This movie begins a thousand years after the Psychlo aliens invaded the earth. The battle lasted nine minutes and earth lost. It is now the year 3000 and earth is a wasteland and man in an endangered species. The Psychlo's are mining the earth of all minerals and shipping the minerals back to their home world. There are handfuls of human survivors, but when caught by the Psychlos they are treated as work animals for the mining operation. The Psychlo's are vicious and cruel, even with each other, let alone the humans. They are also very egotistical, feeling they are so much better than humans that in a thousand years of mining the earth they have never bothered to really learn anything about humans (beyond how they can be used as laborers). They have not even learned human language, nor tried to teach humans their language. However, that is about to change, slightly. Earth's Chief of Security, Terl (John Travolta) has been trained to conquer galaxies, graduating at the top of his class. But due to an "incident" with a senator's daughter, he has been assigned to earth, probably for the rest of his life. Since the Psychlo's consider earth to be the worst place in the universe, that is almost like a prison sentence. But Terl is a schemer. He chooses a recently captured human who is particularly intelligent and stubborn (and about to be executed for the stubbornness) and hooks him up to a "learning machine" to see if he can be taught the Psychlo language. He plans to train this human to run some of the Psychlo mining machinery then have him, and some other humans under his command, mine some gold which the Psychlo high command does not know about and use this gold to buy his way off earth. However, he under estimates how intelligent the humans are, and does not realize that the learning machine also tells the human the Psychlo's weaknesses. The human quickly comes up with his own plan to use his new knowledge to organize the humans and try once again to defeat the Psychlos, only this time knowing how to fight them.
 This is a very well done and interesting science fiction movie, with a slight comic book feel. Overall I enjoyed watching it. It also has a very interesting commentary by director Roger Christian and designer Patrick Tatopoulos.