Number 92: Deportees (Ekhrajhia) 2 (2009)
When I started this venture to watch all of the IMDB Bottom
100, I knew there would be some challenges. I figured some of them would be
obscure and hard to find.
I hadn’t guessed one of the films would be Iranian. And I’d
have to watch in Urdu. With no subtitles. I don’t speak Urdu. But I’m going to
do this properly, so I watched it all and pieced together what I could.
So here we go, my first taste of Iranian cinema…
From what I can make out, the film follows a group of
Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war through. There is a good way of telling
the Iraqi’s and Iranians apart. The Iranians have beards, the Iraqi’s can only
grow puny moustaches. They get captured and put in a prison with Iraqi’s
creating tensions. There is a sub-plot where a plane is hi-jacked by a lone
terrorist with a gun and brought to Iraq where they are paraded in front of the
media. From there they are taken to the same prison the captured soldiers are
in and the Iraqi prisoners start to play what one youtube search later, I now
know to be the Iran national anthem. This is much to the chagrin of who I am
saying is supposed to be Saddam Hussein in attendance. The film ends, Iran is
great.
The characters don’t fit with the stereotypical view of
Iran. They dance, they drink, some of them smoke and one of them appears to be
constantly hitting on a flight attendant. One of the prisoners is a Godfather
type figure, supplying all the other inmates with cigarettes and seems to have
a friendly relationship with the guards.
Not an easy one to review given I couldn’t understand a word
of it and could only base this on what I could see on screen. It’s a testament
to the medium I could decipher as much as I could. I didn’t hate it as a movie but there
is a pro-Iran vibe that sticks in the throat a little.
Number 91: Battlefield Earth (2000)
After that last film, John Travolta’s stupid alien face is a
welcome relief. It might be just as incomprehensible but at least it’s in
English!
I don’t even need to go trawling through dodgy websites to
find it as (to my shame) I already own it.
So, Battlefield Earth,
well it’s even worse than I remembered. By
the year 3000, Earth has been taken over by a race of aliens known as Psychlo’s
who are mining the planet of all its resources. Humans have devolved to caveman
levels and are used as slave labour.
John Travolta’s character, Terl is a particularly ambitious
Psychlo stuck on Earth thanks to a dalliance with a senior senator’s daughter.
He becomes interested in one ‘man-animal’ in particular, Johnnie, who appears
smarter than all the other humans. Terl takes him on as his own pet project
teaching him to read, how to speak Psychlo and how to mine for gold. Why he
does this isn’t clear. A hobby?
After reading the Declaration of Independence (what else?),
Johnnie comes up with an insane plan to free the humans that involves blowing
up the massive dome the Psychlo’s have to live under, blowing up their home world
with a nuclear bomb and harrier jets.
The planes are a particular source of mirth for film fans.
Suppose for a moment you did find a 1000 year old plane, that still worked and
the fuel inside it could still burn. Now, I am no expert in aviation but to be
able to fly a plane, and to fly it well, takes months, even years, of training.
This movie would have you believe all you need is one hour in a simulator.
Bear this in mind as well, in one scene Terl tells Johnnie
that the Psychlos first defeated the humans in just 9 minutes. So highly
trained pilots were wiped out almost instantly but amateurs on their first time
out are able to defeat the alien invaders with relative ease.
Stars Forrest Whittaker and John Travolta have both
apologised for this movie. Barry Pepper (Johnnie) won a Razzie award for Worst
Supporting Actor.
It’s a particularly big deal for Travolta as he was a
producer and fan of the book on which it’s based. The more you look at his CV,
the more you realise Pulp Fiction was
one shining beacon lost inside a sea of mediocrity.
Battlefield Earth is
stupid and nonsensical but what else can you expect from a movie based on a
book by founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard?
(these
are from the list of IMDB bottom 100 as it was on 31st August 2015)
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