Diagonaldi Very well executed

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

TheLittleSongbird Just before anybody gets defensive, it is not as if I make a living out of criticising low-budget movies(I'm really a music student who only has enough money to pay rent and to do a £15-20 weekly shop for three months worth with the occasional trip to the cinema). I have seen movies that are actually watchable even with the low budget. Battlespace is far from watchable, in fact while far from the worst movie I've ever seen it is so bad that are this tempted to give up half-way through. The only good thing about Battlespace was the soundtrack, which I only found decent. Otherwise this is an example of a truly inept movie in every other department. Battlespace looks incredibly cheap, the special effects are really slipshod, the settings and costumes drab and completely uninteresting and bacon-slicer-like editing. For all its cheapness though, the visuals aren't actually the worst asset about Battlespace. The narration and the story are. The narration is thoroughly exhausting in alternative to interesting and it just rambles on and on and on that you are actually begging(inside your head and out loud) for it to shut up. It often is completely irrelevant. The story is interminably dull, the first half literally doesn't move so I'm not surprised people bailed out(though I always think that you shouldn't judge a movie unless you see the whole thing), and needlessly convoluted, almost feeling like five or six completely different movies. There are action sequences here and there but poorly shot and choreographed by someone who is either inexperienced or doesn't have a clue what choreography is. The characters are aimless and just infuriate you, the direction is leaden with no life whatsoever and the acting consists of everybody literally sleepwalking through their roles. Overall, an inept movie all round, don't waste your time. 1/10 for the soundtrack only. Bethany Cox

gordon lucas Most criticisms posted about Battlespace center on poor special effects, low budget,lack of forceful acting, you know, the usual. I don't think great special effects helped AVATAR that much. I don't think the Star Trek movies were well acted, and high budget financing didn't rescue Waterworld. So let's tell you what I liked about Battlespace.This film has a lot of positives. I viewed the acting as subtle - facial expressions and good camera-work went a long way to create mood and emotion. Effective. 6 out of 10.Special effects weren't bad at all, but they were of mixed styles so somewhat inconsistent to the viewer. Some of the painted planet sequences were as good as I've ever seen. Best of all, the special effects conveyed understanding - they weren't simply eye candy, but useful for plot delineation. 7.5 out of 10 The story, pacing and characterizations were the weaknesses of Battlespace. Just another story of a vulnerable lady out to save the universe, after being unable to manage her own life and affairs. Our heroine, actress Eve Connelly, who was attractive and had expressive facials, was supposed to be a superhero, a genetically enhanced Valkerie, but she still threw a rock like a 10th grade schoolgirl. She simply didn't have the nastiness and physical presence necessary for her role. That being said, in spite of rather slow pacing, I was always wondering what was going to happen next, and at no time did I wish the main protagonist dead, as I often do in sci-fi or horror film. She worked on a human level, so okay here. For story, characterizations and pacing, a solid 3 of 10.Best of all, though, was the music. Just excellent. A symphonic score composed and conducted by Aussie superstar Owen Arnold, who is the equal of Brian May and as good as anything Hollywood has to offer. I say this as a professional violinist, composer and conductor myself. This guy is good, and worth watching the movie for. 8.5 out of 10 here, and I simply won't give out 9's or 10's to anything but Le Nozze De Figaro or Parsifal. Check the flick out. You'll have seen lots worse.

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.

Flak_Magnet OK, please believe me when I say that this is a terrible, terrible, sci-fi movie. Its done so poorly that much of the film plays out as unintentional surrealism and its absolutely a 100% waste of time. Awful, but somehow also deeply unfunny. I watched this as a double feature with "Recon 2020: The Caprini Massacre" and although "Battlespace" WAS an incredibly superior film, that's not saying much. The plot of "Battlespace" is so completely convoluted that its impossible to follow. The narration is cryptic, often nonsensical, seemingly endless, and thoroughly exhausting. Literally half the film is duplicative scenes of the female lead, who looks like Brian Bosworth, walking through the desert. The movie actually starts out pretty cool, but then nosedives into pooptown and somehow continues to deteriorate, minute by minute. Absolutely horrible and truly an Absurdist Endurance Test. Zero stars. ---|--- Reviews by Flak Magnet