Quentin Tarantino Is A Big Fan Of John Travolta's Notorious Sci-Fi Box Office Bomb
by Joe Roberts · /FilmQuentin Tarantino has made some undeniable classics. He also loves to hear himself talk, which means we've been forced to endure some unfortunate and downright ridiculous takes, like the time he said notorious John Travolta flop "Battlefield Earth" was good. In fact, he predicted that we'd all come to love the ill-fated sci-fi bomb 20 years after its release. Well, here we are 26 years later and nothing's changed.
In conversations about the worst movie of all time, there's one film that always at least gets a mention. "Battlefield Earth" was so bad that Roger Ebert predicted it would become the king of bad movie jokes, and it basically has. The film was Travolta's squalid little attempt to pay tribute to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard by adapting his 1982 novel of the same name. Instead of being a celebration of the cult-leader's legacy, however, "Battlefield Earth" became exactly what Ebert predicted.
The film remains notorious for its awful visuals, convoluted plot, flat performances, and terrible dialogue. Pretty much everything that a movie can get wrong, this movie got wrong. So wretched is its reputation that "Battlefield Earth" writer J.David Shapiro has been haunted by it ever since. Put simply, nobody liked it. Well, nobody except Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle, who to this day seems to be solely responsible for the film maintaining a 3% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes rather than a flat zero. Then, there's Tarantino, who is apparently the only other person who liked "Battlefield Earth" and thought the film would come to be appreciated as some sort of classic decades after its original 2000 release.
Quentin Tarantino thought Battlefield Earth was destined for greatness
"Battlefield Earth" was directed by Roger Christian, whose legacy thankfully isn't defined by having made one of the greatest misfires in movie history. The filmmaker previously helped design the lightsaber for "Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope" and served as production designer on "Alien." Both those accomplishments alone are enough to make the man a legend, but if his reputation ever faltered it was because of John Travolta's ode to his Scientology overlord.
"Battlefield Earth" was one of those movies that flopped so hard it almost put its studio out of business, making just $29.7 million on a $73 million budget. What's more, critics savaged Christian's movie, making it a critical and commercial disaster. Evidently, the only glimmer of hope came from Quentin Tarantino, who upon seeing the film told Christian that he'd made something truly ahead of its time.
In an interview with SFX Magazine (via CinemaBlend), Christian recalled the movie's Los Angeles premiere and how impressed Tarantino was. "He sat between John and I," explained the director, "and at the end stood up and said, 'I love this film!'" But Tarantino didn't just love the film. According to Christian he saw it as somehow predicting the trajectory of filmmaking. "He hugged John and hugged me," the director continued, "and said, 'Listen, they're not going to get it for 20 years. Just love this film and forget about it, it's gonna come back later, you'll see!' I want to make films like this... I just can't do it!'"
Nothing but guilt explains Quentin Tarantino's love for Battlefield Earth
Quentin Tarantino has been delivering controversial movie takes for years. Aside from falling afoul of other filmmakers like Spike Lee for his questionable treatment of historical atrocities, the director has claimed that Alfred Hitchcock's classics "Vertigo" and "North by Northwest" are not, in fact, classics and that François Truffaut was an amateur. Tarantino also hasn't been doing himself any favors of late having infamously labelled Paul Dano a "weak" actor. At this point, I'm not sure why anybody is supposed to take the guy's views all that seriously, but here we are.
Now, we have yet more evidence that Tarantino doesn't actually know what he's talking about. 26 years after the release of "Battlefield Earth" nobody is claiming this film was a misunderstood masterwork. The movie hasn't enjoyed any kind of reappraisal and its writer is still haunted by its failure. If anything, the movie's reputation has only degraded since 2000. The only thing that might explain Tarantino's apparent love for this film is the possibility that he might have felt a tad guilty for not directing it himself.
According to a 2000 New York Times report, when Travolta was shopping "Battlefield Earth" around, he initially approached Tarantino to direct. The "Reservoir Dogs" filmmaker turned him down and eventually landed on Roger Christian. Perhaps, then, Tarantino was just trying to make Christian feel better at the premiere due to having been indirectly responsible for him being put in charge of this train wreck in the first place.