Battlefield earth
Roger Christian presumably won this big-budget science-fiction gig on the basis of his second-unit work on the The Phantom Menace.
#Battlefield earth serial#
It doesn't help that the film's premise, which sees stoneage cavemen turn into ace fighter pilots with only a week's training, is as naive as that of the 1939 serial Buck Rogers, where Buck mastered futuristic flying machines in as ludicrously short a period. Campbell to add mythic muscle to an action scenario. The path to enlightenment taken by the film's pouting, callow hero Jonnie is as fuzzy as any other post-Skywalker attempt to yoke in teachings from Joseph W. Dick, Harlan Ellison and Alfred Bester.įor this reason, Battlefield Earth is likely to go down better with Scientology devotees - for whom Hubbard is an almost sacred figure - than with serious science-fiction fans.
#Battlefield earth full#
Full of gosh-wow devices that had long since become clichés, Battlefield Earth's juvenile tone was more in tune with the post- Star Wars science-fiction films of the late 70s than the literary field which had nurtured Philip K. It was also clear that Hubbard had taken little notice of how the genre had changed since his days in the late 30s writing at a penny a word for such magazines as Astounding Science Fiction. At the time of publication, it was remarked that Hubbard had retrofitted his belief system into pulp plotting by setting out a story - young man overcomes initial ignorance to achieve mastery of Earth - which could easily be read as an allegory of an initiate's progress through Scientology. Ron Hubbard's first published science fiction after a prolonged break from the genre spent inventing Dianetics, the peculiar system of DIY psychic self-improvement that forms the basis of the Church of Scientology. The 1066-page novel Battlefield Earth was L. Ker sides with the humans Terl is imprisoned as insurance against reprisal from other Psychlo colonies. Jonnie uses a teleport link with the Psychlos' home planet to send the aliens a suicide raider with a nuclear device, which ignites the atmosphere of the planet. In a mass uprising against the Psychlos, Carlo sacrifices himself to destroy the dome over Denver, letting in air fatal to the Psychlos.
Jonnie counterplots against Terl, using his newly acquired skills to scavenge gold from Fort Knox and fighter jets and nuclear weapons from a US military base. Terl trains Jonnie for the job, subjecting him to a machine that fills him with Psychlo knowledge. Assisted by his deputy Ker, Terl plots to make a fortune by secretly training humans to mine gold in radioactive areas. Terl, Psychlo Security Chief on Earth, is condemned by his superiors to stay indefinitely at his post. They are soon captured by a Psychlo raiding party rounding up slaves. Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a young tribesman, leaves his homestead and falls in with Carlo, a hunter. Humans live either in servitude to the invaders or in small tribes. The Earth has long since been occupied by the Psychlos, an aggressively capitalist species of giant humanoid aliens. Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.Ī thousand years hence.