10 Downright Ridiculous Excuses For Terrible Movies

5. Battlefield Earth - Religious Prejudice

The Excuse: " critics were waiting for us to ... chop our heads off. Everybody hated Scientology for some reason. I didn't know people were so prejudiced" - Elie Samaha (Producer)

Despite the fact that John Travolta and his producers spent all of the pre-release campaign insisting the film was not about Scientology, and that it was just a sci-fi film that Travolta really wanted to get made, producer Elie Samaha was quick to jump to the film's defence when it tanked to suggest that everyone who hated it was a great big bigot and hadn't ever wanted to see it succeed anyway. There may have been some who felt that way, but it's just not a substantial enough excuse to explain the downright awful mistakes of the film. Personally I have nothing against Scientology - people should be free to believe whatever they want to believe, just as everyone else should be free from them imposing their beliefs on them - so I like to think I'm unbiased when watching Battlefield Earth. And yet, it is still an atrocious, boring and insistent film that seems to possess the swagger of something with a wrongly over-inflated opinion of itself. It's sloppy, it has very little artistic merit (apart from the unintentionally hilarious performance from Travolta) and it's plainly not entertaining, and that has nothing to do with any aliens other than the awful ones in the movie itself.