MOVIE REVIEW: “The Battle For Terra.”

One of the nice things about being a basically hypercritical and negative individual like myself is that when your opinions turn out to be wrong, you’re almost invariably pleasantly surprised. “Well, that’s it: we’re all gonna’ die,” I say, and it’s kind of hard not to be happy when you’re proved to be wrong. I feel sad for all the stupid hippies of the world, who constantly aspire to great and glorious things, only to have ugly stupid reality and traffic jams and famines and coffee stains bring them down. On the other hand, if you’ve resigned yourself to an imminent economic and environmental collapse, and it *doesn’t* happen, then every day seems like a gift from God. It’s a “The glass is half empty/The glass is broken and empty and men are coming to kill you” kind of thing. I’m not saying it’s the best of all possible ways to live, I’m just saying that it works for me.

I had one of these experiences today when I went (Grudgingly) to see “The Battle For Terra.” Frequent visitors to our happy little blog may recall my very low expectations and condescending predictions for the film from a few weeks ago, and if you don’t you can read ‘em here:
http://www.republibot.com/content/things-almost-interest-us-battle-terra Seriously, go read ’em now and come back, I’ll wait for you.

Done? Thanks. The reason I wanted you to read my half-assed predictions is so I can whole-assedly own up to my wrongness. To wit:

1) This is *not* an ecological fable.
2) The aliens are *not* a politically correct hybridization of American Indians and Hippies.
3) Earth was *not* destroyed because bad people refused to "Go Green"
4) The aliens *do* live "In tune with nature" but only because they’re technologically primitive and have no choice. They don’t recycle.
5) This much I did get pretty much spot-on: The bad humans in this movie are essentially analogues for the European powers who invaded and enslaved the New World, and all-but-destroyed all the native cultures and civilizations and religions and suchlike.
6) This one I got sort of semi-right: Eventually, however, one of the bad humans will go native, realize he has to "Do the Right Thing" and will stop the invasion, convincing humans and aliens to live together in peace and prosperity.
7) I’m 100% convinced that this prediction was true: Whoever wrote this movie has never seen "Babylon 5" and doesn't realize "Earthforce" is the name of the military in that show.

But the big shocker, the one I totally couldn’t have predicted was this: “Battle for Terra” is a good movie. Damn good in places, but solidly above the bar through much of it’s running time. In fact, if you’re the kind of guy who likes a little ‘science’ in your Science Fiction, and not just Transformers and Star Trek doubletalk, this is actually a really internally consistent, well-thought-out SF film. In fact, I’m going to go a little bit further and say that this is exactly the kind of genre film that pretentious fans (like myself) claim to want. Of course it'll bomb - most fans (unlike myself) *are* just being pretetious when they say they want something new and exciting, when in fact they just want cool space battles and pretty-pretty explosions. That's a horrible shame since this