My inductee this year breaks
from my usual trend of inducting individuals, but I feel that these inductees
are so shameful that they don’t deserve any semblance of consistency or
respect. So, the first film to be put into my Hall Of Shame is the colossal
monstrosity that is Battlefield Earth. A passion project of John Travolta, a
long-time devotee of Scientology, adapted from the L. Ron Hubbard novel of the
same name, it contains just about everything wrong in a movie. Travolta is at
his over-acting worst, hamming up every scene to the utmost levels of
ridiculousness, and poor Barry Pepper is saddled with a nothing part. It’s a
shoddily scripted, messily shot (what the hell is up with the Dutch angles), preposterous
piece of work. Upon release, it was critically panned, tanked at the box-office
and sank the Franchise Pictures studio, taking any chance of us being subjected
to the prospect of a sequel. I’m a big believer in the philosophy that in order
for a movie to be a true disaster, it must be a passion project (Travolta)
combined with some level of blinded megalomania (in this case, Elie Samaha). This
a perfect example of that very philosophy; in short, it’s a giant turd.
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