Well now I've seen it and it makes for an almost perfect bookend to the movie year. The previous movie that I had watched was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon so I had seen possibly the best movie of the year back to back with possibly the worst. It's enough to give a person a case of whiplash.

There is so much wrong with this movie that I barely know where to start. To be fair I should start with what little I did like. Some of the matte paintings in the movie were quite attractive. That's about it for good stuff though. I must clarify that only some of the visuals were good. Some of them were downright dreadful. The aliens looked like a demented cross between 70s era KISS and Klingons. Their ships looked like garbage trucks with jets tacked on the sides.

John Travolta was awful. His performance as the alien security chief Terl is overblown and completely lacking in anything convincing or redeeming. He made the character the most hackneyed of cartoons. Hell, he spent half the movie cackling maniacally. That's not acting. I'm not sure what you'd call it but it was bad. Really bad. Really really bad.

The movie shows us Earth in the year 3000. Hundreds of years previously the alien race the Psychlos attacked and conquered the planet. They have spent the time since strip mining it for its precious metals. Humans have been enslaved and hunted for sport. Precious few have survived. One of them, Johnny (Barry Pepper) wants to know more about the world so he sets out to explore. He is promptly captured by the Psychlos. Terl decides to plug Johnny into a learning machine so that he will know enough to mine some gold the Psychlos can't get to.

Johnny doesn't just learn things, he turns into a Einstein level genius overnight. This is a man so dim that when confronted with a pane of dirty glass for the first time he tries to walk through it as if nothing was there. Half an hour of electro-book learning later and he's suddenly a rocket scientist. Now brilliant he begins organizing a human revolt. Terl is of course a blithering idiot and can't spot any of these plans being formed. That's not a big surprise since the scriptwriters clearly didn't think the viewers were too bright either. I can't think of another reason why they would leave plot holes so gaping you could navigate an aircraft carrier through them.

That's an interesting choice of vehicle since the human revolt hinges on the discovery of a whole flight of fueled and perfectly working thousand year old harrier fighter jets. Not only that but Johnny teaches human savages in a couple days to fly these things. Not just fly them, but fly them so well that they can successfully battle alien ships that reportedly whipped a planet full of trained pilots a millennia earlier in a mere nine minutes. Buying this? Me neither. But wait, there's more. Since the humans are supposed to be mining gold and not planning a revolution, they quickly hop over to Fort Knox which has been mysteriously ignored for a thousand years by the gold craving Psychlos. The humans gather up a good size load of gold bars and bring them to Terl, who is far too stupid to notice the problem with this shipment of gold.

This is the kind of movie that starts weakly but gathers up a head of steam and starts sucking like a nuclear powered vacuum by the midway point. It has nowhere to go but down. As the story progresses the logic gets thinner and the plot holes get bigger. Luckily they have John Travolta over acting his heart out to try and cover those flaws. Not often do you see a movie that tries to mask its bad points with even bigger bad points. But even as bad as Travolta was, even he couldn't mask the movie's finale. This is a series of events so incoherent that they might have actually been an assembly of clips from other movies.

I eventually started feeling bad for Barry Pepper and Forest Whitaker. These are actors too talented to have to suffer through this sort of a pothole in their careers. Actually it's probably a much bigger hole but grave sounded too harsh. Not harsh in the sense that the movie doesn't deserve the abuse (it does) but harsh as in these are actors I would actually like to see work again someday. Travolta may have suffered the most damage though. As I understand it, making this movie has been his dream for many years. It brings to mind the proverb "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." It could take decades for him to live this turkey down.

So to review, the movie has a couple nice matte paintings but otherwise collapses under its own stupefying levels of badness. Think of it as the black hole of movies. A force so powerful that no hint of entertainment value can possibly escape, creating a massive ball of badness inhaling ... You get the idea. I'm too worn out from suffering through it to keep whipping this deceased equine.

- John Shea

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