No, I don’t mean in terms of dancing, although I suspect Richard Armitage and his snake hips could outdo Mr. T on that front. Nope, I mean in the Long-Maned Sci-fi/Fantasy Film Character Sweeps.
Back in 2000, Travolta played a role he’d wanted to play for almost 20 years, ever since he’d read L. Ron Hubbard‘s futuristic sci-fi novel Battlefield Earth. Hubbard is the man who created the “religion” of Scientology, of which Travolta is a devoted follower.
The results were a big-budget “vanity” film that is considered one of the worst of all time. It has a two percent rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Yes, two percent of the critics reviewing it liked it. It did a little better with audience members. A whopping 14 percent of them gave it a positive rating. IMDB gave it a 2.4/10.
I attempted to watch the film once but the camera work was so annoying and the performances so OTT– and not even in an entertaining way–that I quickly gave up. And I enjoy sci-fi. But this was right up there in the same category with Howard the Duck and Showgirls (which is, at least, unintentionally hilarious). I think the most entertaining thing about the film was reading the reviews. Some people were quite clever in coming up with new ways to describe its level of awfulness.
Here’s a reel of a few scenes from the film to give you a taste of it:
OK so–when my husband saw a photo of Richard as Thorin, he quipped, “Hey, he looks like John Travolta in Battlefield Earth.”
To which I gave a Guy-like smirk and replied something along the lines of, “John Travolta wishes he’d looked that good in that awful movie.”
Well, I will let you judge for yourself.
John Travolta as the alien villain in the turkey Battlefield Earth.
OK, they both have long brown hair, bushy eyebrows, beards and mustaches. They are both male. Otherwise—Mr. Travolta’s character is just flat-out creepy to me. I do not find this dude with the nose plugs attractive. However, the pointy-eared fellow below? Yummmmmmmmmm.
I am also quite sure The Hobbit is going to be a much, much better film than BE. I don’t think its stars will feel the need, as BE co-star Forrest Whittaker did, to apologize for being in the film.
the armitage effect 