“I hope director Aaron Kurmey tries a lot harder next time because this actually had the potential to be one of those so-bad-it’s-good B-movies that have a certain amount of appeal.”
Aaron Kurmey’s second directorial low-budget effort, with writing from Ryan Hatt, is the less than inspiring Battle Earth. Like many films of this ilk it becomes a comedy of errors, with the writing being the worst offender. We have woodenly-delivered lines like “don’t shit on my chest and call it a tuxedo,” that had the opposite effect of that intended by the writer.
There were also several cringe-worthy scenes that stood out, but for all the wrong reasons. The sex scene, where a man and a woman lay one atop the other, naked, but lethargy and incompetence reigned supreme. You really need to see it for yourself. He lay there almost prone, being a perfect gentleman, covering up all the nasty horrible private lady parts, while our now modest bit of obligatory eye-candy moaned loudly. You could almost feel Kurmey’s embarrassment through the lens.
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Kurmay shot a lot of the film at night, and he handled this part well enough as we managed to see everything needed to help tell the story, but little else. The camera movement was terrible on the eyes and I almost gave up after fifteen-minutes, however, I don’t write a review on a part-watched movie and had to soldier on (pun very much intended). The timeline for the story made little sense as, one second our main character is listening with his wife to a news report on TV about the alien invasion, next thing we know he is crash landing a helicopter in a forest.
The main story involves a group of soldiers on a mission to deliver an alien pod to the people in charge of such things, as the pod contains vital information about the aliens. Forget about the why and how of anything, because there are far more questions raised than answers given, as no explanation is even attempted. We are basically thrown into an unrealistic situation and expected to guess everything. I wanted to know why, at times, some soldiers would wear a gas mask while others next to them didn’t, and really such inconsistencies were the order of the day.
The CGI (what little we see) was poor; the acting wasn’t near up to scratch; the writing didn’t happen at all; the rarely-seen aliens had on rubber Pirates of the Caribbean character masks–Squidface being the obvious one–and there was no sense of time. It was a disjointed mish-mash that didn’t have an excuse for just being low-budget. I hope director Aaron Kurmey tries a lot harder next time because this actually had the potential to be one of those so-bad-it’s-good B-movies that have a certain amount of appeal. I wish I could recommend Battle Earth but sadly, I can’t.
Johnny’s Grade: D
Review by Johnny Thomas
