In the year 3000, 'When man is an endangered species', and they have very little food or shampoo but an abundance of leather vests and net shirts and apparently the populace is fearful of putt-putt golf courses, and in a period of time any move anyone makes is accompanied by a huge, distracting non-diegetic sound effect and everyone speaks in a grandiloquent fashion, and I guess that's perfectly fine because that's acceptable in the future, man (and I mean man because there's literally 2 women in this movie) is a slave to an extraterrestrial race knows as the Psychlos. Suddenly, the cast is in a lushly overgrown abandoned mall, and someone's changed the hue of the picture to a different color, (and you'd better get used to that happening because it's going to happen a lot) John Travolta appears in slo-mo, firing the worst looking laser beam since the early 1980's.
We are less than 30 minutes into this film.
There's a vaguely litigious cantina scene with glowing green liquids, bad teeth and elaborate hair pieces, and you have a distinct feeling someone got in trouble for spending way too much money to have the outcome look this cheap. You have this feeling you've experienced parts of this movie before because it has a Waterworld (sans the flippers) meets Dangerous Liaisons (sans the romantic intrigue) meets Office Space (sans the humor and staplers) in space with dreadlocks sort of vibe about it. You then have the feeling you really don't want to watch this movie anymore, and then you get the treat of seeing someone who looks like Jabba The Hut get his nails done.
Seemingly months later in an obvious comic book mechanism, the superior villain teaches the lowly human hero all about his mad schemes, and the hero foils the villain again and again, who never seems to catch the drift. Which begs the following questions...why would an advanced extraterrestrial civilization reference a long-dead Greek mathematician? Why would this advanced civilization need gold when there are far more valuable elements to science they could mine? Why would these aliens just let the humans run loose without a babysitter if they think there's a possibility the humans will just get into uprise-y and overthrow-y high jinks? How do things like generators and aircraft and flight simulators work after 1000 years with no electricity and no gasoline? Why is the Declaration of Independence and maps to nuclear waste dumps so easily found amidst a thousand years of rubble? Why are there so many codpieces? Why are there so many sideways wipes? Why doesn't George Lucas sue? And most importantly, why am I still watching this movie?
Not the worst movie I've ever seen, but one of the worst modern big budget films I've ever seen. On Netflix Instant Streaming.
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