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April 24, 2000 Battlefield Earth Will Tank By Bob Bahr

Media watchers, with their big tongues hanging out the sides of their mouths, showed all the restrained glee of an Irish Setter in a city park last year when they declared the dawning of the era of online movie marketing. Blame it on The Blair Witch Project, a flimsy horror film with a handful of creepy scenes that would have been scary only if the strange occurences were real and I had been there, in person, to witness them. That flick rode to fame and fortune on the back of a Web campaign. It was a hit months before it arrived in theaters. The Blair Witch Project taught us all a lesson by proving that a smart marketing push on the Web can produce box office dollars.

Did anyone learn that lesson? Apparently, not the folks behind the space epic Battlefield Earth, which is scheduled to open May 12. Could there have been a project better suited for a Web campaign than this movie, which is based on one of the most popular science fiction books of all time?

Okay, maybe J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but that Web campaign is well under way, thank you. The movie trailer has already been downloaded about four gazillion times! Anyway, Rings would have to be classified as fantasy fiction, not sci-fi. If you don't think there's a difference, don your spiffy, white asbestos suit, post that thought on a message board that sports the name "John W. Campbell, Jr.", and get ready for the flames. One would be hard pressed to find an arena with a higher percentage of sci-fi fans than the online community. The opportunity was ripe.

The Scientologists behind Battlefield Earth (L. Ron Hubbard is the father of the Scientology religion) did a fair job of getting the movie trailer out on the Web for fans to analyze and obsess over. And this probably wasn't a good thing.

John Travolta plays the evil alien Terl in the film, but too much of his pretty-boy face is visible through the Klingon-like makeup for him to seem threatening. Forest Whitaker, a 6'2" linebacker-esque man, is inexplicably cast as Ker, a midget alien. And Barry Pepper, the actor tapped to play hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (would I make that name up?) looks more like a scraggly grunge rocker than a shining hero emerging from America's new Old West. The action sequences are clipped to the point of irrelevance and the character interaction seems like a poor rehashing of countless past sci-fi movie scenes.

A writer calling himself Dr. Benjamin Wog allegedly got his hands on the movie script and promptly diced it to pieces on xenutv.com, an anti- Scientology site. His words were picked up by other movie preview sites. He called the script "stupider than anything Ed Wood could ever imagine."

"Well, here's my detailed look at the script for John Travolta's swan song, Battlefield Earth. The Church of Scientology calls this movie 'The Film to Beat in the Year 2000.' I say we beat it with a stick.

"I'm not panning this film because Hubbard created a fraudulent religion to bilk people out of their money, or because Hubbard's wife went to prison for ordering the break in of the FBI and IRS, or even because Scientologists have picketed my home... this script just stinks.

"Do you want to see people hopping in jets and flying to exotic locales they shouldn't even know exist? Do you want to see 10 foot tall aliens walking around with lunchboxes and briefcases? Or pinching the asses of alien waitresses with their claws? What the hell is Travolta thinking? I know he loves Hubbard but he must know this script doesn't work. On almost every level, this is complete and utter dreck. It's a clanking piece of man-animal droppings."

Think it's just Scientology critics who are forecasting the doom of Battlefield Earth? Consider what Amy Wallace, staff writer at The Los Angeles Times, predicted about the film.

"Aside from the fact that several of Hollywood's top stars are Scientologists, can anyone really think that L. Ron Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (which Warner Bros. is releasing) has the makings of a blockbuster? (Although, if reports are true that John Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston, play 9-foot-tall aliens --- named Psychlos --- with glowing amber eyes and grotesquely elongated heads, this could be the comedy of the year.)"

No substantial dissenting opinions on the script or movie can be found on the Web. Even the Battlefield Earth fans on the official Warner Bros. Battlefield Earth message board chatted in the tone of doomed hopefulness, reminiscent of McGovern campaign workers in late '72, discussing how the movie might not suck. The prospect that the movie will be vastly inferior to Hubbard's book --- and quite a stinker in its own right --- was often a foregone conclusion on the message board. The conversation generally shifted to a critique of the 1,000-page book itself and Hubbard's literary merits compared to science fiction titans, such as Robert Heinlein.

Okay, so the movie will probably suck. That doesn't mean it couldn't have become a hit. One would think that a movie with a potentially huge cult audience, backed by an organization that thrills in the notion of guerrilla marketing and persuasion, if not low-key proselytizing, would have seized this opportunity and launched a Web campaign for this film... the likes of which cyberspace had never seen.

Didn't happen. And therefore, the tea leaves of the Web predict yawningly empty theaters for Battlefield Earth.

Bob Bahr is a contributing writer to goodauthority. He lives in New York City.