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.
