The plot of the 2000 bomb Battlefield Earth posits a very interesting question: if the alien Psychlos were all as stupid as John Travolta's General Terl, how the hell did they manage to conquer the Earth? Seriously, Terl is the biggest idiot ever - he gives a human a crash course in all of the Psychlos' technology and then sends him and a bunch of other people unsupervised to a buried military base where there are a bunch of jets and bombs and stuff. And why? To mine gold. Why the frak would an alien care about gold?
