Load of rubbish!!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

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

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.

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.

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.