So it's the year 3000, because why the hell not. It's a nice round figure. The earth has been ruled by an alien race called the Psychlos for 1000 years now. (Okay, so they're a few years late getting here). There are a few groups of humans who still live in remote areas outside of Psychlo control. The rest of the humans are enslaved by the aliens and used for manual labour. The humans living in the remote areas have reverted to being quite primitive. They live in caves, have long hair, wear loin cloths and ride around on horseback, that kind of shit.
One of these humans (our main hero guy) decides to leave his hot, brunette girlfriend and the peace and security of his little cave and go out into the world and explore for some reason. He quickly gets caught by the Psychlos and sent to their processing facility. Head of the processing facility is Psychlo John Travolta, looking like a Klingon on a bad day. Alien Travolta doesn't like this particular assignment because he hates being on earth. His superiors screw him over however and change his assignment from being a temporary one to permanent. So he's not best pleased and he hatches a plot to use the human slaves to mine for gold and buy his way off the planet. He plans to send the miners to radioactive areas which are off limits to the Psychlos as the radiation proves to be lethal to them (it's no so great for humans either, but never mind).
Alien Travolta selects our main hero friend to be foreman of the group. He sits him in front of this rapid learning machine that beams knowledge straight into his brain. Alien Travolta repeats this process several times, as our hero friend acts dumb, as if he can't understand the Psychlo language, thus making Alien Travolta think that the rapid education process doesn't work on humans. So our hero friend gains knowledge and intelligence way beyond that of any other human. Meanwhile our hero's babe girlfriend comes looking for him, and she too gets captured by the Psychlos. Our hero plans an escape, which fails. Alien Travolta learns of the romantic link between our hero and his babe girlfriend, so he fixes an exploding collar around her neck, which if remotely detonated will blow her head off. So our hero guy has to do as he's told. Alien Travolta teaches our friend how to fly one of the alien ships, and then sends him off with a group of humans to mine for gold.Our hero friend through his rapid education has learnt about Fort Knox, so he takes half the men on a journey to find it, and hopefully a ready made supply of gold. The area around Fort Knox was apparently irradiated so the aliens wouldn't have been able to go there. The other half of the men are left behind in order to not arouse suspicion. So our human friends find the gold and load up the ship. Our hero friend also hatches a plot to destroy the protective dome over the processing plant by blowing it up with a nuclear bomb. The destruction of the dome should hopefully result in the death of all the Psychlos. But our friend is even more foresightful. He realises that as soon as the dome is destroyed, hordes of Psychlos will teleport to earth to replace those killed. So he plans to teleport himself and a second nuclear bomb back to the Psychlo's home planet and blow it to shit. However one of the other guys steps in and volunteers for the task, saying that our hero friend is too important to the success of the mission to go blowing himself up. Aww, that's sweet.
What follows is truly laughable as they travel to Fort Hood to get tooled up for the mission. So these guys that were living in caves and wearing loin cloths five minutes ago are now messing about with nuclear warheads and learning to fly Harrier jump jets (no, honestly). They return to the processing plant with the gold. Alien Travolta doesn't seem particularly bothered that the humans have apparently managed to smelt the gold into bar form. Our hero friend finds his babe girlfriend and manages to remove her exploding collar. There then follows a bad cgi battle between the Psychlo ships and Harrier jump jets. Our human friends fight the aliens and manage to explode the dome. The other guy successfully teleports to the Psychlo's home planet and nukes it to shit. Alien Travolta is about to shoot our hero friend. But before he does, he decides to detonate the collar on our hero friend's girlfriend just for good measure. But oh dear, the collar explodes and blows off the arm that alien Travolta was holding his gun in. Oopsie. So alien Travolta is captured and imprisoned in a cage surrounded by the gold bars from Fort Knox. The earth is saved and everyone lives happily ever after. Hooray! The End.
No word of a lie, this is the worst film I have ever had the misfortune to watch. It was shat out of Hollywood's bumhole and onto an unsuspecting public in 2000. And quite rightly, it tanked, never making back the millions it cost to make. Quite how anyone involved in this film managed to get work afterwards I'll never know. There's just so much wrong. Basically everything. I would say it's like a bad episode of Star Trek, but that would just be hugely insulting to Star Trek.
I really don't appreciate having loin-clothed people with long hair who live in caves in my sci-fi. That's just fiction. Where's the science? In my opinion it's just lazy and cheap film making. And okay, I'm no oil painting, but there's just something odd looking about the lead good guy. For the entirety of this film he walks around in full Keanu Reeves mode. That is to say with a permanent look of bemusement, confusion and perplexion upon his face. Maybe Travolta didn't want anyone too good looking for the lead role. Speaking of Travolta, his "acting" is totally hammy. Actually I struggled to find any acting in this film at all. At no point in this film did I feel emotionally engaged, connected or invested in any of the story or the characters. Humans died, I didn't care. Humans fought back, I didn't care. Humans were victorious, I didn't care. I just didn't care. I just wanted it to be over.
I'm not going to go through the plot holes, there's just too many of them. You can find numerous mentions of them on the interwebs if you really want to. I will just mention one though. I don't think after 1000 years you'd find any fuel in a Harrier's fuel tank, let alone have it be mechanically sound enough to fly. That's just one, but as I say there are many, many more.
Women in this film are woefully represented. There are basically two of them, one from each species. There's the aforementioned girlfriend of our hero, whose main role in this film appears to be damsel in distress. Then there's some hot alien chick with a freakishly long tongue who is apparently alien Travolta's "secretary". She appears in just one scene.
This film is based on a book by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Now I'm not going to speak of Scientologists, because apparently they can be right pissy sods, but as far as the book goes, that didn't exactly receive rave reviews either. So what we have here essentially is an abysmal film based upon a poor novel. Apparently this film is only the first half of the story, so we could've been subjected to a sequel. Mercifully the first film sucked so hard that we were spared that terrifying prospect.
This is one of those films that I genuinely feel should never have existed. Normally even in the worst films there are some redeeming qualities, but in this there is literally nothing to redeem it. It is beyond redemption. During every minute of this film I just wanted it to be over. I never want to watch this film again. Even if you paid me I don't think I could endure it again. I think we have a new low. Don't watch this.
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