Psychlo killer: Battlefield Earth 25 years on | Little White Lies

Psy­ch­lo killer: Bat­tle­field Earth 25 years on

29 Apr 2025

Words by Liam Murphy

Close-up portrait of person with long blonde hair and facial features obscured, in a dark setting with blue smoke or fog.
Close-up portrait of person with long blonde hair and facial features obscured, in a dark setting with blue smoke or fog.
Sci­en­tol­ogy’s spec­tac­u­lar flop went down in his­to­ry for all the wrong rea­sons. A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry on, what went wrong?

TTSB, or Things That Shouldn’t Be, is Scientology’s term for when you tell a high­er-up I’ve got a bad feel­ing about this’. It’s not quite an ethics chit” (a writ­ten rep­ri­mand) but it refers to some­thing incor­rect. This might be used to report on an SP” (sup­pres­sive per­son) or a mem­ber with the poten­tial to blow” (an unau­tho­rised depar­ture from Scientology).

If you were to ask David Mis­cav­ige, the cur­rent leader of the new-age reli­gion, what he thinks is Some­thing That Shouldn’t Be, he’d like­ly say Bat­tle­field Earth.

In fact, accord­ing to both Scientology’s most vocal defec­tor and the co-writer of the 2000 sci-fi film’s script, the Thetan pow­ers that be could’ve put a stop to it. They were involved with its cre­ation – the co-writer claims they were too busy giv­ing notes while the defec­tor alleges they were over­see­ing the whole thing. But even with the pow­er of Xenu on their side, 25 years on movie-goers aren’t eat­ing out of a nov­el­ty e‑meter pop­corn buck­et or going to see the lat­est spin-off which gives some back­sto­ry to vil­lain­ous alien Terl. What happened?

It start­ed with a signed copy of L Ron Hubbard’s 1982 nov­el Bat­tle­field Earth’ land­ing in John Travolta’s mail­box: a pulp sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry about the last of humanity’s strug­gle against an alien race, and a thin­ly-veiled jab at psy­chi­a­trists, Hubbard’s arch-nemeses.

The Grease actor was no stranger to Hub­bard. He’d become a Sci­en­tol­o­gist years before after being gift­ed the movement’s pre­cur­sor text Dia­net­ics while on the set of Robert Fuest’s 1971 film The Devil’s Rain. The star’s rela­tion­ship with the church became rocky – the book Going Clear main­tains that Hub­bard him­self ordered a full review of Travolta’s audits” from over the years – but, at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, he was their star boy.

Bat­tle­field Earth had loomed over Hol­ly­wood since it was writ­ten. A huge inflat­able Terl – the alien Tra­vol­ta would go on to por­tray – stalked the boule­vard in 1984 like a dour tube man, and a low-bud­get attempt at a film with Hubbard’s direct involve­ment was fold­ed up in the same decade.

But the leader’s wish for a Star Wars meets Close Encoun­ters film would begin to take shape in the mid-90s, after his death. Travolta’s man­ag­er Jonathan Krane signed on with Fox to make Bat­tle­field Earth, hav­ing brought it over from MGM. The first two things he said to Vari­ety at the time? It’s Travolta’s pas­sion project,” and It has noth­ing to do with Scientology.”

So began a pat­tern. The archived film’s web­site has no men­tion of Sci­en­tol­ogy – even in its gush­ing page on Hubbard’s life and achieve­ments. Travolta’s answer when asked echoed Krane’s: Noth­ing to do with Sci­en­tol­ogy.” When asked about the reli­gion itself, Tra­vol­ta would shrug it off as a phi­los­o­phy” that he liked. The first thing the team behind the film told Kim Coates while court­ing him for the role of Car­lo? You guessed it: You know this has noth­ing to do with Sci­en­tol­ogy, right?”

There’s an alter­nate real­i­ty where Quentin Taran­ti­no gave in to his Pulp Fic­tion star’s request and direct­ed Bat­tle­field Earth. Terl would be gun­ning down humans to the tune of Nan­cy Sina­tra and we’d prob­a­bly seen what Psy­ch­lo feet look like too. But he turned it down – Tra­vol­ta and the Church had to set­tle for Roger Chris­t­ian, best known as the sec­ond unit direc­tor of Star Wars: The Phan­tom Men­ace.

But from the begin­ning the pro­duc­tion was shroud­ed in a black cloud of neg­a­tive press. The growth of inter­net forums allowed infor­ma­tion and rumours to spread quick­ly. Anti-cult web­sites spread sto­ries about sub­lim­i­nal mes­sages” and secret financ­ing for the film com­ing from the church. The Church’s rebut­tal? The only thing I’ve read is what’s in the media.” They had noth­ing to do with it, at least accord­ing to the Sci­en­tol­ogy spokesper­son at the time, Mar­ty Rathbun.

The fer­vour around the film was hot­ting up in all the wrong ways. But James Richard­son, a Neva­da Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor who stud­ied new reli­gions, played down the like­li­hood of secret mes­sages. He laid the film’s fate on how good of a yarn it is”.

Three rugged, heavily armoured warriors with long dreadlocks, standing together in a dark, atmospheric setting.

Word of mouth before its release def­i­nite­ly hin­dered the film, but the reviews tru­ly evis­cer­at­ed it. Bat­tle­field Earth made half of its gross in the first three days and there­after went cold, earn­ing around $30m at the world­wide box office – way under its bud­get of $73m, this fig­ure was retroac­tive­ly cor­rect­ed, though. The bud­get was revealed to be $44m after a fraud law­suit found the pro­duc­tion team had inflat­ed the number.

Roger Ebert announced the film was unpleas­ant in a hos­tile way” and ref­er­enced, as many crit­ics did, Christian’s per­va­sive use of Dutch angles. Almost every scene in the film is skewed slight­ly to achieve what the direc­tor said was a com­ic book” style, but real­ly just comes off like the cam­era oper­a­tor fell asleep. The film’s aus­tere sto­ry of humanity’s strug­gle is mixed with a bud­dy com­e­dy between Tra­vol­ta and Whitak­er as 8ft tall dread­lock-sport­ing aliens. It is, in no uncer­tain terms, a mess.

Five years ago, in an inter­view with The Dai­ly Tele­graph J.D Shapiro, the film’s co-writer along­side Corey Man­dell, would go on to blame its poor qual­i­ty on exten­sive notes he received from MGM, which he was then told came direct­ly from the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy. Shapiro also said he had met with Scientology’s high­er-ups before he had signed on.

And years after its release, one very loud and promi­nent Sci­en­tol­o­gist defec­tor – that same for­mer spokesper­son, Mar­ty Rath­bun – would go on to say David Mis­cav­ige had per­son­al­ly been micro­manag­ing” the film. He’d received dailies and was beside him­self with joy after pre­view screen­ings, telling Tra­vol­ta that the old man [Hub­bard] would be proud of you.”

If the Sci­en­tol­o­gists and Tra­vol­ta are telling the truth, and the film was not a ploy to laun­der a shady movement’s rep­u­ta­tion via the mag­ic of Hol­ly­wood, they’d have been fool­ish not to seize the opportunity.

One only has to look at The Matrix, a sci-fi movie released a year before, to see the pow­er film wield­ed at the time – the Wachowskis’ film is foun­da­tion­al in people’s feel­ings about our post-tech world. That movie gave a far-fetched the­o­ry real Hol­ly­wood pur­chase, and a flashy film might have done the same for Hubbard.

It’s also arguable that, by today’s stan­dards, they needn’t have been so coy. White Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, vio­lent bor­der con­trols and QAnon con­spir­a­cies were a large part of the roll­out for Sound of Free­dom, a thriller based on the anti-traf­fick­ing work of Tim Bal­lard. The film made $251m (which would have been around $135m in 2000) and was screened by Pres­i­dent Trump him­self. Its real-life hero even con­sid­ered a run for sen­ate, before a fed­er­al law­suit for alleged human traf­fick­ing and alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct some­what took the wind out of his sails. The suc­cess of such films, though, show Sci­en­tol­o­gists might not have to skew their ide­olo­gies with Dutch angles if they ever decid­ed to take anoth­er crack at it.

In press for the film, Tra­vol­ta claimed he had grown too old – or as he put it, fat” – to play the pro­tag­o­nist, John­ny Good­boy Tyler, and instead played the vil­lain­ous alien Terl. Rath­bun claimed Mis­cav­ige hat­ed the star after it tanked, but Bat­tle­field Earth also helped put an end to Travolta’s post-Pulp Fic­tion resur­gence. Not that the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy cared; they were already busy with a new, younger hero: Tom Cruise.

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