The Jeffreview you've been waiting for: Battlefield Earth

I saw the tape on the shelf while browsing the library. Picking it up, I saw John Travolta's made-up face staring back at me, and I was filled with a mixture of dread and curiosity. Curiosity won out. I checked it out of the library, and I just finished it yesterday. And you know what? I liked it.

Battlefield Earth was good. It had its weaknesses, but it was entertaining, and I liked the story. Now of course, you're thinking, "He's gotta be fucking with me." Well, yes, sort of, I am. The truth is, I did enjoy Battlefield Earth. I would recommend it to you as distracting entertainment if you were planning to take, say a road trip. Because the Battlefield Earth I checked out of the library was the audiobook. It was an abridged version of the L. Ron Hubbard novel, read/performed by Roddy McDowall.

The book-on-tape was packaged in images from the movie, obviously for the purposes of marketing it, but perhaps if they had known how bad the movie would be, and how badly it would do at the box office, they wouldn't have bothered. The movie (which I haven't seen, but, oh, the stories I've heard...) is based loosely upon the first half of the novel. Had the movie done well, the plan would have been to produce a sequel which covered the rest of the novel. Lucky thing they didn't shoot both movies back-to-back, like they did with Lord of the Rings and the Matrix sequels.

The original novel Battlefield Earth was published at over 800 pages long. It was written by L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the cult-like religion of Scientology, a fact which has overshadowed his rather prolific publication of over 200 books of varying genres, including 15 New York Times bestsellers. Published in 1982, Battlefield Earth is a return to L. Ron Hubbard's roots as a writer of science fiction pulp novels, stories that were popular in the 1930s, printed in magazines and dime novels, on cheap paper. It contains no Scientology propaganda or anything like that. The audiobook I listened to was read by the late Roddy McDowall, the actor with the prissy, English accent probably best-known for his role as Cornelius in Planet of the Apes. His performance was good, using a wider range of accents and voices than I had expected. The audiobook was 8 hours long, significantly shorter than the novel which is one of the longest, if not THE longest, science fictions novels ever published.

One could easily see why they decided to cut this book in two when making it into a movie. The first half of the story is quite different from the second half, and there is something of a climax which makes it a rather natural stopping point for someone who wanted to make an overly-expensive, action-packed adventure movie. It is basically a grand adventure tale, with plot being the first priority and character development being lower on the list. Still, there were some interesting characters in the audiobook. It is about brave and noble human beings throwing off the yoke of their oppressive, alien conquerors and winning their freedom. Of course, anyone who watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine should know that there's more to winning your freedom than simply slaying the villain. There are the glory boys who win the space battle in the fancy starship Enterprise, then there are the Deep Space Nine folks who settle in for the long haul of getting the planet back on its feet.

Battlefield Earth takes place in the year 3000, or so I gather from the novel's full title, Battlefield Earth: A Saga for the Year 3000. In sharp contrast to the insightful speculation of the TV show Futurama, Earth is not a gleaming megalopolis of flying cars, heads floating in jars, and sociopathic bending robots. It is, instead, a largely unpopulated wilderness which has been under the dominion of aliens called Psychlos. These Psychlos have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and reign over an empire of millions of planets spanning 16 universes. The key to their domination has been their discovery of the technology of teleportation. Able to teleport to any point in the 16 universes, they can send their military anywhere, instantly. In fact, the way they conquered Earth a thousand years ago was by teleporting an unmanned craft to our planet, where it then flew about, dropping poison gas all over the place. In a matter of days, almost all the people in the world were dead, with not a single Psychlo casualty in the process. Then they came to Earth and set up shop.

The planet wasn't colonized by the Psychlos, or anything like that. Instead, a Psychlo mining company spent the last thousand years mining metals, including gold. In that time, the human population stayed in remote areas, in primitive villages scattered throughout the world. So the Psychlos in the novel are not the villainous, conquering invader types. They are, instead, mining company employees whose main concern is making a profit. Sure, they could be cruel at times, but you have to remember that they looked upon humans the way we look upon monkeys: as animals. Occasionally interesting, sometimes surprisingly intelligent, but mostly just animals. They are described as being around 9 to 10 feet tall, much stronger than humans, with sharp talons instead of fingers and fur on their bodies. Their faces are vaguely described as being composed largely of bones. "His eye-bones glowed with pleasure," or "His mouth-bones stretched into a smile." Outside of their mining compound they wear transparent "breathe-masks" since they can't breathe Earth air. At no point in the novel were Psychlos described as looking like an overweight John Travolta, wearing dreadlocks and Kiss-style platform boots.

The first half of the novel centers around two characters: the Psychlo head of security, Terl, and the primitive human, Jonnie "Goodboy" Tyler. The point of view shifts between the two, Jonnie seeing Terl as a towering monster, and Terl seeing Jonnie as a disgusting animal. This shifting perspective is an interesting device which helps keep the Psychlos from being two-dimensional monsters. At one point early in the story, Terl has captured Jonnie, and is keeping him in an old zoo cage. But Jonnie has no food or water, and Terl's alien food is indigestible to Jonnie. So Terl lets Jonnie escape, following him in stealth. Jonnie, on the run, manages to feed himself by catching and killing some rats, eating them raw (he is desperate and starving). Terl then recaptures Jonnie, and from then on continues to fee Jonnie raw, dead rats, which he logically assumes are Jonnie's food of choice. Later, when Jonnie's learning is proceeding slower than Terl would like, he thinks to himself, "what can you expect from an animal that eats raw rat?"

The story begins with Jonnie living in his village, high up in the mountains of Colorado. This is one of the few safe areas from the Psychlos, as the trace amounts of uranium there are lethal to the Psychlos. Of course, the low levels of radiation are also causing some sterility and birth defects among the humans there, resulting in a dwindling population, but they don't know that, and they are afraid to leave the mountains because of the monsters (the nine-foot-tall Psychlos). Jonnie is a bit of a rebel, and decides to explore the lowlands, and show that monsters don't really exist. At the same time, Terl has found some evidence, such as the old, decaying, abandoned cities, that humans may have once been intelligent beings. And since they are obviously not affected by the uranium in the mountains (obviously, since that's where they live), perhaps they can be trained as slave labor, to mine the metals which may be in those regions? That would raise profits without significantly increasing personnel costs. So he decides to take a hunting trip and bring back a human, to see if it can be trained.

Naturally, Terl captures Jonnie and makes him the subject of the experiment. Using a Psychlo teaching machine, Jonnie learns not only to speak Psychlo, but to read English as well. His successful training encourages Terl to expand his operation. Meanwhile, Terl discovers evidence that some of the other executives in his company are embezzling from the company and banking huge profits. He uses this knowledge to blackmail them into approving his human training project. He schemes to use the humans to mine gold deposits, off the company books, and pocket it for himself. He "recruits" a bunch more human subjects for his project, from the remote highlands of Scotland. By now, Jonnie has been Terl's pet for about a year. As he trains these 50-or-so Scot recruits, he also plays Braveheart, shaping them into his own little army to strike back against the Psychlos.

The thing is, even if they could kill all the Psychlos on Earth, they would just get spanked hard the next time the Psychlo homeworld decided to send another gas bomber. So they have to do something to prevent Psychlos from attacking them. In a coordinated attack using hijacked Psychlo aircraft, they manage to teleport nuclear warheads (salvaged from an old missile base) to the Psychlo homeworld. This results in a chain reaction which destroys their planet. Yay! Humanity is free! A natural ending to the movie! Oh wait, the book is only half over.

The newly-rebellious humans manage to kill or subjugate the few Psychlos remaining on Earth. They establish a government and a banking system. But this is not the end. The Psychlos were the rulers of a vast, intergalactic empire. Their corporations provided metals and other resources to a million planets in 16 universes. And their homeworld was the hub of this great, vast wheel. You don't destroy something like that, with nobody noticing.

Eventually, Earth is visited by other aliens, aliens who, now that the central Psychlo government is gone, are striking out on their own, fighting for territory and resources. Earth is still a largely-untapped bounty of resources, and several alien races arrive to take their piece of the pie. They attack the newly-formed and still-primitive human society, which is without significant planetary defenses. The few leftover Psychlo fighter planes and thousand-year-old military installations are no defense against the technologically and numerically superior alien forces, who begin raiding and burning the (still mostly unoccupied) cities of Earth.

And finally, there is the appearance of the only force that held the universes with as much power and fear as the Psychlos: the intergalactic banking system. With the Psychlos gone, the shark-like bankers are the only authority universally respected and obeyed by the many alien races who inhabit the universes. And they have business to do on Earth. Apparently, the Psychlo mining company which was mining Earth had purchased the mining rights with a loan from the bank, and now that the Psychlos were gone and unable to make their payments, it was time to repossess the planet.

So while the first half of the novel was about the education of Jonnie and his revolution to overthrow the Psychlos, the second half of the novel was about the legal wranglings, maneuverings, and manipulations involved in keeping the Earth from being sold off in a foreclosure auction, while it is being picked away by attacking aliens.

If you ask me, the second half of the book is really the interesting part. I enjoyed the grand adventure of the first half, the struggle of our hero to throw off the chains of his oppressor, but this is a story which has been told many times. The second half gets interesting, because it's about the part of the story you don't usually get to hear about. What happens to Luke Skywalker after the Emperor is killed and all the Rebels are done partying? I mean, the hero tries to overthrow the oppressor, you pretty much know how that will turn out. But when the bank comes to repo your stuff, now that's scary. And even though you assume that the good guys will win, it's a lot less clear just how it's going to happen.

I can see why they didn't make the second half of the novel into a movie, since the first half is more of a straightforward adventure story. And had the movie been successful, I wonder if they would have adapted the second half of the book, or if they would have simply written a new action-adventure story, and resurrected the villain to be defeated again, typical Hollywood crap. Because the second half of the novel involves vast stretches of time where the only action involves people sitting in a council chamber, arguing intergalactic law with each other, not exactly the explosion factory that Hollywood tends to prefer for a science fiction movie.

If you're planning on taking a road trip, or just find that your daily commute could use a bit of distraction, I think you could do a lot worse than listening to the audiobook of Battlefield Earth. At 8 hours long, it distills L. Ron Hubbard's original novel down to probably about one-third or one-quarter it's original size. The emphasis is definitely on plot, rather than character development, though there are some interesting characters. The Psychlos can be cruel, but they're just trying to do their jobs on a far-off mining world on which they'd rather not be stuck. Jonnie transforms from a headstrong young dissident to a leader of men, to a reluctant celebrity. And even though dealing with politicians and bankers isn't what immediately springs to mind when one thinks of defeating alien invaders, it does make for an interesting and not-entirely-predictable story.

Now that I know L. Ron Hubbard's original story, I am admittedly a bit curious to see the reputedly-horrible movie. Though after reading a few reviews online, my curiosity is diminished. So if you're inclined to, check out the novel, skip the movie. I know, the movie is shorter, but the novel won't leave you wishing you could gouge out a part of your anatomy.

© 2002 Jeffrey P. Hui