Watch Battlespace For Free

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

From the looks of it, there was a surprising amount of money spent on Battlespace. It's loaded with special effects and even though it all looks like it was pirated from the software used for Babylon 5's CGI, the extent of it is fairly impressive. If the credits are to be believed, this thing was filmed in 4 separate U.S. states and 4 foreign countries. The soundtrack even includes music from an honest-to-goodness orchestra. You can't do that by charging it to a bunch of credit cards. Of course, the credits also list writer/director Neil Johnson and co-star Blake Edgerton over 20 additional times between them for jobs ranging from wardrobe to fight choreography to location manager, so there were some corners cut. Still and all, somebody got some cash from somewhere and poured it into this production. Of course, given how much this film sucks, that somebody would have been better off piling the cash in neat rows on their front lawn and setting it on fire.This thing is epically bad. I mean, it's the kind of bad filmmaking where you find yourself unable to conceive of the person responsible for it. I cannot form an image in my mind of writer/director Johnson as a normal, functional human being. I can't imagine him communicating with other people or doing his taxes or just being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The closest I get is this fuzzy picture of a mentally ill homeless guy who sleeps on a bed made from the torn pages of terrible sci-fi novels and wanders the streets, muttering gibberish and occasionally accosting people he thinks are out to get him.First of all, Battlespace has enough back story for at least 6 different motion pictures. There's space wars and addictive virtual reality and cybernetic religion and time travel and mysterious aliens and memory wipes after unhappy love triangles and…well, it was awfully hard to keep my attention fixed on this tedious debacle so I may have missed even more stupid exposition about this, that and the other. I'd say that 90% of it was useless except if you removed the voice over narration that explained all this crap, what you'd be left with is a virtually silent movie about people in laser tag outfits running around the desert. Writer/director Johnson's elaborate and involved fictional histories are both the spit and bailing wire holding Battlespace up. Take it away and the film would collapse in on itself like a cinematic singularity.Secondly, there are some laughably awful sequences thrown up here. From a slo-motion fight scene like something out of The Six Million Dollar Man, but without the coolness of Lee Majors or the "nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh" sound effects, to a character hiding from a passing space ship by burying herself under an inch of sand, to trying to pass off what appears to be a nose hair trimmer as a laser gun, I was often left asking "Are they serious or is this meant to be some kind of parody?"The first 3/4ths of the story is a woman in the future named Iva (Eve Connelly) who is frozen in stasis but still narrates the memories of her mother (Eve Connelly) as the mother futilely tries to prevent their homeworld from being blown to bits. The last 1/4th is about Iva meeting a couple of comic relief characters who look like they came straight from losing a Star Wars costume contest, then being told she has to sacrifice herself to jump start another Big Bang. If you're wondering what those two seemingly independent plot lines have to do with each other, stop. The people who made Battlespace didn't worry about it and neither should you.And just to top things off, while Eve Connelly is reasonably attractive and gets a producer credit for this thing, she disregards the Producer Self-Nudity rule and remains fully clothed at all times. I can't blame any discerning actress for refusing to take it all off for this kind of trash but if Connelly had any discernment to begin with, what the *bleep* is she doing here in the first place? She'd have been better off waiting tables and going to auditions. Hell, she'd have been better off taking a welding class at the closest community college.I will say that Battlespace isn't like the sub-amateurish dreck flooding the marketplace where the work of ambitious halfwits is fraudulently foisted onto the public. It's not some C- film school project or what some desperate wannabes cobbled together over a few weekends with their indulgent friends and family. This is a professionally made movie. It was just made by professionals who are really, really, really, really bad at their chosen profession.This is a "must avoid" motion picture. If you even think about watching it, stick a fork in your thigh or something equally painful until the notion goes away.

I'd never heard of zero budget "auteur" Neil Johnson before seeing "Battlespace" on DVD at Hollywood Video. A few minutes into the movie I realize this isn't a bad thing. Like many straight to video Sci-Fi movies, this is a film dominated largely by overused bad special effects and a constant parade of pretentious sci-fi concepts that fail to create a story.Viewers are tortured with a religious sounding text introduction, then a spoken introduction followed by a narration by the main character's daughter. To me this seemed like a smoke screen to mask a film with militantly ugly visuals and zero character emphasis. Some people on here seem all too ready to take this film seriously and swallowed it's seemingly new age messages hook line and sinker. These favorable reviews must come from the same kind of people who can delude themselves into thinking that things like "Battlefield Earth" was a brilliant movie, or that Shasta is just as good as Coke.Those who were lured in by the cheesy cover art can look forward to lousy acting (in small doses, spaced with long blocks of people not talking), rotten computer animated effects (in extra large doses), and irritating talking computers. What you won't get is excitement, emotional stimulation, memorable dialogue, or a good story."Battlespace" is impenetrable bull and the constant irritant of the narration proves it. Real science fiction, hell, real film-making, is about characters and their dialogue, not special effects and dull predictions. This is right down there with similar direct to video sci-fi like "Cl.One" and "Recon 2022". If the boredom of "Strange Horizons" and "Alien Visitor" is something you seek out, by all means, watch the crap out of this. If you enjoy good storytelling and hate fake lens flares, you're better off with a real movie.

I get the impression that either the director or producer has a few enemies.I love Sci-Fi films and I have been avoiding this film like the plague because of the reviews here. I was looking at you tube and found a remarkable "making of" documentary that chronicles the making of this film.This convinced me to finally rent this from Blockbuster. The film really isn't that bad. It is not the greatest film ever made, but it is made with care, attention and a real passion. If you see what goes into this film, then you may not hate it so much.I enjoyed it a lot, but feel is suffered from a lack of budget. I feel there criticisms here are perhaps too harsh... I mean there are some real crap films out there. This film is not in the worst categories. Please make more films like this, but please spend more money next time. The universe this film creates is vast and deep, and really begs the question about our place in the universe.Ignore the bad reviews, viewers and decide for yourself. It is definitely better than the new Flash Gordon TV series that Sci-Fi channel has churned out.

What's with these school boys who keep saying 'worse move ever made"? I enjoyd this film. It is intellectually stimulating. Sure the budget is small, but why is the a point of complaint? At least the film was made, and more power to the producers for having the balls to getting it made without a big budget. Anyone with 20 million plus dollars can make a film look good and impressive, heck, even Michael Bay looks good at this level. If you want to be intellectually stimulated, watch this movie. If you want to watch cars blow up and people look cool with guns and bikes, watch something else. This film is for intellectuals only, and if you don't get it, don't slag it. You have clearly missed the point.