You know, after thirty years of reading science fiction and about fifteen years writing about it, I thought I’d seen every possible way the genre could fail. Then I started watching sci-fi movies, and oh boy, did I learn there were whole new categories of spectacular failure I hadn’t even considered.
There’s this weird masochistic streak in me – probably comes from spending decades reading everything from brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin novels to the most derivative space opera dreck – that makes me seek out science fiction films that are so catastrophically bad they become their own form of entertainment. I’m talking about movies that make you question not just the filmmakers’ judgment, but your own life choices for sitting through them.
Last month, my colleague Janet asked me why anyone would voluntarily watch terrible movies. Fair question. I mean, I’ve got a stack of unread Jo Walton novels on my desk and a Philip K. Dick collection I keep meaning to revisit, so why am I spending my Friday nights torturing myself with cinematic disasters?
The thing is, there’s something oddly fascinating about watching creative ambition collide head-first with complete incompetence. It’s like literary criticism in reverse – instead of analyzing why something works brilliantly, you’re trying to figure out how something went so spectacularly wrong. These movies exist in this strange space between unwatchable garbage and accidental comedy, and honestly, sometimes I can’t look away.
But here’s what I’ve learned: not all terrible sci-fi movies achieve that magical “so bad it’s good” status that makes them worth your time. Most of them are just… bad. Painfully, boringly bad. Let me walk you through five films that I thought might be entertainingly awful but turned out to be mostly just awful.
First up: “Battlefield Earth.” Jesus, what a mess. I remember reading the Hubbard novel back in college – it wasn’t great literature, but it was readable pulp adventure. The movie though? It’s like someone took that book and ran it through a blender with a film school dropout’s fever dreams.
John Travolta plays this alien called Terl, and he looks like he’s wearing a bad Halloween wig from a discount store. The dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who’d heard of human conversation but never actually witnessed it. And don’t get me started on the camera work – they use this tilted angle shot so much I got dizzy just sitting in the theater.
I saw this at a midnight showing in 2001 with my friend Dave from the English department. We thought we were in for a fun bad movie experience, you know? Like “Plan 9 from Outer Space” or something charmingly inept. Instead, we got two hours of what felt like being trapped in someone else’s very expensive midlife crisis. Dave actually left halfway through, and I should have followed him.
Then there’s “The Happening,” which might be M. Night Shyamalan’s most baffling film, and that’s saying something. The premise – plants releasing toxins that make people kill themselves – could work in a short story, maybe something out of a good horror anthology. But stretched to feature length with Mark Wahlberg talking to houseplants? Come on.
I took my daughter to see this when she was home from college. Big mistake. There’s this scene where Wahlberg actually says, with complete sincerity, “Can you believe it? We’re running from the wind!” My daughter looked at me like I’d personally offended her by choosing this movie. We still joke about it, but not in a fond way.
“Plan 9 from Outer Space” has this reputation as the ultimate so-bad-it’s-good movie, and I get why people love Ed Wood’s earnest incompetence. There’s something almost sweet about how hard he tried with absolutely no budget and even less skill. But honestly? Sitting through the whole thing is more of an endurance test than entertainment.
I caught a revival screening at the Grand Illusion a few years back – you know, one of those midnight cult movie things with people in costume shouting at the screen. The audience enthusiasm was infectious, I’ll give it that, but the movie itself is still just… not good. Even ironically. Sometimes a disaster is just a disaster, no matter how much cultural significance we pile on top of it.
“Jupiter Ascending” frustrated me more than most because the Wachowskis clearly had ideas – big, weird, ambitious ideas about space royalty and genetic engineering and cosmic politics. But they buried all those potentially interesting concepts under the most convoluted plot imaginable and dialogue that would make a soap opera writer cringe.
Mila Kunis discovers she’s space royalty, Channing Tatum roller-skates through the air like he’s in some cosmic disco, and somehow this all makes less sense than it sounds. I saw this opening weekend because I loved “The Matrix” and thought, you know, maybe they’d recapture some of that lightning. Instead, I got two hours of expensive-looking nonsense that couldn’t decide if it was a romance, an action movie, or a philosophical treatise on class warfare.
And “Zardoz.” Oh, “Zardoz.” Sean Connery in what can only be described as a red diaper, a giant floating head that spouts guns and philosophy, and a plot that feels like someone adapted their undergraduate thesis on post-apocalyptic social structures. I watched this at a sci-fi convention panel about “weird movies of the ’70s,” and even in a room full of people primed to appreciate cinematic strangeness, the discomfort was palpable.
The problem with all these movies is they fall into this dead zone where they’re too bad to enjoy straight but not quite bad enough to be genuinely funny. They’re just… exhausting. Like reading a really terrible self-published novel that takes itself too seriously to mock properly.
You know what makes a good bad movie? Something like “They Live” or “Flash Gordon” – films that embrace their own absurdity without winking at the audience. There’s a sincerity there, even when everything’s ridiculous. These disasters I’ve been talking about? They’re either too cynical or too confused to achieve that kind of honest silliness.
I think my fascination with these cinematic train wrecks comes from the same place as my love for analyzing literature – I want to understand how stories work, and sometimes the best way to do that is by examining how they fall apart. When I’m reading a terrible sci-fi novel, I can usually pinpoint where the author lost control of their plot or characters. With movies, the failure modes are more complex because you’ve got more people involved in the creative process.
Plus, there’s something democratizing about shared suffering. Sitting in a theater full of people all realizing they’ve made the same poor life choice creates this weird community. We’re all in this together, witnesses to the same beautiful disaster.
But honestly, after watching enough of these movies, I’ve come to appreciate how difficult it is to make even a competent film, let alone a good one. Reading bad science fiction is one thing – at least that’s just one person failing to tell a coherent story. Movies require dozens of people to all fail simultaneously, which is actually kind of impressive in its own way.
That said, I can’t really recommend seeking out terrible movies unless you’re the sort of person who enjoys watching things fall apart in slow motion. Life’s too short, and there are too many genuinely great sci-fi films out there. If you want to watch something that uses the genre to explore interesting ideas about humanity and technology and the future, go watch “Her” or “Arrival” or hell, just rewatch “Blade Runner” for the fiftieth time.
These magnificent disasters serve a purpose, I guess – they remind us that for every “2001: A Space Odyssey,” there’s a “Battlefield Earth” lurking in the bargain bin. They’re cautionary tales about what happens when ambition far exceeds ability, or when commercial considerations override artistic vision, or when nobody in the room is willing to say “maybe this isn’t working.”
And if you absolutely must watch one of these beautiful train wrecks, do it with friends who share your appreciation for cinematic absurdity. Make it a social event. You’ll need all the moral support you can get.
Kathleen’s a lifelong reader who believes science fiction is literature, full stop. From her book-filled home in Seattle, she writes about thoughtful, character-driven sci-fi that challenges ideas and lingers long after the last page. She’s a champion for under-read authors and timeless storytelling.