25 Years Ago, John Travolta Starred In One Of The Worst Movies Ever Made

John Travolta is a legend in more ways than one. The "Saturday Night Fever" veteran has starred in several unimpeachable classics, but he could also teach a masterclass on calamitous career choices. The man has been in the industry now for almost half a century and not once has he learned how to not make a bad decision. Since the mid-1970s, when he played a supporting role in "Carrie," Travolta has appeared in projects that have won him acclaim, but he's also appeared in a lot more that have garnered derision — to the extent that Travolta now has a full seven movies with straight 0% Rotten Tomatoes scores.

How does he do it? Well, the phrase "passion project" seems to be a harbinger of doom for the "Pulp Fiction" star. Travolta has, at various points, gotten it into his head that because he likes a thing, it will make a fantastic movie (with him in the lead role, of course). My personal favorite example is 2018's "Gotti," a "passion project" that Travolta had been trying to get made for seven years prior to its debut. The John Gotti biopic seemed to ignite something in Travolta, who promoted the ever-loving hell out of the film, joining social media for the first time ever in order to sing its praises. According to insiders who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, the actor truly believed his performance as the mafia don would bring untold awards success. Instead, "Gotti" stands as one of the biggest blunders in his filmography and one of the seven 0-percenters on RT.

But "Gotti" wasn't the first time Travolta had seen a passion project blow up in his face. Like I said, the man just never seemed to learn certain lessons, even after the calamity that was 2000's "Battlefield Earth." This earlier Travolta "passion project" became such an Earth-shattering failure that even the "Battlefield Earth" screenwriter apologized for the movie after the fact.

As if movies like "Trading Paint" and "Life on the Line" weren't enough to sully John Travolta's name, he's also a Scientologist — and a pretty enthusiastic one, too. At one point, Travolta decided he had to pay cinematic homage to the founder of this seedy little cult, L. Ron Hubbard, and did so with an adaptation of his 1982 novel "Battlefield Earth." The Scientology head honcho was also a prolific writer of science-fiction (if you can believe that), and his book about humanity rebelling against a race of tyrannical aliens known as Psychlos evidently enraptured Travolta, to the extent he basically forced through a big screen adaptation.

Now, we've already established that, for all his successes, John Travolta has had some truly abject lows in his career. Somehow, he even managed to front a sequel to "Saturday Night Fever" — one of the most celebrated films of the '70s — that was so bad that The Boston Globe's Owen Gleiberman dubbed it "a disgrace." In that case, however, director Sylvester Stallone has taken much of the blame for producing such a flop. In truth, however, you can pick pretty much any decade and find a Travolta stinker. So, to say "Battlefield Earth" is one of his worst movies, then, is to say that it is one of the worst movies in the history of Hollywood.

The movie was made on a $73 million budget and directed by Roger Christian, a man revered for shaping the aesthetic of science-fiction movies ever since he helped create the lightsaber for "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope" and crafted the look of Ridley Scott's space horror classic "Alien." Yet, "Battlefield Earth" remains one of the most disastrous science-fiction movies ever made. 

Not that you need any more explanation beyond the film being an obsequious ode to the man who gave the world Scientology from the star of "Gotti." Still, in case you were wondering what went wrong, here's a brief explainer.

Even in pre-production, pretty much everyone but John Travolta thought "Battlefield Earth" was a bad idea. Nevertheless, the actor was eager to make it, so much so he not only invested his own money into the project but also basically forced the movie into production with help from a then newly-created company by the name of Franchise Pictures. The head of the company, Elie Samaha, was particularly forceful. The book "Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema" quotes Samaha as saying, "I would yell at everyone, 'This is a science-fiction film starring John Travolta!' again and again." Such an approach supposedly distracted from the negativity brought about by the Scientology connection, and after Samaha managed to get the film financed and into production, he apparently just stepped back and let Travolta and co. make whatever the heck they wanted.

What they made wasn't good. Director Roger Christian once told Vice that Travolta sold him on the film by referring to it as "'Pulp Fiction' for the year 3000" and "the 'Schindler's List' of science-fiction." He also alleged the actor viewed the movie "like 'Star Wars,' only better." In reality, "Battlefield Earth" was a $73 million disaster, and its $29.7 million global box office take was the least disastrous thing about it. The movie saw Travolta play Terl, the leader of the Psychlos, who rule Earth in the year 3000. The planet itself has become a hollowed out hellscape, and Barry Pepper's Jonnie "Goodboy" Tyler has had enough. Hence, he leads humankind into a battle against the Psychlos to reclaim the planet. Also, Forest Whitaker is there. Add it all up, and you have a movie that left critics a little more than unimpressed.

Far from being convinced the movie was "like 'Star Wars,' only better," Roger Ebert likened the experience of watching the film to "taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time," and claimed the movie was "not merely bad" but "unpleasant in a hostile way." Hostile is pretty much the tenor of reviews in general, with Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times summarizing, "After about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea."

Surprisingly, despite the awful reviews and the fact Travolta never really recovered after this box office flop, "Battlefield Earth" is not one of the actor's 0%-rated movies on Rotten Tomatoes. Not that the site which would have you believe there are only two perfect war movies should be taken too seriously, but if you're interested, "Battlefield Earth" has a 3% rating and a 2% rating among top critics. That means only one of 44 top critics liked the movie and that critic was Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose "fresh" review amounted to this: "Is it worth seeing once? Sure."