SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

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

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

mwford-1 Everyone else pretty much summed this one up perfectly. This REALLY does look like a cheap 60s Italian SciFi movie, so the biggest surprise is that it was done in the late 70s. Wow!There are so may bad things, but a couple jumped out at me: 1) The bad computer has waited 100s or 1000s of years for someone technically capable of fixing it. It said the local inhabitants where not advanced enough, but guess what, all anyone had to do was remove a circuit board from a storage rack, walk across the room, pull out the bad card and replace it. I think those folks on the planet could have done that and besides, the bad robot created another robot that was all powerful. Couldn't he have done it?! Maybe it wasn't in his union rules. 2) The panicking reporters who, because 2 alien space ships passed by an earth space ship way out in outer space, one of which our spaceship easily blew up, all reported that the end of the earth was imminent falling all over each other to make the report. At least some of the people in the film addressed this unbelievable stupidity...and it happened twice!One could go on and on. Suffice it to say, this is one of the greatest bad movies ever and anyone who is an MST3K fan owes it to themselves to check this one out. Don't you dare miss it!

Erik (snikrepkire) I laughed. I cried. Then I watched Battle of the Planets or whatever it was called. Seriously. Hilariously bad. This is sort of a spaghetti space western I guess. Extremely low production values -even for a 70s sci-fi flick. Really strange and bad acting complements the nonsensical story. I'm pretty sure that the stars were just white paint splattered on black boards or occasionally white Christmas tree lights. For the space walk scenes it appears that they just turned the camera on its side while people waved their arms around.I got this movie as part of the 50 Classic Sci-Fi Movies pack available at amazon.com or that deep discount DVD place. I highly recommend getting one or more of those.

mstomaso I am tempted to mention the fact that The Film "Mission to Mars", directed by Brian DePalma, bears a strong similarity to this film.... there, I've mentioned it! One of the most remarkable things about this film is the fact that "Star Wars: A New Hope" came out in the same year. Despite the title, this film bears no resemblance whatsoever to Star Wars. However, I should note that its own title is completely unrelated to the film as well. There is no war, really. But films without plots are hard to name, so c'est la vie.This film stars a lot of good looking actors (both male and female), though they are all too thin, just like the script, and the special effects. The technology depicted in the film is reminiscent of the first Star Trek series or even Lost in Space. The special effects are variable. Some are actually fairly decent miniature shots, but then there are a few cardboard cut-out sequences reminiscent of some of Terry Gilliam's animations in Mont Python's Flying Circus. The behavior of the actors is sometimes inexplicable, but the dialog is so bad that you hardly even notice. For example, every time the entire crew of the spaceship is about to die (and this happens a lot), they all stand up and cheers and hug each other when they survive. various subplots are developed and then abandoned (just as well IMO) and, towards the end, it almost seems as if we are going to get a coherent story-line. Maybe they ran out of film? This film is a hoot. I recommend it highly for bad film buffs and MST3K fans. MST3K probably avoided this because it was a too-easy target.

Aaron C. Schepler WAR OF THE PLANETS (1977) ½* John Richardson, Yanti Sommer, West Buchanan, Ely King. In this film by Alfonso Brescia (as "Al Bradley"), astronauts land on an alien planet and agree to help its humanoid inhabitants battle a super-computer that has taken over the planet. Even by 1977 standards, the sets, costumes and special effects look badly dated, the dialogue is often incomprehensible and the performances are uniformly languid. The theme of the film--that man shouldn't become too heavily dependent on machines--simply gets lost in the muck. The Italians were never that good at sci-fi, but this movie is truly an embarrassment.