Well...(rubs neck)...This is awkward. Especially so since I already used that word in the title. It's like this...
I visited family (so didn't write since I was out of the country), then I studied for the LSAT, and then I had to deal with the stress of my dad visiting so I didn't expend the emotional energy I desperately needed on recreational writing. After my dad left, I needed a few days to recharge emotionally.
So, in light of that, here goes a silly topic.
Battlefield Earth is rightly one of the worst major movies in American history. Even interpreted generously, the dubious nature of the villains' actual threat and the wildly improbable successes of the protagonists make the plot and acting useless for drama (comedy is another matter). The uneven nature of the acting (most of the characters seemed dazed, a handful of others seem wildly energetic, and not much existed in the middle) means that the film could not count of the acting to provide enjoyment to compensate for other weaknesses. The special effects were not spectacular or even good (to my completely indifferent eye) and the filming sought to imitate the many more well-received films of the day by closely-imitating the defining scenes (to the point that accusations of plagiarism are commonly made).
If there is any part of the movie that was intended to be taken seriously and that actually deserves respect, it might be the music which attempted the kind of synchronization with the setting a la Doctor Zhivago but without success. The writing was a bad 2000 adaptation of a 1982 novel full of cheap thrills by an author whose purveying of those thrills was geared to the less experienced readership of the 1930s. Points that would have been enlightening and witty are no longer new, no longer edifying, and no longer exciting. The film rightly deserved the many Razzie awards it recieved.
Why do I mention this? It is certainly fun to laugh at the men who tried to make a great science-fiction epic that conveyed the nobility of the human spirit, had extremely high hopes, and who failed so dramatically as to be suspicious, that is not my goal. Julian Simon was notable for arguing that humanity needs its problems as part of the process of improvement. I would like to extend his concept (used more about material goods shortages) to the nature of narrative and the quality control we now try to impose.
As humans are now rich enough to dedicate a large chunk of time to story-telling, the social role of story-telling has changed. Where once stories bound small bands of geographically and biologically related people together and reinforced their unity and commonality, Stories are increasingly free from geographic restrictions and now bind people together not on the basis of shared geography or clan but of ideas and ideals. As stories influence our lives, Plato's urging for only "useful" stories to be told gains clarity. Do we have any reason to believe that people raised on a diet of unreal stories with scenarios and endings designed to flatter or engage in wish-fulfillment will be rational actors in society? No.Most Americans are already subject to the Optimism Bias and media examples only provide spurious evidence to fall back on.
One result of the human desire to connect with stories is that knowledgeable audience members strive to make the fantasy worlds correspond to reality on some level in order to better relate emotionally to the story. Much of a genre's evolution comes from fans desiring more credible stories and authors trying to avoid the flaws that audience members pointed out before. If good has come out of the Battlefield Earth fiasco, it is that we now have a much better cultural memory about terrible movies and what makes them. As reviewers point out the failings of the movie, the leadership flaws can be analyzed and future lessons learned. Perhaps not by the next generation of cult film directors or even viewers but by somebody that can then apply the knowledge. In a perhaps unsettling analogy, humanity learns from such experiences as a man with amnesia forgets events but retains preferences.
In a bout of my own irrational optimism, the apparently useless behavior of making hyperbolic reviews of bad movies provides small data points that will eventually be used in part of the improvement of a key part of our social regulation (our "entertainment" media) and also in understanding the relationship between the people and their story-tellers. It is through such sociological interest that we harvest the delayed fruit of the popular culture.
