The “dumb, dumb, dumb” sci-fi movie Roger Ebert despised: “A shameful waste of money”
Not everyone loves sci-fi, which is fair, even if it’s been responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made. Some people prefer their stories to be grounded, realistic, and relatable, and that’s OK. Roger Ebert didn’t have any issues with the genre, although he did have major problems with its worst offerings.
Star Wars is arguably the worst thing that ever happened to sci-fi, at least for a while. The release of George Lucas’ record-breaking behemoth completely changed the landscape of cinema in 1977, and everybody else in Hollywood was suddenly rushing to make a spacefaring epic of their own.
Some of them were good, some of them were mediocre, and many of them were wretched. None of them could hold a candle to that first visit to a galaxy far, far away, which left Ebert to ponder why the industry was so keen to churn out so many far-flung stories set in the vast reaches of space when so many of them were irredeemably awful.
The catalyst for his rant was 1980’s Saturn 3, which fooled a lot of people into thinking it might be watchable based on a central trio of Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel, and Farrah Fawcett. Set on a remote space station, the paint-by-numbers story finds a pair of residents being hounded by a rogue scientist and his robotic companion, which inevitably has designs on starting an android uprising.
In a one-star review, Ebert asked the question that dogged him throughout: “Why is it that filmed science fiction almost always seems required to be dumb, dumb, dumb?” Saturn 3 provided plenty of answers, leaving the critic to question not only how a rotten screenplay was allowed to be filmed, but why anyone would be willing to spend money on making it.
“The level of intelligence of the screenplay of Saturn 3 is shockingly low – the story is so dumb it would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country – and yet the movie was financed,” he wrote. “Why? Why do they feel compelled to support the lowest common denominator of filmmaking?”
Anyone who had to sit through it was probably thinking the same thing, with a $10 million budget hardly a drop in the ocean by the standards of the time. In most respects, hearing the word “awesome” or any of its derivatives used to describe a picture would be a positive, which absolutely wasn’t the case here.
“This movie is awesomely stupid, totally implausible from a scientific viewpoint, and a shameful waste of money,” Ebert concluded, before turning his fury towards the financiers. After catching Lew Grade and Elliott Castner’s names in the credits as producers, he declared that “they ought instead, in simple fairness, to simply give their money to filmmakers at random.” Why? because “the results couldn’t be worse.”
