Battlefield Earth (novel)/YMMV

The Book

• Anvilicious
• Arc Fatigue: The movie wisely cut out the chapters involving the mining of the gold, or the long search for radiation.
• Ending Fatigue: The book's climax is around page 320, and there's an obvious enough ending when the humans have retaken their planet. And then the book keeps going for 700 more pages.
• Marty Stu: Jonnie is physically perfect despite hailing from a village plagued by radiation, an awesome fighter, a super genius, and so beloved by all that when he falls ill, the entire planet, including countless tribes he has never met, is worried sick about him. Some of them add him to their pantheons.
  • Heck -- his middle name is "Goodboy"! Lafayette, dontcha think you were trying a mite too hard to make this guy a God among men?
• Squick: The Bittie and Pattie relationship. If we're optimistic and they're both about the same age, we have two eight-year-old who decide to get married someday. Then Bittie dies, and Pattie goes into a deep depression. And then years pass and Pattie still hasn't moved on, goes to Bittie's tomb, and demands that a parson marry them.

The Film

• Bile Fascination: The movie regularly places in the top (bottom?) 10 of most filmgoers' "worst movies of all time" lists.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Some may find it hard to appreciate the heroes' methods after the real life tragedy that happened a year after this film was released. Also has some Unfortunate Implications.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's an unintentional Actor Allusion, but John Travolta goes around with a rubber hose up his nose.
• Ho Yay: One of Jonny's followers spends much of the movie looking soulfully at his leader. Jonny even cuts off a lock of his hair for him, and he wraps it around his fist as a sort of talisman. There's arguably more chemistry between the two than between Jonny and his designated love interest.
• Idiot Ball: A lot of characters grab a hold of this, but the Psychlos seem to have been issued an individual one at birth.
  • Actually, every individual Psychlo was issued an Idiot Ball at birth in the form of a brain implant by the catrists (something covered by the book but not the movie).
  • One example from many: Terl gets so into shooting cows to demonstrate his shooting prowess to the humans that he doesn't actually pay attention to his surroundings, and gets jumped from behind as a result.
  • Terl also teaches the humans how to work their aircraft, weaponry, and speak their language.
  • In any scene with Terl and Johnny together, you can almost see them passing the ball back and forth. One memorable case is when Terl is inspecting the results of Johnny's mining and quite understandably asks how Johnny is presenting him with gold bars, rather than the ore he was expecting. Johnny, who hadn't spotted that flaw in his plan, gives Terl some lame answer about how they decided to smelt and shape it for him. Terl accepts the obvious fallacy without question.
• Idiot Plot: Characters aren't making the wisest decisions in this film.
• Memetic Mutation:

Terl: While you were still learning how to spell your name, I was being trained to conquer galaxies!

• Nausea Fuel: Given the amount of tilted camera shots, it's probably a good idea to avoid this movie if you suffer from motion sickness.
• Snark Bait: Roger Ebert wasn't kidding when he said this would be the punchline for jokes about bad movies for decades to come.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: John Travolta. Subverted in that he was too confident in the film that he was either trying too hard or not really trying.
• Unfortunate Implications: Forest Whitaker's buffoonish, boot-licking interpretation of Ker. Hard to believe this is the same guy who would eventually win a Best Actor Oscar for The Last King of Scotland.
  • Semi-averted with the alien who built the Instant Expert machine. The book calls the race Chinkos, and you suddenly realize the entire race is a caricature of the Chinese. The movie changed the name of the race to "Clinkos" and kept its role minimal, except for the fact the Clinkos still have offensive Asian stereotypical behavior.
  • As Cracked.com has put it, "It is important to note that the feel-good ending of the film is when someone destroys the decadent capitalist empire with suicide bombing." And moving backwards with this thought in mind, it is disturbing to see the things the heroes go through, like learning to fly planes from the enemy, and building up a (near-)quasi-religious-fanaticism, to attain their goal.