this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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Unpopular Opinion

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I saw the movie in high school, when it came out on VHS, and I loved it. I bought the book, and couldn't put it down. It was perhaps my favorite piece of sci-fi for a while. I thought John Travolta was delightfully hammy, and that the movie was extremely quotable and fun.

A coworker of mine were just talking about musicals this morning, and my strong dislike of Hamilton. For some reason, it popped into my head that I would love a musical of Battlefield Earth, and John Travolta should sing in it. This sentiment was not shared by my coworker. So, yeah, that's it.

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[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 1 points 3 weeks ago

The movie was a travesty of the book, and didn't even finish the story. As a teen I enjoyed the book and so many of the ideas in it, and only as an adult reading others' takes on it saw that it wasn't the greatest writing. After reading it I dove into his Mission Earth, but barely finished the first one and did not want to continue for nine(!) more of the same. So there probably is some validity of the writing quality opinions.

I can't say why Battlefield Earth worked for me - maybe because I took the concepts and my imagination filled in where the words failed. And yes, I get that the damsel in distress and women characters in general were terrible, but that could be reworked in a movie to be better characters while in the same scenarios.

I think I was most attracted to the hard science parts, like the hidden circuitry as a copyproof method of their tech, or the ships that flew by space displacement and keyboards (Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict used/borrowed this idea). And the second part of the book where Earth is the underdog trying to climb back from destruction to become a leader in the galaxy was a favorite of mine too, even if cliche.

So I don't want a musical - I want if anything a proper movie that both tells the full story in the novel while fixing a lot of the problems of Hubbard's writing style.