When you hear that a movie was kickstarted by John Travolta, the same man that starred in Grease and Saturday Night Fever, what do you think?
Do you want to watch it out of pure curiosity, boredom or maybe just because you’re a fan? Well, don’t watch it for any of those reasons because we are talking about the film Battlefield Earth. One of the lowest rated, most hated films of all time.
Battlefield Earth tells the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth thousands of years into the future. After an alien menace named The Psychlos has invaded and taken over the planet. This jumps to our main character Jonnie being kidnapped and enslaved. After some alien political bickering, our antagonist Terl (Travolta) schemes to have his slaves mine slightly radioactive gold for the use in a political bribe.
For some reason this entails teaching Jonnie how to use their alien mining equipment which can conveniently function as war machines. Needless to say, the humans revolt: good guys win, bad guys lose.
With all that said, the plot is obviously idiotic but the interesting part is where it comes from. This movie was based on the novel of the same name by L. Ron Hubbard, which also happens to be the basis of Scientology, the religion Travolta is a staunch member of. Putting personal opinions aside on the religion, because of this movie’s abnormal source material, many productions companies wanted nothing to do with it.
Enter Franchise Pictures, who were happy to help Travolta put his faith on the silver screen if he contributed a large sum of money to help pay for it. After several million dollars were already put up, other investors were happy to pick up the slack.
After the film’s release it was met with immediate panning, ridicule, and criticism. After its run time was up it posted a loss of 43 million dollars. This loss led to the bankruptcy of Franchise Pictures, but not before it was made public that it lied to its investors about the scope of the budget in order to scam them.
With all this surrounding the film, in addition to its general terribleness it has rightfully been called the “worst movie of all time.” Before 2012 it “won” the most ever Razzie awards ever given to a single film and at the time of writing this, it currently sits with a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
My Take:
I mean I don’t even know where to start. This movie has constant weird camera angle shifts and an asinine plot. The fact that I kept checking the time to see how much I had left to deal with, only to see it was just a quarter of the way through, was disappointing to say the least.
All these glaring problems actually gave me a migraine. Watching this movie physically pained me. The only reason I could see anyone watching this movie is that they have some fetish for mental self-flagellation. 0/10. This is not one of “It’s so bad it’s good” movies. Do not watch this, and mercy on anyone that does.
