AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

MBunge 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.

Xanatos1313 So imagine you have a great idea for a sci-fi movie. You wright down a rough concept. You start to flesh it out till you have a pretty solid concept, involving a story that spans generations and seeks to show a new concept on the whole state of humanity and reality. Then you sit down to write the script. Face with the challenge of including your concept into dialogue, things get difficult. So then, you just say "screw it," and haphazardly mesh your raw concept into the movie using the worst trick in the book: voice-over narration.This is how I feel this movie came about. The story seems like it would be interesting, but, honestly, I could write a better script in my sleep. The characters are shallow, static, and the acting... oh, the acting. I couldn't empathize with any of the characters because I was too busy laughing at their reactions (or lack there of) to events.The camera work at times made no sense and took me completely out of the story. For example: Why do we need a zoom out to see two planets, just to have the camera go back to Mara in the desert? Why couldn't we see her communing with the planet, and just cut that bit of narration? Oh yeah, because we'd rather just have more crappy special effects and narration than have an actor play the planet spirit.Also, just let me note that any given episode of Stargate SG-1 had a lower budget than this movie and still managed to pull off better effects. And the show started nine years before this was released. Hell, the PlayStation 1 title "Colony Wars" (also released in '97) has a more intriguing story AND better effects.The only reason I rated this so high is because I can see a pretty interesting concept in the narration. But this film is marred by horrid writing, unconvincing acting, odd camera work, weird scenes, useless characters, and almost no thought put into it's execution. I'd say watch it for a laugh, but it gets too boring to laugh at half way through, so just stay away all together.

captaintorvin Let me break down this film for you...The first fifteen minutes are a showcase for terrible special effects. I'm not one to nitpick about special effects, but what you've got to understand is that if you can't afford good special effects, you shouldn't anchor your film around special effects. Starships fire blobs of color at each other, flaring into stock explosions, and careening past moons with polygon counts low enough to count with your fingers. You will have no idea what is happening. It will not make sense.The second act involves a woman walking in the desert. At this point you will be treated to drab scenery, and illogical, boring fight scenes. Nobody speaks. Nothing interesting happens. The protagonist's goals are unclear, and are not very compelling. This goes on for about 45 minutes.Then in a five-minute montage, she sneaks into an enemy base, straps herself to a rocket, tries to destroy a doomsday weapon, fails, and dies.None of this has any bearing on the eventual direction of the film.In the last twenty minutes, basically the chick's memories get transferred to her daughter, who goes into stasis for a very large number of years, learning the secrets of mankind. After this, we see the first, and last five-minute segment of human interaction in the film, then the new heroine is forced to choose whether she wants to become part of the material that causes the big bang or not. You know. Because when the universe is collapsing, you get to decide if you want to be a part of it.She chooses yes. BUT THE MEMORIES OF MANKIND SURVIVE IN A CAPSULE. Maybe we won't make the same mistakes again, huh? If you like movies with characters, then this is not a good movie for you. The lead roles could have been fulfilled nicely by any old wind-up toy capable of staying right-side-up while walking through sand. All of the story is told through painfully dull narration.The film tries to seem deep by throwing together a whole bunch of undeveloped science-fiction ideas. There are enough concepts here to fuel a number of films, but as it stands, it's bloated with completely irrelevant details. Two-thirds of this film could have been reduced to a 45-second montage. Instead, the narrator fills in a novella's worth of backstory without ever giving us a reason to care what happens to the characters.There are good ideas in here, but nobody watches films to see ideas ineptly explained. People watched films to be entertained. This film does not entertain.

Vincent Black This movie was rented for free, I had no misconception about this being a very bad movie. I rented it for Thanksgiving because we eat turkey and then the family watches an awful movie. So you ask, what makes this movie so bad you gave it only 2 stars? Dialog. The lack of dialog makes this a movie perfect for a deaf audience. In fact if you rent this, just turn the volume down to zero and pop in any heavy metal CD from your favorite artist. I know you will enjoy it better. The plot of this holiday turkey was so encumbered with tech and geek speak you need a translator for the narrative. Now for all you people who enjoy good sci-fi effects... eh, they are not much better than video game trailers or cut scenes in cases worse. The actors, um both of them, are not much to look at either. They say nothing much through out the entire movie. Many of the technical aspects will make you laugh like the scene where the hero straps herself to a missile and fires it at the city 70km away (it never showed how she landed). The scene before that we see a robotic sentry fire at her with a cannon from 12 feet away and he misses multiple shots. Also we are told that the political division between the antagonist and protagonist is bio-tech (genetically enhanced humans) vs cyber-tech (machine enhanced humans) but both seem to be cyborgs or enhanced humans. What told me this was a bad movie at the rental store was the cover that looked like a video game cover art and there was only the one copy, good new releases have many copies available.