Cinema history is full of masterpieces — and then there’s Battlefield Earth. Often cited as one of the worst movies ever made, the infamous 2000 sci-fi epic is leaving Netflix at the end of February. So if you’ve ever been morbidly curious about what a $73 million disaster looks like in slow motion (and at a permanent Dutch angle), your time is running out.
Based on the novel by L. Ron Hubbard (yes, that L. Ron Hubbard), the film is set in the year 3000, where Earth has been conquered by an alien race known as the Psychlos. Humanity has been reduced to scattered survivors, including Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), who is enslaved by the gleefully villainous Terl, played by John Travolta.
Terl forces humans to mine gold — apparently the Psychlos’ most prized resource — before Jonnie launches a rebellion using the aliens’ own technology against them. On paper, it sounds like a fairly standard sci-fi premise. In execution? It’s cinematic chaos. It’s so gleefully bad, you simply must watch it. Battlefield Earth was a long-gestating passion project for Travolta, who spent years trying to bring Hubbard’s novel to the screen, and it has nothing to do with Scientology, honest.
How Bad Is ‘Battlefield Earth’?
Oh boy, it’s a stinker. It’s so bad. When Battlefield Earth premiered in May 2000, critics didn’t just dislike it — they annihilated it, and they had fun while doing it too. Roger Ebert famously wrote, “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.” Variety dubbed it “the Showgirls of sci-fi shoot-’em-ups.” And Jon Stewart went even further, calling it “a cross between Star Wars and the smell of ass.”
A Collider retrospective by Collier Jennings added this nugget:
“None of it compares to Travolta’s acting, which is the pinnacle of hamming it up. Travolta delivers lines like, “While you were still learning how to SPELL YOUR NAME, I was being trained…to CONQUER GALAXIES!” in an over-the-top register, to the point where you can see the teeth marks he’s left from chewing the scenery. Battlefield Earth should be the film every future filmmaker watches when learning what not to do on set. It was bad when it premiered in 2000, and it’s still bad all these years later.”
Battlefield Earth will leave Netflix at the end of the month.
Release Date
May 12, 2000
Director
Roger Christian