Last night a surprisingly fat John Travolta appeared on Leno to shill his upcoming (and Cult of $cientology-funded) movie epic, Battlefield Earth. It was a hoot. I’ve seen some bad sci-fi in my day but, sheesh!
Just from the clip I saw (i.e. if that’s what they are showing to try and drag people in the theaters) the movie looks totally dreadful, maybe one of the worst movies ever made. I am laughing.
I was worried that if “BE” was of any quality or popularity, then the status of L. Ron Hubbard would be much elevated in the ranks of American pop culture. Worried that people might flock to his other “literary works”, and be pulled imperceptibly towards the slime-dripping tentacles of the iron-fisted, money-grubbing UFO cult. Instead, the obnoxious and proselytizing Travolta will get totally savaged by the critics and the cult will lose about, say, $150-$200 million.
I am still laughing, hard. It’s going to be a sweet summer, watching that train wreck plummet out of the theaters as the cult goes through all sorts of PR gyrations and lies to inflate “BE”'s numbers. I only wish I could see the heads roll for myself.
For more info on the filming of this diaster, go to the weekly alt.religion.scientology (ARS) summation at www.xenu.net.
Whew… had to sneak in the backdoor just to get here this afternoon.
One other thought I had as I was watching the clip they showed on Leno was this: Is this supposed to be one of the better parts of this movie? I mean, traditionally you want to show some of the best stuff when doing the talk show circuit – maybe not * the * best, but something from among the better parts. Then people are disappointed that the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to the clip they saw. Here, I was thinking, unless the rest of the movie is much much better than this, this movie could send Travolta back into oblivion for another twenty years.
I think I’ll pass on this one too… not that I get out to the movies like I used to, but…
–I am Soren Kierkegaard.–
“People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.”
I don’t know if it will really bomb. But I doubt if it could be as bad as Starship Troopers. That movie mad absolutely no attempt to follow the book. I was hopping to see the scene where the guy drops the grenade that counts down out loud. Instead, the movie was glossed over as a propaganda film. Must have made Heinlen spin like a top.
It’s sad that Hollywood uses Sci-Fi as a spring board in an attempt to snatch a FX Oscar. Give me Niven, the old Asimov stories, and Heinlen any day.