Battlefield Earth: Part Duh

[Cadaverous Pallor]

Ok, first of all, apologies to Gn2 for my very subjective movie tastes.

We ended up seeing this today with my sister-in-law. They wanted to see it so Greg and I acquiesced.....and I enjoyed nearly all of it.

Things I liked:

• The characters. Much more believable than in most of these kinds of movies. Dialogue, acting, backstory, interaction, all good in my book.
• The effects. Pretty damn seamless. Saw some stuff that was pretty amazing, shocking, surprising. Alien crafts, carnage, whathaveyou, all well done and entertaining.
• Believability. Yeah, aliens fantasy blah blah, but the way that the mob reacted to everything was very well done. People don't just run screaming from something that amazing - they stop and look and it ends up getting them killed. One scene in particular involving a mob had me in tears.

Things I didn't like:

• THE ENDING. WTF is with Spielberg and endings now? I won't give it away (although it is the same as the original story) but it's so poorly done that the audience was laughing. The last 15 min sucked all the good feeling out of the movie.

Spoiler:

• Seeing the aliens. It was kind of cool that they had 3 legs just like their craft, but I really liked the faceless automoton destruction better. Keeping them hidden would have been more fun.
• The Tim Robbins bit. He wasn't that good...a little too kooky. And the basement scene went on far too long. Again, didn't need the aliens in there - the snaky surveillance thing was plenty.

Yeah, there were some cheesy moments, but I enjoy that to a point, and this movie didn't cross that point. I really, really enjoyed this as a popcorn movie up until the basement scene went on too long, and it was downhill from there.

Originally Posted by Boss Radio

As far as the 9/11 references, that tragedy gave us a new visual lexicon to draw upon in order to accurately telegraph what the aftermath of a disaster would look like, at least to us in the USA. Flyers of missing people? Why not? That scene would most likely play out the same.

My thoughts exactly. Although it's annoying that, once again, it's mostly in New York. I'm so sick of New York in movies like this. It's like nothing ever happens elsewhere.

So yeah, sorry Gn2, but I'd recommend this to action movie fans with a caveat about the ending. If you like this sort of thing it's worth seeing in the theater for the eye-popping effects and great sound.