Angelina Jolie's First Major Movie Was A Panned Sci-Fi Sequel

Everyone's got to start somewhere, and that somewhere ain't necessarily got to be pretty. Take Tom Cruise, for example. He made his film acting debut in Franco Zeffirelli's teen romance "Endless Love," an avalanche of ick notable for its Diana Ross/Lionel Richie theme song and notorious for the scene where Shirley Knight's bohemian mother watches approvingly from the top of a staircase as her 15-year-old daughter (Brooke Shields) has firelit sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend (Martin Hewitt). Somehow, Cruise survived this association with one of the most atrociously awful movies of the 1980s to become one of the world's biggest movie stars.

On the less scandalous end of the spectrum, Paul Newman's first movie was the biblical epic "The Silver Chalice," for which he received mostly lousy reviews. Jessica Lange was ridiculed for conjuring the ghost of Carole Lombard to play a daffy starlet in the 1976 remake of "King Kong." And George Clooney has probably heard just about enough of the misbegotten 1983 horror flick "Grizzly II: Revenge" over 40 years after it became the title that would always lead off his filmography.

Once actors have achieved a certain degree of success, these ignominious beginnings should become a lot easier to stomach. But when it comes to Angelina Jolie's career, stomaching that first movie proved literally difficult.

Albert Pyun's "Cyborg" was Jean-Claude Van Damme's first theatrical release after he scored his first box office success with "Bloodsport," and, as someone eager to see more of his shockingly limber martial arts shenanigans, I found the discount post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick to be an absolute bore. "Cyborg" was easily forgotten exploitation, and though it was a modest hit in 1989, I figured it was Van Damme's least likely sequel vehicle.

While Van Damme was done with "Cyborg," purveyors of direct-to-video schlock were not done with "Cyborg." I discovered this when I rented Peter Jackson's "Braindead" (titled "Dead Alive" in the United States) on VHS in 1993, and was treated to a trailer for "Cyborg 2" before the main feature. It looked awful, and I felt terrible to see Elias Koteas (whom I'd loved in Atom Egoyan's "The Adjuster") slumming it in a movie made to take up space on a video store shelf. That said, Jack Palance growling the line "If you want to dine with the devil, you're going to need a long spoon" and this unknown female actor deadpanning "Don't get dead" to Koteas suggested "Cyborg 2" might go down swell with beer and pizza (as a DTV release, there were no contemporaneous reviews to consult).

It didn't, but the cyborg of "Cyborg 2," played by an unknown-to-me Angelina Jolie, unmistakably possessed a captivating screen presence. I had no idea she was the daughter of Jon Voight until years later (not that this was important), but I was fairly certain I'd be seeing more of her. Sure enough, two years later, she co-starred in Iain Softley's goofball cult flick "Hackers."

In 2014, long after Jolie had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for "Girl, Interrupted," Buzzfeed asked the internationally beloved artist, who, by this point, had served as a Special Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees what it was like to kick off her career with "Cyborg 2."

"Oh, I threw up," said Jolie. "I did. I saw it and I threw up. Just nausea."

To be fair, this was her reaction to seeing the finished film. As for making the movie, she had some fond memories. For instance, she enjoyed her kickboxing training. But as she told Buzzfeed, "I was 17 and I think I thought I was making a real movie, which is odd, since there's a scene when I'm decapitated and talking ... as one does. But, yeah, I saw it and got really sick. I just remember my brother Jamie holding me and saying, 'It's going to be all right.'"

To date, Jolie's films have combined to gross over $6 billion at the worldwide box office. Turns out brother Jamie knew what he was talking about.