It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Blistering performances.

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.

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

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.

I knew it would be a bad movie when I rented it but I hoped for a good bad movie. Oh well, had fun making fun of the endless sand trudging, eating camel dung (well, actually eggplant) and weird grimacing acting from I think it was about five actors. The DVD needs a director's commentary so that I can find out what he was thinking...or if he was at all. I can't believe they actually went to England, Austrialia and wherever to film this...could have been done ANYWHERE. Would have been better if they had managed to get her naked. The best line of the movie? "He waiting for his upgrades." "Yup, still waiting". Now that WAS FUNNY! If anyone had more than 3 pages of dialog (beyond the narrator....SHUT UP ALREADY) then I'll watch it again.