Author: L. Ron Hubbard
Director: Roger Christian
Huh? I’d heard terrible things about this and expected that it couldn’t possibly be that bad. It’s not. At least if you liked the book, it’s not, as it’s close to the book to be mildly interesting. If you hated the book you’ll hate the film. It essentially strips out all the unusual, interesting parts of the book and only keeps the action scenes. Incomprehensibly, however, the film makes astonishingly primitive and foolish errors. For instance, John Travolta plays an alien, a Psychlos named Terl. Yet he and the other Psychlos are nearly indistinguishable from the humans. Psychlos are supposed to be huge creatures, nine feet tall, and there’s some awkward camera work to almost make that illusion happen, but then all the Psychlos machinery, chairs, etc. are human-sized! The pace of the whole film is rushed to the point of incomprehensibility — key lines of dialog are thrown away or grunted in strange incomprehensible accents — if you haven’t read the book I doubt anything would make sense. But so much of the book is tossed out that what’s left doesn’t make sense anyway. And there are weird technical mistakes, such as the matter transportation special effect which was so badly done you couldn’t figure out what was happening. I mean come on, Star Trek had that working in the sixties! And what was up with the acting? Performances varied all over the place, with the human hero played by Barry Pepper absolutely terribly, just a mishmash of rebellion and toughness. Now there were a few good things: I thought Travolta did a good job conveying the sliminess of Terl, and the special effects of planet Psychlos were fine, but the story just didn’t mesh. It’s an epic tale told by a kindergarten teacher, reduced of all complexity and science. Next time, get a decent script and director. I was shocked after the film was over to discover that the director, whom I was positive was a no-talent MTV video hack doing his first feature, is an industry veteran who’s been making films since the 1970’s (even winning an Academy Award for a short) and came personally recommended by George Lucas. Have we really sunk this low? Seventy percent of the problems of this film came from the director, the rest from the script (which wasn’t that bad, though it had some serious deficiencies in places). Watching the pompous director on the DVD compare Hubbard’s novel to Frank Herbert’s Dune is not only an insult, it shows how little this guy about science fiction and literature. He ought to have to pay money to every person who suffered through this turkey.
