“Why disguise him as a smelly alien creep?”: the sci-fi movie Roger Ebert called a waste of money
If Roger Ebert didn’t like something, he wasn’t shy in letting it be known. As one of his era’s most prominent film critics, his word carried more weight than most, so a withering evisceration of any given movie coming from his fingertips was immediately lent some extra heft.
Any analysis or criticism of cinema is entirely in the eye of the beholder because, at the end of the day, all art is subjective. Ebert loved some of the classics and detested some of the worst features ever made, but he was hardly beholden to the popular consensus.
He wildly celebrated some notable disasters and egregious affronts to the good name of the moving image, while there were plenty of all-timers he didn’t care for in the slightest. However, he was most definitely toeing the party line when he decried an abomination so galling it decimated a career and murdered an entire studio as having scraped the bottom of the sci-fi barrel.
For a while, John Travolta could do no wrong after Quentin Tarantino rehabilitated his career with Pulp Fiction, earning him his second Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’. Get Shorty, Michael, Phenomenon, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, and more; the hits just kept on coming as the actor fully embraced his second wind.
Sometimes, though, all it takes is one very bad movie to undo all of that hard work. For Travolta, it was Battlefield Earth, his love letter to Scientology. The star viewed it as his personally curated version of Star Wars, with sequel potential and the ability to bring the writings of L Ron Hubbard to a wider mainstream audience than ever before.
Needless to say, that’s not quite how things panned out, with Battlefield Earth losing a fortune at the box office, sweeping the board at the Golden Raspberry Awards, and putting Franchise Pictures out of business. Travolta earned the majority of Ebert’s scorn, but Forest Whitaker didn’t get off lightly, either.
“Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money since we can’t recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine,” he wrote. “Travolta can be charming, funny, touching and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep? The Psychlos can fly between galaxies, but look at their nails: their civilization has mastered the hyperdrive but not the manicure.”
To be fair, that was one of the kinder insights on Battlefield Earth, which was swiftly torn to shreds by anyone unfortunate enough to see it. Travolta has never managed to reclaim those immediate post-Pulp Fiction heights ever again, and investing so heavily – both personally and professionally – on such a sorry excuse for a spacefaring epic can be pinpointed as the exact moment his renaissance ended.
