Battlefield Earth
dir. Roger Christian
Warner Bros.

Othello’s crushingly sad self-diagnosis was that he “loved not wisely but too well,” which casts a light into a corner of the spectrum of artists that’s easily glossed over. Cultural critics’ quick catcall of “Sellout!” is a ready response to a sea of marketing-driven, product-tested, dead-by-committee, compromised art objects that have subbed out originality to make room for preprogrammed demographic appeal. But what to make of those artists blinded to their craft by their earnestness?

Of all the negative trends in movies that Battlefield Earth epitomizes, overweening zeal may not be the one that’s most immediately obvious, but it’s the most telling. Battlefield Earth is, make no mistake, a terrible, terrible movie. But those who claim it’s the worst of the decade need to be reacquainted with Batman & Robin, at the very least, which is a terrible, terrible, terrible movie for an entirely different set of reasons. Mysteriously over- and underdirected by Roger Christian, Battlefield Earth is an adaptation of the first half of the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, who quite famously founded Scientology, a religion that includes Battlefield Earth producer and star John Travolta among its quite famous adherents.

Stories from the production of Battlefield Earth read like McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers’ mock-journalism constructs — Travolta talking about receiving different drafts from screenwriters until he found one that fans of Hubbard’s sci-fi felt was the most faithful; how impressed Travolta was with the dailies and the final cut and Christian’s direction; and, perhaps most Eggers-esque of all, how completely sincere Travolta was, in contrast to the forced-smile glad-handing that star types always give the projects they work on.

It stands to reason Travolta really felt the movie was as good as he said — in spite of his legitimate acting skills, he very well may have no taste — and that he surrounded himself with others with as ardent a love for the book as his. Battlefield Earth is a vanity project, to be sure, but the fundamental value it aimed to flatter was not vanity per se. The movie is closer kin to My Life, What Dreams May Come, Reggie’s Prayer, The Omega Code — movies so caught up in the service of an idea or ideal that they completely lose track of storytelling itself. (In the case of Battlefield Earth, it’s ideal-by-association, but all the same motivations apply — reverence must be applied to the masterpiece of the founder of your religion even if that masterpiece isn’t a holy book.)

You’ll notice that the litany of movies in that last paragraph shared a religious, or at least spiritual, or at least metaphysical, bent. Siblings like Cradle Will Rock and Philadelphia could also be included because they were likewise blinded by ideology, or Simon Birch and The Sheltering Sky because the filmmakers couldn’t get over their affection for the source material, but those works centered on matters of the soul manage to set themselves apart. God, in the myriad ways that cultures throughout history have approached the concept, is the ultimate muse, and the great works of any culture always include meditations, subtle and explicit, on the divine. That’s not really true of much recent cinema — the accomplished movie artists for the most part address the subject only in that most universal way that all stories do, and those with fevered passion for such exercises are rank amateurs in the film craft.

There’s no middle ground between these soulful-but-laborious labors of love and soulless Hollywood product so much as there’s a higher one. Sling Blade, The Apostle and After Life are all recent examples of non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, non-insulting, deeply accomplished works of art that revel in humanity’s spiritual dimension while remaining deeply honest about all those other messy dimensions.

The distance between what those movies accomplish and, say, what What Dreams May Come does (which is insulting, proselytizing and dogmatic without even having a concrete dogma to attach itself to) is the most visible gulf between the contemplative artist and the ham-handed zealot, but nothing shows how low you can be lain by unbridled zeal better than Battlefield Earth. Untempered passions — spiritual, political, intellectual — make for awful movies; if Battlefield Earth stands as a too-visible warning against this, then all the suffering it caused may not have been in vain.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)