John Travolta and the worst movie of all time: What happened on the set of ‘Battlefield Earth’?

It’s been 25 years since its release in May 2000, but Battlefield Earth retains its reputation as a candidate for the worst film in cinema history, on par with the most illustrious abominations perpetrated by Uwe Boll, Ed Wood, and Juan Pinzás. A Reddit user recently dedicated an eloquent phrase to it: “I’ve seen Lisztomania, Zardoz, Cats (twice!), and Glitter, but this film exceeds all my expectations.”

The author even praises its “stupidifying” effects and adds that he only agreed to watch it after acquiring a secondhand copy, because he didn’t want to give the Church of Scientology, the (alleged) owner of part of the copyright to the monstrosity, even a single cent. He’s not the only merciless detractor of the film. Another wrote: “I couldn’t leave the theater because I was watching it on my laptop. So, I just left my house.”

Battlefield Earth cost $44 million to make and grossed $29.7 million. Had it not been for a solid box office showing that saw it rake in $11.5 million on its opening weekend, it would have become one of the biggest failures in history. The infamous Razzies awarded it seven statuettes in March 2001, including Worst Picture, Worst Actor (John Travolta), Worst Supporting Actor (Barry Pepper), Worst Screenplay, Worst Direction, and Worst Couple (for Travolta and anyone else appearing alongside him on screen).

Chimpanzees and colored pencils

Critic Roger Ebert, a generally respectful and circumspect fellow, said of it that “it’s like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way.” He added: “I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.”

Rita Kempley, a writer for The Washington Post, went on a rampage, declaring that “a million monkeys with a million crayons would be hard-pressed in a million years to create anything as cretinous as Battlefield Earth.” Leonard Matlin, in his celebrated film guide, was gracious enough to note Travolta’s “weird but amusing performance” but expressed icy contempt for the “clumsy plot, misplaced satire, unbelievable coincidences, and a leaden pace.”

It’s so nefarious that the years haven’t even turned it into an object of worship or ironic rehabilitation. This time, new generations of viewers and critics, including the most omnivorous, self-conscious, and humorous, have unequivocally echoed their elders’ verdict: it remains among the worst-rated excrescences on Rotten Tomatoes (with a paltry 3% favorable reviews) and its average rating on IMDb hovers around 2.5 out of 10, in the “very poor” range. What’s more, in this era of the proliferation of platforms of all kinds, no one has bothered to revive it: it’s not available on any Spanish streaming service, for example.

‘Pulp Fiction’ in the year 3000

What happened? How is it possible that a film distributed by Warner Bros., in which more than $40 million was invested, ended up generating such fierce derision and such unanimous rejection?

In an alternate universe, Battlefield Earth could have become Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film after Jackie Brown. Joe Eszterhas would have written the script, MGM would have produced and distributed, and John Travolta would have been backed by an all-star cast that included Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman. It would have been “Pulp Fiction in the year 3000” and “a beefed-up Star Wars.”

At least that’s how Travolta imagined it. In 1995, the New Jersey actor acquired the rights to adapt one of L. Ron Hubbard’s most famous novels. He did so on behalf of the Church of Scientology, a contemporary cult that Travolta had joined in 1975 and which, by his own admission, provided “a shot of spiritual energy” and a decisive boost to his career.

After all, it was about bringing to the big screen one of Hubbard’s seminal texts, a mercurial individual who always alternated his role as a religious leader with that of a bestselling author of science fiction and fantasy. The book takes place at the dawn of the 30th century, on a planet Earth where human beings have been decimated and reduced to slavery by a feline-like alien species, the Psychlos, cruel warriors and ruthless resource extractors on the planets they colonize, the galactic version of the British (or Spanish) Empire. Hubbard dedicated around 1,000 pages to the adventures of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, a member of a troglodyte tribe who barely survives in the shelter of the Rocky Mountains until the Psychlos capture him and take him to the mining colony they have built on a site that was once the city of Denver.

The novel was a success, and Hubbard himself proposed adapting it into a film with the help of illustrious disciples like Travolta, who was one of the first to read it. Fox and MGM showed interest, but the project was quickly shelved in late 1983 when it became public knowledge that Hubbard and his Church were involved in the so-called Operation Snow White, an attempt to infiltrate as many as 137 U.S. government agencies in order, according to the leader, to counter, as far as possible, the unjust smear campaigns that Scientology was suffering.

The discredit of the supreme Scientologist was soon joined by that of Travolta himself, one of the highest-grossing actors until the late 1970s, but in sharp decline after the failure of his projects after 1985. In 1994, Tarantino came to the rescue by offering him the role of LA mafia hitman Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Encouraged by his wife, Hawaiian actress Kelly Preston, Travolta agreed to participate in a film whose script he didn’t believe in for a paltry (to him) $100,000. That lowered fee ended up earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and, most importantly, a new dawn for his career.

Travolta and his manager, Jonathan Krane, decided to invest their newly regained status into the adaptation of Battlefield Earth, which already had a preliminary script but had been shelved several times. At the time, the actor stated that he intended to make the most of his “power” in the industry: “If you can’t use your position in the business to make the ideas you’re really excited about a reality, what’s the point?”

Sales season

The first attempt to close the virtuous circle surrounding Hubbard’s novel was to ask Tarantino to direct it. Travolta met with his artistic rescuer and tried to convince him that the novel, despite the potential stigma attached to Hubbard’s signature, had nothing to do with Scientology, that it was stimulating, intelligent, and “non-sectarian” science fiction.

Tarantino, however, declined the offer. The Kill Bill diptych was his main priority at the time. So Travolta’s business partners, Franchise Pictures and JTP, insisted on leaving the direction in the hands of a “promising” star, Roger Christian, who had just turned 50 without accumulating any credentials other than six minor films and his participation as second unit director on two installments of the Star Wars franchise. Christian, however, was credited with designing the Jedi Knights’ lightsaber, and that paternity, not entirely confirmed, was what earned him the position of helmer of a $44 million project.

The script fell into the hands of another fish out of water, New York comedian J.D. Shapiro, who had worked under Mel Brooks on the delightful Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but who showed little interest in futuristic parables with deep religious roots and, furthermore, didn’t get along with the producers. However, the flashes of humor that survive in the final script, which Corey Mandell took over as soon as the original screenwriter opted to leave the project, can be attributed to Shapiro.

From there, Travolta and his agent took the reins in a frantic race toward disaster. They rounded out a cast with no obvious selling point other than the presence (as a villainous sidekick, in a retina-detaching costume) of Forest Whitaker, an island of genuine talent in an ocean of lackluster performers: Barry Pepper, Kim Coates, Kelly Preston, and Sabine Karsenti.

They then invested a fortune in a long and eventful shoot in various locations in the Canadian province of Quebec and on the South Korean island of Jeju. They tinkered madly with a script that lost coherence with each rewrite, yet it tried to remain faithful to the “spiritual undertone” of Hubbard’s work, a supposed paean to the Promethean instinct and humankind’s capacity for self-improvement.

Travolta himself, convinced he was witnessing the defining moment of his artistic career, traveled the globe aboard his Boeing 707 to discover attractive locations for filming, recruiting talent, and acquiring new investors. Even worse: he gave free rein to the authorial pretensions of Roger Christian, who, for example, insisted on filming scene after scene using Dutch shots — that is, with crooked or tilted angles. A stylistic trait that, in Ebert’s words, “the filmmaker has borrowed from films far better than his own, but without ever understanding how, when, and why to use it.”

In the final stretch, Travolta attended a series of preview screenings in California and New York and found the film met with mockery and disdain from an audience that couldn’t believe what they were seeing. But it was too late.

After a final round of cosmetic tweaks, the whole thing was ready to be served in the spring of 2000. It opened simultaneously in over 3,000 U.S. theaters and managed to break the $10 million mark in its opening weekend (going up against Gladiator, the highest-grossing film at the time) before scathing reviews and a poor reaction from its early viewers ended up sabotaging its future.

Perhaps most memorable is the psychedelic portrayal of Travolta’s character, a galactic tyrant with a lustrous mane and creepy claws who combines sadism, a sense of humor, and incompetence. Don’t miss the thought process that leads this comic-opera villain, as grotesque as he is self-important, to conclude that humans’ favorite dish is raw rats.

There are films that purge their own excess, lose their way, fail miserably, or incur the most embarrassing ridiculousness. And then there’s Battlefield Earth, which was able to do all of that all at once and, of course, die in the attempt.

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