A book about the year 3000 by everyone's favorite author (and founder of cult/crock of shit Scientology) L. Ron Hubbard. Also another Warner Bros Blockbuster summer movie starring scientolgy poster boy John Travolta as some evil guy (Maybe for him this role is like Charleton Heston playing Moses in the 10 Commandments). And dont forget the line of action figures from Hasbro either (kids love fake religion). Check out the official website at www.battlefieldearth.net and check out the film coming in May 2000 or Xemu will eat your soul!

Seriously this was not a plug for Scientology

Against all advice, I went to see Battlefield Earth on Saturday night. I have to say... I was thoroughly entertained, but I think it was for all the wrong reasons...

Every time John Travolta did his maniacal laugh (which was quite often), I was in hysterics. Example dialogue:

            JOHN TRAVOLTA
     I'm going to tell all of our superiors what you did.

            RANDOM PSYCHLO
     But you said you wouldn't!

            JOHN TRAVOLTA
     Yes... but I changed my mind!  Muahahahahaha!

He's just so thoroughly evil, but in a Darwin Mayflower kind of way that's more amusing than sinister. Most of the other Psychlos are like that, too. It was also cool seeing Kim Coates again. He's the guy that got his nose punched into his brain by Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout, and the guy who trades paper for sex in Waterworld.

If anything, the movie has me now seriously thinking of buying the book. No, not Battlefield Earth. It's much too long. The book I'm looking to buy is the SAMS "Learn the Harrier Jet in 7 Days". And maybe the "Illiterate's Guide To Nuclear Weapons", too.

Battlefield Earth is not as horrible as the critics would like you to believe. Did they even see Bats? How about Lobster Man From Mars? Highlander 2? Phat Beach? People are calling this the worst movie in decades, and I can't even put it in my top 10 worst.

But then again, if given the choice between that and Cherry 2000...

Just a couple notes from an engineer's point of view about this movie and its inaccuracies:

The year is around 3000 A.D. and the cave-dwelling humans come across some vintage 20th century stuff, specifically a jet-fighter and a nuclear bomb.

I'm not sure about the internal components of a jet-fighter, or whether one would still work after a thousand years, but I am sure that the jet fuel wouldn't. JP-5 jet fuel has a shelf life of around 4 years. In fact, most petroleum by-products are inherently unstable. Try starting up a lawnmower after it's been sitting for a year with gasoline in the tank...it's not much fun. There's no way that 1000 years from now those fighters would have taken off, unless the primitive humans had somehow set up their own petroleum distillation plant.

Modern nuclear weapons use tritium in their design. The tritium is an essential part of the bomb, acting as an accelerant to the nuclear chain reaction. Unfortunately tritium has a half life of aprroximately 12 or 13 years, which means that militaries must constantly replace the tritium in their bombs. The only current manufacturer of tritium in the U.S. is the Savannah River Site, a nuclear facility located near the Savannah River in eastern Georgia.

After 1000 years the tritium will have decayed to basically 99% ordinary Hydrogen gas, which would make it pretty damned impossible for the bomb to go off, like it did in the movie.