Firstly, the story has got to be the most retarded concept since Cleopatra 2525, which as avid TV watchers will know revolves around a stripper from the past fighting alien zombie robots in the underground world of the 26th century. I don’t know how L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology and the author of the novel Battlefield Earth, ever gained respectability writing novels with less sense than the top floor of the Royal Ottawa, but somehow (I suspect subliminal messaging), he has convinced Hollywood’s elite that they can cleanse their souls with his dianetics machines, which incidentally seem to run entirely on platinum VISA cards. But who am I to question Hollywood’s choice of religion. At least they’re not Mormons. In all honesty, Battlestar Galactica Earthship Troopers has some of the stupidest plot twists and leaps of logic since I Still Know What You Did The Summer Before Last When You Hit Me With Your Car, Remember?. The basic concept has humanity being reduced to primitives after being invaded by evil nine-foot tall aliens called Psychlos. Who says subtlety is dead? And it just goes downhill from there. I realize that the science fiction genre requires some suspension of disbelief, but there’s no way I’m going to buy cave men learning to fly Harrier jets in seven days to destroy their evil alien overlords. Hell, I couldn’t even figure out how to use my camcorder in seven days, and I had a manual. As for the aliens, who incidentally bear an uncanny resemblance to Klingons in platform shoes, they are the epitome of evil, a race of money hungry, backstabbing, murderous tyrants who for some baffling reason are completely unable to swear, resorting instead to such harsh phrases as ‘crap-hole’ and ‘shut the crap up’. However, they do have bad teeth, and thus their evil is unquestioned.

Director Roger Christian, whose last movie managed to gross almost $20 in domestic box office, seems to be slightly confused for most of the movie. For one thing, so much money seems to have been spent on special effects that there wasn’t anything left for a tripod, so most of the movie is crooked and sideways. Us hoity-toity film students call this an oblique, or ‘funny-looking’, angle, but Christian uses it so much it loses its ‘world off balance’ effect and goes for a more ‘world full of nausea’ deal. It’s also my opinion that the movie would have been a lot shorter had it not been filmed entirely in slow-motion. Everything’s in slow-mo, the fighting, the explosions, the dialogue, the credits, everything, bringing the movie in at a tight 7 hours and 20 minutes. At least it was shorter than The Insider.

But what was worse than all this was the five guys sitting behind us during the showing. I don’t often use ‘steaming mound of rat feces’ to describe people, but this time I’ll make an exception. They kept getting all into the heroic score and cheap cinematic cheese, like when the main character, played by Barry Pepper, who you would remember from Saving Private Ryan if he wasn’t destined to fade into obscurity after this movie, gets inspired to revolt by reading the Declaration of Independence in a burned out library. At one point they got so into it that they started hooting and hollering during the ‘climactic’ final scene. I’m not quite sure what ‘buck ‘em down’ means, but one guy kept yelling it and it made me feel dirty. Now if you’ll excuse me, I feel like I need to cleanse myself. Where’s my VISA?