Live from Austin!

I have a confession to make: until this year, I didn’t have all my photos in a properly cataloged database. I’d tried various programs, but none of them quite satisfied me.

iView MediaPro seemed to have bugs in its ITPC handling. I e-mailed their support address reporting the problems, and got no reply at all. Then they were bought by Microsoft, so that was that.

QPict works well as a browser for large numbers of random files, but I don’t find it a very helpful tool for organizing them. This seems to have been reflected in the changes in the new version, which looks more like a Finder replacement for photos.

I got Adobe Bridge for free with Photoshop Elements, but I gather it’s pretty much the full deal as bundled with Photoshop CS3. It looks like it’s very powerful, with some kind of metadata templating system. However, it has a horrible interface for browsing large numbers of photos, and a horrible interface for entering metadata.

iPhoto was pretty ropey too. In particular, it insisted on moving all your photos into a set of folders named 2004/01/01, 2004/01/02, and so on. It also had no support for any of the industry standard metadata formats, such as ITPC and XMP. It’s as if iTunes had been built with no ID3 tag support and made to store all your music in folders according to how many minutes and seconds long each song is.

However, with iTunes 08, Apple finally delivered something usable; and with iTunes 09, I’m actually feeling enthusiastic about the program. I’ve now got everything in iPhoto, and I’m happy with it.

The new face recognition is far from perfect, but it’s good enough to be a time saver. It can also be a source of entertainment–I laughed when it got confused by some shadows, picked out a horse’s ass, and asked whose face it was.

The geotagging isn’t too useful as yet, but it’s a nice feature to have supported. I’ve discovered that if you’re using the dialog to manually assign geotags, it will use any existing metadata to help narrow down the options it presents to you. This means that if you start off by tagging a bunch of photos with an approximate location (e.g. London), and give the event a sensible title (e.g. England Trip 2001), searches for specific locations will apparently start from London, England and work outwards.

Browsing the tagged photos is less impressive. For now, there’s just a zoomable Google map with push pins on it. However, I’m sure people will start coming up with cool add-on visualizations.

Another nice feature of iPhoto is the built-in Flickr and Facebook support. Both systems work like add-on photo libraries; you can edit a Flickr-published photo album, and the changes automatically sync up in the background. Also, any faces tagged in iPhoto result in the appropriate person being tagged in Facebook.

Internally, the iPhoto Library now organizes your files by event. As in previous versions, the original files are kept untouched, and any changes you make result in new files. All of this is invisible to you, and you don’t need to care, but it does mean that you never lose quality by applying repeated edits to a JPEG, and you can revert to the original file at any point. The program manages to stay pretty snappy, even while juggling thousands of files.

iPhoto now supports the raw CR2 files from my Canon SLR, as well as JPEGs. It also has an option to reveal the original file in the Finder, or to fire up an external program (such as Photoshop or Canon Digital Photo Professional) to edit the raw file.

So overall, I now recommend iPhoto, even for fairly advanced photography enthusiasts. It won’t be enough for a pro studio photographer, but if your camera isn’t your career, it’s probably most of what you need.

In mid November, our contract with AT&T (formerly Cingular) expired. We switched to T-Mobile and got BlackBerry Curve phones.

I was a BlackBerry skeptic for a long time. I didn’t think I wanted a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard. This changed when we looked at the phones available. It turned out that the Curve was only marginally wider than the average phone, perhaps a centimeter or so. It’s otherwise comparable to mid-range phones in size. It ends up being pretty much as portable as our Sony Ericsson Z520a phones.

The BlackBerry UI is best described as “retro”. The icons look like 1990s Windows, the text fonts look like 1980s Atari ST, and the general method of navigation most resembles Palm OS. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Starting with the good, the UI is clearly designed from first principles to work well on a handheld device. The central trackball handles scrolling, pointing and clicking. It sits easily and naturally under the thumb. You can do pretty much everything with one hand, including browsing the web and checking e-mail.

This is in marked contrast to the iPhone, which pretty much requires two-handed operation. Windows Mobile devices suffer from having a desktop UI squeezed into a handheld form factor, and also require two hands, and often a stylus. Symbian is designed for phones, but the UIQ interface for smartphones uses a stylus. Overall, then, the BlackBerry works better than other phones I’ve tried when you’re standing in an airport with a coffee in one hand.

On the downside, it’s hard to find the icon you want in a hurry, because of their visual clutter. Perhaps a replacement UI theme would help; I’m a little tempted to grab the theme designer and start working on one, but it’s Windows only. The fonts were initially problematic too; nowhere near as nice as Apple’s, and they took some getting used to.

But when it comes time to reply to an e-mail, niggling issues with fonts were forgotten as I got to grips with the keyboard. Yes, it requires both hands, or more accurately both thumbs. It’s not as fast as a full size keyboard, but it’s faster than Palm Graffiti or Windows Mobile pen input, and much faster and less frustratingly error-prone than I found the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to be. Unless Steve relents and allows a Son of Newton to use the Newton’s non-cursive text recognition, I can’t see it being bettered.

Textual messaging is where the BlackBerry really shines. It’s quite possible to thumb out fairly lengthy e-mail responses, or even update your web site. As far as IM, there’s support for Google Talk and AIM built in, as well as Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and ICQ if you know anyone who still uses only those. There are third party clients for non-Google Jabber and other protocols, and in addition, there’s BlackBerry’s own BlackBerry Messenger, previously called PIN messaging.

If you have a friend who also has a BlackBerry, PIN messaging is definitely the way to go. The manual doesn’t cover its benefits, so I’ll digress a little here. Unlike other IM systems, PIN messaging is tied to the BlackBerry device by a unique ID. You connect with another person initially by sending them an invite via their BlackBerry-specific e-mail address, or any other address they access via BlackBerry e-mail. When they reply, their device records the device ID you sent, and sends you theirs.

The primary benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s push-based. The recipient doesn’t need to be logged in. If their phone is switched off, the message will be queued until they log on.

The second benefit of PIN messaging is that it’s reliable. Unlike SMS, messages don’t get randomly dropped. In addition, you get delivery confirmation automatically for every message: when you hit enter, the line you typed appears in the transcript with a small icon next to it indicating that the message is going out over the network. When your device receives positive confirmation that the recipient’s device has displayed the line you sent, the icon changes.

If that’s not enough, there’s a third benefit over IM or SMS: there’s a separate “ping” option. So you can set up your regular notification to be something discreet, and know that your spouse can ping you to set off something more noticeable if necessary.

Other than that, PIN messaging has the usual file transfer, allows you to send voice memos, and looks and behaves like regular IM. For us, it has completely replaced SMS, not least because it doesn’t cost 15¢ a message.

One interesting feature of the BlackBerry is that as well as individual icons for each messaging system, there’s also a unified inbox that shows IM, SMS and e-mail in one place. This makes sense, as they all have pretty much the same UI on the Curve; the protocol is almost an irrelevant detail. I believe that if you attempt to send pictures via SMS, the phone automatically uses MMS, but I haven’t tried it.

Web browsing is a mixed bag. The built in BlackBerry browser has two modes, mobile mode and “desktop” mode. Although there are references to WAP, the browser copes with both, the mode just determines how the page is formatted for display. In mobile mode it works like a typical phone browser, in desktop mode it tries to deal with things like tables, CSS and JavaScript. Overall it makes for a pretty good browsing experience, as phones go. (If you haven’t tried browsing from a phone, the main issue isn’t usually layout–it’s latency. Each page request takes a ridiculously long time to send, compared to a desktop system. I assume this is something to do with the mobile network.)

An alternative is Opera Mini, which takes the “thumbnail of page with moveable active area” approach to web browsing. It works surprisingly well with sites that the built-in browser can’t cope with, like zagat.com. (Yeah, good move, make a web site of restaurant reviews that doesn’t work with a phone browser.)

Maps are another strong point. There’s a map application supplied, but I downloaded Google Maps for BlackBerry, which is free and offers pseudo-GPS location by correlating your active cell to its geographical location. Accuracy can be as little as 50m or so in cities, up to 1km in the countryside. The Google Mail application also works well once downloaded.

The BlackBerry OS appears to be Java based, and is pretty solid. It’s more reliable than a Palm; I’ve only managed to crash it once, which is comparable to Linux on the N800 in solidity. Initial bootup (after inserting a battery) is horrendously slow, but once running it seems to use a soft power off which doesn’t require a full boot. The UI is generally responsive at all times, unlike some Sony Ericsson phones. You can put the phone into standby mode by holding down the power switch. In standby the screen and keyboard deactivate, but you can still receive messages and calls. The same hold-down-button action brings the phone out of standby instantly.

The one bug I’ve found so far is in the BlackBerry web browser. After a while the cache gets full and slows browsing down tremendously. The workaround is to empty the cache once a week.

The phone shows a lot of attention to the details of how a mobile device should best operate. For example, an ambient light sensor behind the notification LED turns the screen brightness down in dark areas, and automatically turns on the keyboard backlight. The LED itself has behavior customizable through the notification options; each event (phone call, IM, SMS) can have any or all of a user-chosen sound, vibration, and LED flashes. You can even set different messaging systems to have different notification; for example, I have IM just flash the LED a few times, unless it’s a PIN message from the spouse.

Mac sync is a bit of a sore point. There’s a package called PocketMac that BlackBerry purchased and now give away for free. It worked for me, more or less, but had some annoying bugs. (For example, syncing with a subset of address book records didn’t work, and editing records on the BlackBerry resulted in duplicates.) The solution is simple enough: Mark/Space have a Missing Sync for BlackBerry, which makes everything work, and even syncs user pictures so you can see the face of the person calling you if you’ve given them a picture in OS X.

Overall, it’s the best mobile phone I’ve used. Whether it’s good for you will of course depend on your use cases. If you’re someone who likes to talk to people or use voicemail rather than IM or e-mail, or if you have little patience for customizing software, the iPhone is probably a better bet. It certainly look prettier. But if you prefer text to voice and prefer functionality to prettiness, the Curve beats the iPhone hands down. This may change once they stop crippling the iPhone and open it up to third party applications; we’ll see. For now, I’d pick the Curve again, even if the iPhone wasn’t tied to AT&T.

Update: Oh yeah, the Curve is also a quad band phone. That’s de rigeur, so I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning.

An experiment in cloning goes awry: director Kurt Wimmer attempts to clone The Matrix and inject it with Brave New World DNA, and ends up with a truly ghastly piece of derivative sci-fi that takes a noble premise and turns it into exploitative cartoon violence. What plot twists exist are telegraphed so far off you’d need to be heavily sedated to miss them.

Like the uneven but popular movie it slavishly copies, it can’t decide whether it wants to be intelligent and philosophical, or to just revel in pointless unrealistic violence; and whereas the original at least had a plot device to explain the unreality, the cheap knock-off has no such excuse. Netflix thought I’d rate it 4/5, but adequate acting and special effects can’t drag it above a 2.

I find myself wondering whether Roger Ebert actually watched it before giving it 3 out of 4 stars, especially as he mentions a memorable scene of the protagonist listening to jazz. In the scene in question, the music played is Beethoven, the guy even mispronounces “Ludvig Van Beet-hoven” before putting the record on.

[My review of Do As I Say (Not As I Do) : Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy]

What is a book? It’s not merely ink and paper, what makes it a “book” is that it imparts information.

Schweizer could have written such a book. He could have called it “Do as I say (not as I do): profiles in media hypocrisy”. He could have profiled hypocritical media blowhards of all kinds, and put his investigative journalism skills to good use.

Instead, he chose to write a book which makes plain at first glance that it is hopelessly politically slanted. As such, the information in the book is immediately suspect. It’s like reading a book about the history of World War II that pretends the war started in 1941 when the US joined in, or an oil industry environmental report on Alaska that doesn’t mention that it’s a wildlife refuge: you immediately know that the credibility of the book is near zero because of its blatant bias.

Hence–and this is the key point–Schweizer’s book will only be read by those who already take it on faith that liberals are all hypocrites. They already (think they) know that Michael Moore employs only Aryans and that Al Franken strangles kittens. In short, nobody who actually reads this book will gain any knowledge from it; it will merely reaffirm that which they already know and believe.

Therefore this is a book, but at the same time it’s not a book; it has the form of a book, but even if every fact in it is accurate, it will impart no knowledge to anyone, trigger no discourse, contribute nothing to the sum total of human knowledge. Frankly, Schweizer could have just set up an Amazon payments ID and had right wingers send him money directly, and avoid wasting so much ink and paper.

In a word, avoid. Unfortunately it’s a competently executed movie, at least as far as acting and cinematography—so sadly, I must break with etiquette and provide a synopsis. It’s the only way to explain how truly bad the movie is.

Continue reading »

[Very minor puzzle spoilers.]

As a piece of graphic art, Myst IV should win awards. Unfortunately, as a game it leaves rather a lot to be desired.

The most immediate problem is the speed–or rather, the lack of it. While my computer was comfortably over spec and could easily handle scrolling the screen around even with all the effects turned on, each transition to a new location involved the game freezing for a few seconds while it loaded in the next set of graphics. Usually the delay was around 4 seconds, but sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. That’s not too bad when you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, but when you’re wandering from place to place trying to solve puzzles spread over a world, it gets tiresome very quickly.

The second problem is that even as of late 2005 and 3 patches, the game is buggy. I couldn’t persuade the mangrees to do their thing, even though I had resorted to a walkthrough and was sure I was doing what it said. I tried saving the game, quitting, restarting and loading, and suddenly the puzzle was solved. If I hadn’t been working from a walkthrough and hadn’t known the game was misbehaving, I would likely have wasted hours unable to solve that puzzle for no good reason.

The puzzles themselves aren’t as satisfying as earlier Myst games, either. Some of them make no sense at all–like stroking a snake to make a machine work. Others don’t quite work right, like the slider puzzle on the gate, abruptly making you conscious of the fact that you’re not dealing with a real physical object, but instead with a computer simulation that has extra constraints that wouldn’t be there in the real world.

In Riven, the puzzles were carefully woven into the worlds; the machinery mostly had a good reason to be there. Myst IV is more of a throwback to the original Myst, with elaborate locks in arbitrary locations, strange apparently pointless mechanisms, and worlds in an initial state that really doesn’t make sense except as a way to throw puzzles at you. To make up for this you’re given an amulet which is basically a clue machine, a rather blatant plot device which again destroyed the feeling of being in a real world.

The puzzles are also tough. When you’re forced to resort to hints, you should always think “Aha, yes, of course, I should have got that.” In the case of one of the Myst IV worlds, I still didn’t understand what was going on even after reading the solution. Combine that with the click (wait wait wait) click (wait wait wait) slowness when wandering around, and you have a recipe for frustration.

Still, the music was great–easily the most impressive soundtrack of a Myst game so far. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the defects and keep me immersed in the game.

If you’re a Myst fan, you’ll buy this anyway. If you’re not, I’d suggest that you steer clear of it and get one of the other games in the Myst series.

My Netflix queue contains over a hundred items. As a result, it’s often the case that by the time a movie appears in my mailbox, I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to watch it in the first place, or even what it’s about.

This was definitely the case for Timeline. I can’t think why I would have put it in the queue; I’m not a big fan of anything mediaeval, I’m not wild about director Richard Donner’s previous movies, and Michael Crichton has written some pretty cheesy SF.

I certainly didn’t pick it based on reviews. The movie got a complete critical savaging; you’d think it was Battlefield Earth 2 from some of the comments:

“No film in recent memory has cried out this much to be mocked.”

“Timeline may not be the dumbest movie to be released this year. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.”

I find it interesting that there’s a massive disparity between the critics’ reviews, and the average rating given to the movie by ordinary people. I think the critics are way out of line on this one. If you want to see a really excruciatingly bad SF movie, one that’s so wildly implausible it makes Timeline look like an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, consider The Core. That stinking piece of cinematic excrement got way better reviews from the pro critics than Timeline, which tells me that there’s something seriously wrong with the critics’ sense of judgement.

[Spoilers follow, if a movie as badly reviewed as this can be spoiled.]

There’s one criticism that leaps out as wildly inappropriate:

“It looks like cheesy ’60s television, with paper-thin characters and crummy special effects that wouldn’t even have made it in the last season of Star Trek.”

—Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Since I’ve had the benefit of watching the documentary extras on the DVD, I can reveal that there really weren’t any special effects in the movie. They got the special effect of medieval trebuchets launching projectiles by actually building a bunch of full-size trebuchets and having them launch flaming projectiles. They got that unconvincing effect of a castle blowing up by actually building a full-size castle and blowing it up. The people fighting in a burning smoke-filled courtyard? Well, they set the courtyard on fire, then had a bunch of people fight. The metal swords? Yes, they were made of aluminium, but they were still actual metal swords. And so on.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of grounds for criticizing this movie; but physical verisimilitude isn’t one of them. Still, let’s get a few of the valid criticisms out of the way.

First the plot. It’s easy to say that the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and the outcome predictable, so let’s put some numbers to it: I worked out the major plot twist and knew the basic outline of what was going to happen 12 minutes into the movie. (I jotted a note of the time.) Really, as far as the story goes there’s nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of episodes of Star Trek—right down to the two red-shirted security officers who get killed almost immediately, and the anachronistic object found on an archeological dig. (At least this time it’s not someone’s head.)

Then there’s the medicine. My history teacher (yes, the one who’s now in jail) always used to say that if you did travel back in time, the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Yet somehow, disease is never a factor in this story—the peasants all look clean and healthy, and today’s bacteria and viruses, with their 600 years of evolutionary head start, fail to impact the people of the past in any way.

Then there’s the language issue. The heroes take back a French guy to help them talk to the locals. The trouble is, we’re heading to the 1300s, when English looked like this:

Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve of any erthely man.
And therfore positif lawe and swich decree
Is broken al day for love in ech degree.
A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed,
He may nat fleen it, thogh he sholde be deed,
Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf.
And eek it is nat likly, al thy lyf,
To stonden in hir grace, namoore shal I,
For wel thou woost thyselven, verraily,
That thou and I be dampned to prisoun
Perpetuelly, us gayneth no raunsoun.

I’ll let you extrapolate to French. Maybe you can piece together what most of the above is saying—but speak it? With passably correct pronounciation, good enough to fool knights on the lookout for foreign spies? I don’t think so. Yet nobody in this movie, whether English, French, Scottish or (god help us) American, has any significant trouble understanding anyone else’s accent or vocabulary. Which is a pity, because the situation could have been so much more tense and menacing if they had. I mean, why use authentic medieval costumes of sackcloth and leather, and get genuine heraldry from England, if you’re going to have medieval French people speak modern English with a modern French accent?

Finally, there’s the essential countdown to doom caused by technological limitation. You’ve seen it in countless Bond movies (and movies based on Michael Crichton stories), but let’s overlook the cliché. Instead, let’s think about the fact that a team of half a dozen engineers somehow manage to rebuild a destroyed multi-million dollar computer-controlled time machine, one which it took years of research to construct. And they do it in under 5 hours. In reality, they’d still be installing Windows XP Service Packs by the time everyone got permanently stranded in the past.

Then there’s the acting. Yes, some of it is pretty bad, but what do you expect? It’s a Hollywood action movie. Trying to believe that Paul Walker is Billy Connolly’s son is like trying to believe that Keanu Reeves is the spawn of Sean Connery, but we can probably write off that lousy piece of casting as a market-driven attempt to appeal to the teen and early 20s audience who liked 2 Fast 2 Furious.

More troubling is the complete inability of the cast to make us believe they have a convincing enough motivation to step into an experimental time machine and go through a wormhole in space that they’ve been warned will rip them into electrons so that for a moment they won’t even exist. In the documentary, Richard Donner mentions that in Crichton’s book the technological detail and the characters arguing over what to do ran to around 100 pages, but that they managed to condense it down to 5 pages of movie script. Well, yes, I guess technically all the essential plot points were left intact, but…

Enough negativity! Because if you can somehow look past all that, it’s really not that bad a movie. The medieval detail is well done, and there’s something about real buildings and tunnels and mud and thatch, something about real explosions and smoke, that computer graphics still can’t duplicate. The pacing is evenly fast, so you don’t get bored, and there are some satisfying moments.

So in summary: it’s some painstaking attention to detail that really belonged in a better movie. Sadly, it was stuck into this overgrown B-movie instead. It’s an enjoyable but mindless couple of hours, basically a mid-point between The Messenger and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I promise you, it’s better than The Core.

Some time ago I read about someone who gets lots of review copies of books set to her for free, because she writes good reviews of them on Amazon.com. I thought at the time that that was pretty cool. It made me wonder just how much I’d have to review to get free stuff, and whether my reviews would all have to be breathless Joel-Siegel-style enthusiasm.

I got my answer. Amazon and Disney sent me an advance copy of the new remastered DVD release of Bambi to review. Yes, Bambi. I can only assume they didn’t pick me based on what I’ve reviewed in the past. Either that, or they noticed I’d been browsing for books and movies about skunks, which would be worryingly efficient of them.

Anyhow, I watched the movie and reviewed it. Hey, why not? Ignoring the plot, the animation is beautiful, and I’m a sucker for anything with a cute animated skunk in it.

So when my RSS aggregator picked up on a review on filmcritic.com, I decided to take a look, just to see if my conclusions were the same as other reviewers. Let’s just say that the guy who wrote that review clearly hasn’t watched the movie since he allegedly saw it as a kid; not even the first five minutes. How can I tell? Well, Bambi is male. He’s referred to repeatedly as the new young Prince of the Forest right at the start of the movie. Bit of a giveaway, that.

I know it’s crazy, but I kinda feel that movie reviewers ought to watch at least part of the movie. I can understand book reviewers not finding time to read the entire book in every case, but come on, how much effort is it to watch “Bambi”?

Meanwhile, I could get to like this Amazon reviews thing. Maybe next time they can send me something from the other end of the tastefulness scale. There’s a new unrated edition of Orgazmo about to be released…

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

We just found the time to watch Battlefield Earth. As I mentioned a while back, this movie is allegedly worse than Xanadu, which I had rated as the absolute worst movie I’ve ever watched. So, how does Battlefield Earth compare? Well…

The first thing to note about the movie is that the entire thing is shot in tilt-o-vision. Every single scene has the camera at an odd angle. Not just slightly, either—we’re talking 30 or even 45 degrees. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that they were unable to find enough people willing to work on a Scientology-backed movie, and ended up employing a cameraman with one leg.

If you think about the process of moviemaking, you’ll realize that there’s a major problem with shooting at odd angles: it makes it really difficult to edit the material seamlessly. As a result, what you get in Battlefield Earth is a funhouse maze of cuts. One moment John Travolta is sloping to the left; we cut for a reaction shot, and when we cut back he’s sloping to the right.

Once you get into a fight scene, of course, you’re continually trying to work out what the hell is going on—are they going to leap on the enemy from above, or are they hiding at ground level? Can the guards see them or is that piece of machinery in the corner of one of the shots supposed to be hiding them? Just working out the geometry of what’s supposed to be happening is taxing. Perhaps that’s just as well, because it’s the only mental stimulation you’re likely to get.

Sometimes the effect of the sloping is just comical—like in the opening scene, where it seems as if the primitive humans are so regressed that when they put up a tent on a hillside, they drive the poles in perpendicular to the ground; or later on, when John Travolta bangs his head on a piece of scenery getting up, but it looks as if he slid down into it.

The fascinating thing is that at some point, someone must have sat and watched the early rushes and thought “Hey, this is great, yeah, let’s do the entire movie like this.” They spent enough money to make the special effects look good, but somehow couldn’t find the cash for a tripod.

Another thing that apparently seemed like a good idea, is that every time something exciting happens the movie goes into slow motion. Gunshots, explosions, individual punches in a fistfight, people jumping off stuff—all slowed down. It’s like watching the movie with an eight year old kid playing with the remote control. Yes, I found slow motion fascinating, back in 1980 or so.

The acting? Oh, the acting is competent enough. I mean, this is sci-fi, so you can overlook the Shakespearean scenery-chewing whenever an old human guy talks about Our Great Heritage. Everyone even manages to act with bits of string dangling from their noses, because that’s what someone in props decided the breathing masks ought to look like.

Anyone can make a crappy movie by putting crappy actors in it. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Start with an award-winning screenplay; hire Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke; drop them into the mix, and watch them work their magic. What impresses about Battlefield Earth is that they’ve made a film where everything else is awful, but the acting’s not bad.

Let’s talk plot.

Again, this is sci-fi, so we’re not expecting perfection, but a little attention to plausibility would have been appreciated. OK, so mankind was enslaved by an alien race who wiped out all our defenses in just seven minutes, it’s now the year 3000, and the remaining men and women live as scattered nomadic tribes in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. I can buy that. What I can’t buy is an alien race advanced enough to have teleportation technology, who still communicate by carving their messages into cast metal plates.

These aliens are smart enough to travel across intergalactic space—but dumb enough to give a spaceship to a bunch of humans who have already tried to escape several times, set them down in the middle of nowhere, and leave them alone for two weeks to mine gold. They have advanced surveying sensors which can locate gold seams in the unpromising geology of North America, and they know all about our history, but somehow they missed the fact that Fort Knox was sitting there filled with gold the whole time—oh, and the dying human guards conveniently left all the safe doors open too.

The humans find a military flight simulator that’s still in perfect working order after a thousand years, and the electricity’s still on too. Yeah, right. The non-literate humans use the flight simulator to learn how to fly a Harrier jump jet in combat conditions, in only seven days. Mmm-hmm. And then they find an entire fleet of armed and working Harrier jets, also totally undamaged by an alien invasion followed by a thousand years of neglect.

A giant glass habitation dome has a bomb detonated on its framework. Every single pane of glass shatters, yet somehow all the shards stay in place. Then a hero flies a hoverplane into it, and the entire thing explodes. Ohh-kay.

I’m not trying to be picky, I just really see a few minor implausibilities. Well, let’s be honest, huge gaping plot holes. It is, as more charitable reviewers have said, “a little unbelievable“, like a 50s sci-fi B-movie is a little unbelievable. Unfortunately, L.Ron wrote the book in the 1980s, and it’s a safe bet that Travolta did his best to make sure the great man’s masterpiece was translated to the movie screen with plot intact.

But all that aside… Is it worse than Xanadu? Well, yes and no. Xanadu has plenty of moments where I found myself cringeing with embarassment for everyone on the screen. However, Battlefield Earth impresses with its constant level of awfulness. It avoids being bad in all the easy ways, yet sustains a steady wretchedness for almost two hours. It’s an amazing achievement, and I wish the MST3K team were still around to give it the review it really deserves.