Battlefield Earth: science fantasy. Starring John Travolta, Forest Whitaker and Barry Pepper. From the novel by L. Ron Hubbard. Directed by Roger Christian. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

The first year of the new millennium (if that’s the way you’re counting) is looking pretty dim where movies are concerned. Along comes Battlefield Earth, among the first of the summer blockbusters to stumble out, to turn the lights down lower. It’s this year’s Wild Wild West. We hope.

Based on the first part of a massive novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth is a compendious mishmash of every space action movie since Star Wars over twenty years ago with all of the faults and none of the virtues of its kind.  I’ve been tempted from time to time to tackle Hubbard’s epic, just to see what it’s like. Now all temptation is cured.

The plot sounds simple enough. It’s the year 3000. Aliens from the planet Psychlos have taken over Earth, forcing Homo sapiens to retreat to a Stone-age existence in radiation-polluted areas, where our numbers are fast dwindling. One of the humans, Jonnie (Barry Pepper), frustrated by misery and starvation and skeptical of the “gods” his elders say hold sway over all, flees the radioactive village in the mountains to search for food and better territory for his people.

Unluckily for him, he stumbles upon the “gods” after all, led by the sinister vainglorious Terl (John Travolta), chief of security on a planet the Psychlos consider the lowest of the low.  Their contempt for human beings is so complete they don’t even bother using them for their ruthless mining operations. Nor can they breathe Earth’s atmosphere. And Earthlings cannot breathe theirs.

Jonnie, along with some humans from another tribe, is captured by the Psychlos (a group who reminds me partially of Star Wars Wookies crossed with Rastafarians). Terl notices that Jonnie is smarter than the rest and gets the idea to experiment on him to see how smart he can make him and use him to stage secret mining operations of his own. Woe to him, for Jonnie uses his newfound intelligence to turn the tables on Tel and the Psychlos and stage a revolt. All in a matter of oh, a week.

The plot eventually becomes so dense it turns senseless. There’s nothing to grab onto and ride with. Its idea of characterization is to give each actor a tick to make them lovable (one of them repeats the mantra “piece of cake” over and over. Yep, like that guy). It leaps from one pretentiously tilted frame to another without a lick of sense. Roger Christian’s direction, designed solely to pump air into a lame script, is among the worst I’ve seen. There are times when the actors seem to miss their marks entirely. The action scenes are done with the clunky MTV whop-‘em-on-the-head approach that only creates confused ennui instead of excitement. The film is so crowded it would only make sense as a 12-part serial, the kind they made sixty years ago and some of which are still enjoyable to watch.

Travolta, unfortunately, must shoulder the blame for much of this.  Inspired by his devotion to Scientology, he spent many years shepherding Battlefield Earth to the screen, but without, it appears any sense of creative detachment along the way.   I like him as a villain, but as Terl he’s overripe and ostentatious. His vocal inflections distractedly sound like “Fresh Air” movie critic John Powers, leading me to speculate whether this is a jab at our profession (like the awful Siskel & Ebert gag in Godzilla), a more interesting idea than anything else going on here.  He has none of the gleeful polish he put on his villainy in Broken Arrow, Pulp Fiction or Face/Off.

Sitting down in the theater I worried that we might be subject to two hours of exhortations on Scientology. In the end, preaching might have been preferable.