Battlespace (2007)

Who payed the critics

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

From the looks of it, there was a surprising amount of money spent on Battlespace. It's loaded with special effects and even though it all looks like it was pirated from the software used for Babylon 5's CGI, the extent of it is fairly impressive. If the credits are to be believed, this thing was filmed in 4 separate U.S. states and 4 foreign countries. The soundtrack even includes music from an honest-to-goodness orchestra. You can't do that by charging it to a bunch of credit cards. Of course, the credits also list writer/director Neil Johnson and co-star Blake Edgerton over 20 additional times between them for jobs ranging from wardrobe to fight choreography to location manager, so there were some corners cut. Still and all, somebody got some cash from somewhere and poured it into this production. Of course, given how much this film sucks, that somebody would have been better off piling the cash in neat rows on their front lawn and setting it on fire.This thing is epically bad. I mean, it's the kind of bad filmmaking where you find yourself unable to conceive of the person responsible for it. I cannot form an image in my mind of writer/director Johnson as a normal, functional human being. I can't imagine him communicating with other people or doing his taxes or just being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The closest I get is this fuzzy picture of a mentally ill homeless guy who sleeps on a bed made from the torn pages of terrible sci-fi novels and wanders the streets, muttering gibberish and occasionally accosting people he thinks are out to get him.First of all, Battlespace has enough back story for at least 6 different motion pictures. There's space wars and addictive virtual reality and cybernetic religion and time travel and mysterious aliens and memory wipes after unhappy love triangles and…well, it was awfully hard to keep my attention fixed on this tedious debacle so I may have missed even more stupid exposition about this, that and the other. I'd say that 90% of it was useless except if you removed the voice over narration that explained all this crap, what you'd be left with is a virtually silent movie about people in laser tag outfits running around the desert. Writer/director Johnson's elaborate and involved fictional histories are both the spit and bailing wire holding Battlespace up. Take it away and the film would collapse in on itself like a cinematic singularity.Secondly, there are some laughably awful sequences thrown up here. From a slo-motion fight scene like something out of The Six Million Dollar Man, but without the coolness of Lee Majors or the "nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh" sound effects, to a character hiding from a passing space ship by burying herself under an inch of sand, to trying to pass off what appears to be a nose hair trimmer as a laser gun, I was often left asking "Are they serious or is this meant to be some kind of parody?"The first 3/4ths of the story is a woman in the future named Iva (Eve Connelly) who is frozen in stasis but still narrates the memories of her mother (Eve Connelly) as the mother futilely tries to prevent their homeworld from being blown to bits. The last 1/4th is about Iva meeting a couple of comic relief characters who look like they came straight from losing a Star Wars costume contest, then being told she has to sacrifice herself to jump start another Big Bang. If you're wondering what those two seemingly independent plot lines have to do with each other, stop. The people who made Battlespace didn't worry about it and neither should you.And just to top things off, while Eve Connelly is reasonably attractive and gets a producer credit for this thing, she disregards the Producer Self-Nudity rule and remains fully clothed at all times. I can't blame any discerning actress for refusing to take it all off for this kind of trash but if Connelly had any discernment to begin with, what the *bleep* is she doing here in the first place? She'd have been better off waiting tables and going to auditions. Hell, she'd have been better off taking a welding class at the closest community college.I will say that Battlespace isn't like the sub-amateurish dreck flooding the marketplace where the work of ambitious halfwits is fraudulently foisted onto the public. It's not some C- film school project or what some desperate wannabes cobbled together over a few weekends with their indulgent friends and family. This is a professionally made movie. It was just made by professionals who are really, really, really, really bad at their chosen profession.This is a "must avoid" motion picture. If you even think about watching it, stick a fork in your thigh or something equally painful until the notion goes away.

Just finished watching this movie and after seeing the severe lack of good reviews, felt compelled to chime in with my personal review. I generally ignore ANY negative reviews I find for a movie, preferring instead to read whatever positive things people have to say. There's always SOMEONE whining about something in a movie, but perhaps they were in a cranky mood or (as another reviewer theorized) they had a personal gripe with the director or a cast member. However, if someone actually takes the time to write a POSITIVE review, I can be pretty sure that they genuinely liked it. :) Anyway, about this film... no, it's not perfect. But it's definitely enjoyable, entertaining; a good solid diversion. HIGHLY reminiscent of TITAN AE, this flick had an extremely enjoyable mythology as a back-story that is immediately revealed at the start of the film. The animation however is both a step up and a step down from that of TITAN AE. This animation is done is a much more realistic style vaguely similar to FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN but even more realistic (or perhaps a half step below the animation in IMMORTAL (AD VITAM), which is one of my favorite animated sci-fi flicks of recent years. Strangely, it seems maybe they were hampered by budgetary constraints (or maybe they didn't notice it?) because even though the STATIC images were extremely well-designed, the battle sequences seemed a bit disjointed or a bit out-of-kilter.The story also wasn't perfect but I wasn't looking for perfection, just a nice flick to watch during a boring evening. On that count, it definitely satisfied. Story-wise, it also reminded me a bit of LOST IN SPACE, as well as having a touch of CONTACT and STARGATE mixed in. Yep, as I said, this isn't a perfect film, but it has a moderately satisfying story, solid voice acting, and fairly enjoyable animation. Perfection? NO... but definitely a solid flick.

This movie was rented for free, I had no misconception about this being a very bad movie. I rented it for Thanksgiving because we eat turkey and then the family watches an awful movie. So you ask, what makes this movie so bad you gave it only 2 stars? Dialog. The lack of dialog makes this a movie perfect for a deaf audience. In fact if you rent this, just turn the volume down to zero and pop in any heavy metal CD from your favorite artist. I know you will enjoy it better. The plot of this holiday turkey was so encumbered with tech and geek speak you need a translator for the narrative. Now for all you people who enjoy good sci-fi effects... eh, they are not much better than video game trailers or cut scenes in cases worse. The actors, um both of them, are not much to look at either. They say nothing much through out the entire movie. Many of the technical aspects will make you laugh like the scene where the hero straps herself to a missile and fires it at the city 70km away (it never showed how she landed). The scene before that we see a robotic sentry fire at her with a cannon from 12 feet away and he misses multiple shots. Also we are told that the political division between the antagonist and protagonist is bio-tech (genetically enhanced humans) vs cyber-tech (machine enhanced humans) but both seem to be cyborgs or enhanced humans. What told me this was a bad movie at the rental store was the cover that looked like a video game cover art and there was only the one copy, good new releases have many copies available.

Beyond boring. 80% of this movie, shot on dirt cheap miniDV and 'film-looked' in post, shows a lone heroine traversing a desert. THAT'S IT. Scenes that could've been done in 45 seconds, are stretched out to 45 minutes.The costumes are cheap looking. Acting is non-existent. These were favors (or blackmail) by the cast, and nothing more.The CGI visual are horrendously bad, even by amateur standards. This smacks more of an 8th grader's attempt at video game cutscenes than a low-budget feature.This thing is so bad, even the nerd-run series 'Hidden Frontier' looks and plays better. The look of the movie is horrible. Acting is nil. Visuals are shockingly bad. The only saving grace is the clear audio.Spare yourself 90 minutes of agony. AVOID.