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David Moll, cue
dmoll@pjstar.com
Travolta, Scientology One long and bad hair day

5/4/2000

I would never pass judgment on something I hadn't seen yet, but the sci-fi flick "Battlefield Earth" - opening next week - shows signs of being the best bad movie of the year.

This assessment isn't based on the coming-attractions trailer, which contains some cool special effects. Nor is it based on the fact that "Battlefield Earth" is from the 1,050-page novel by L. Ron Hubbard - the world-class con man who founded Scientology, the California nut-bar church and the most ruthlessly lawyered-up religion in America. Just because Hubbard found himself a good scam doesn't mean he might not have once been a decent science-fiction writer. I wouldn't know.

No, the perversely promising thing about the "Battlefield Earth" ad campaign is John Travolta's haircut.

Have you seen this thing? It'll stop you dead in your tracks.

Travolta plays the villain of "Battlefield Earth," a creature called Terl, a "Machiavellian mastermind" from an alien race called the Psychlos.

The film is set in the year 3000, when the Psychlos have conquered Earth and put the surviving humans to work in the mines. One daring young man, Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), rises up and leads humanity in a final struggle for blah blah blah.

As Terl, Travolta's done up with a sort of Fu Manchu beard, sinister eyebrows that go all the way back to his temples and a headful of big swinging dreadlocks. He looks like a cross between a giant spider, a Flash Gordon bad guy and one of those spooky middle-aged dudes who used to live out of their vans in the parking lots at Grateful Dead shows.

It's definitely a striking look. It definitely makes a statement. The statement is, "Please forget that I was ever in this movie."

Actually, Travolta is the one who got "Battlefield Earth" made. One of Scientology's most famous adherents - especially since the reported departure of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise from the church's fold - Travolta had been trying to get the book made into a movie for years, but says he only recently got the clout to do it.

He also says the movie has nothing to do with Scientology. But the Washington Post, in an extremely interesting article last November, drew a connection between the sinister "Psychlos" of Hubbard's novel and the fact that Scientology's wacky cosmology regards psychiatrists as one of the planet's prime evils.

Hubbard preached that "in a distant galaxy, alien 'psychs' devised implants that would ultimately wreck the spiritual progress of human beings," reports the Post. "The psychs and their 'blackened souls,' he preached, were to blame for all crime, violence and sin." But what about bad hair days?