s true!
Will we — meaning I — be able to live off our brains in the future, or will we just have to give our creative works away for free? If we can’t live off our brains then we’ll need a form of SOCIALISM just to survive. WIKIPEDIA IS COMMUNISM! Until the Wikipedia Corporation finally builds a good interface, for goggles and power-gloves.
Open source and open content are a cancer. The dogma I object to is composed of a set of interlocking beliefs and doesn’t have a generally accepted overarching name as yet, so I’m going to call it Digital MAOISM, which is COMMUNISM. Update, five years later: Here is a detailed retcon explanation of why I was not just trolling for headlines by calling Wikipedia COMMUNISM, but was speaking precisely and you just weren’t thinking hard enough: [snip 10,000 words]
Also, you should get into virtual reality more.
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto is published on papyrus scroll and hand-illustrated by monks. You cannot have a copy until you have fought your way up the mountain and proven yourself worthy.
I usually go for a metric along the lines of Chesterton's Fence: do the negative critiques seem like they're dismissing the film out-of-hand, or do they seem to show an understanding what it was going for and still think it failed to do it well? Roger Ebert was usually pretty good about this, which gives his truly scathing reviews that much more bite [1].
[1]: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000
my favorite bit: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."
I read just about every Heinlein story I could get my hands on as a teenager. The funny thing is that the one's I thought were sort of stupid - e.g. Have Space Suit Will Travel and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - because they were only about the solar system, I've found to be among my favorites as an adult.
Then again, I couldn't get through Friday back then, but found the description of the role that big data would play in the future prescient a few years ago. Likewise, understanding Stranger in a Strange Land in the context of Heinlien's relationship with Hubbard was beyond me in high-school [Hubbard's BattleField Earth is worth a read or at least a try, even if the movie isn't. He was a talented writer among other things].
>Maybe it's the "star rating" system that's broken.
While less so for product reviews, I feel like restaurant/hotel reviews are more like movie reviews. Just like Battlefield Earth, there are some bad restaurants that universally will get panned. And there are some just wonderful establishments everyone will love, just like Shawshank Redemption.
But for everything in between, it's a matter of taste, which is why Netflix tries to infer your tastes and predict a star rating for _you_ rather than gives you an aggregate rating.
Someone might give a dive bar a one-star review because it's smoky, they only accept cash, and they only sell Bud Light. However that same person might give a 5-star review to a craft beer bar that refuses to sell mass market lagers.
On the flipside, someone might give the dive 5 stars because the drinks are cheap and it's one of the last places in town where they can go out and still light up. And they might give the fancy bar one star for being too pretentious.
Neither opinion is wrong, people just like different things. Glomming this all into an average star rating just seems to give me useless information.
In order for it to be meaningful that something is "bad", it has to have had intentions of being "good".
Anyone can intentionally make a bad movie that's worse than a stinker like Battlefield Earth. That's nothing worth recognizing because the difference between the actual quality and the intended quality, the ΔQ, is so tiny.
"The worst movie ever" designation should go to the film that has the highest ΔQ.
>I don't decide which book to read based on what program was used to edit the book.
Yes you do. You read books published by major publishers that adhere to a certain quality or standard. You don't read books that were hand-written on a banana leaf.
>I don't watch a movie based on what software was used to edit it.
Ever seen Battlefield Earth? Didn't think so.
>Why would I judge a picture based on what camera was used?
Usually one is oblivious to the camera used for a picture. However, the camera used does indeed correlate with the quality of the image. The better the camera, the higher quality the picture. This gives information about the site owner's intent for content.
They did in the movie Battlefield Earth lol
Along the same lines, I had a paperback copy of Battlefield Earth in the mid 80's with a "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!" emblem and a tear-out card to order the soundtrack.
Hopefully waiting decades for an Ender's Game movie turns out better than waiting decades for Battlefield Earth did.
...or waiting decades for the Star Wars prequels.
Maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up - but LotR turned out well!
Good list, and I've read nearly all of them.
Getting past the first chapter of Pandoras Star is well worth it - Morninglightmountain is one of the most original, minblowingly awesome all time alien baddies, and the trepidation and sense of impending doom in that book and its's sequel Judas Unchained are superb. Would also recommend the Void Trilogy by Peter F Hamilton too - strong mix of scifi and an alternate fantasy world.
Missing in my view would be: Greg Bear - Eon (as people have mentioned, but also: M John Harrison - Light James Blish - Cities in Flight Battlefield Earth (awesome book, hopeless film) Brave New World for my ultimate "classic"
"Alternatively, you could try writing awful science fiction novels and hiring a ton of lawyers. I hear that also works these days."
Off-topic but I disagree : Battlefield Earth was a good book. And terrible movie.