What are the odds? Terl offhandedly states earlier somewhere that all Man Animals look alike, yet he is able to use a deerskin sketch of a woman to track her down.

The Hubbard novel is pretty bad, especially in its second half (not covered in the movie), but it does get several things right that the movie gets wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s puzzling how Travolta’s movie remained faithfully to a lot of stupid little details–the crap-lousy crappy use of “crap” all the time, the obsession with “leverage”, silly terms like “man-animal” and “rat-brain” and “kerbango”–but screws the larger story up. To name one important thing: the Psycho garrison in the book does not keep a slave population of humans and, in fact, most of them have never seen a human or know the smallest thing about them. When Terl captures Jonnie and tries to train him, the other Psychlos basically think he’s indulging an odd whim to play with a novel sort of pet. Terl knows scarcely more about humans than they do and has to improvise a lot. But the movie decides rather to go for The Ten Commandments cliches while keeping aspects of the story that only make sense if the Psychlos are genuinely ignorant even of what humans look like. Instead we have Terl knowing about mankind’s “advanced technology” while at the same time he acts like “man-animals” are too stupid to breathe without help.

I’ve heard that an earlier cut of the movie had more Travolta in it. I’d love to see that. Terl’s combination of boundless self-conceit and bottomless stupidity, played by a second-rate actor who seems to think he’s Hans Gruber matching wits with John McClane when he actually sounds like Norma Desmond playing queen bitch to Joe Gillis. The Great Ruler from Plan 9 conveyed more authority than the whiny Terl.

Also, radiation doesn’t turn Psychlo air into poison; it causes Psychlo air to explode (!!!) This has the side effect of making you wonder why Planet Psychlo (and its unnamed moon) didn’t blow up billions of years ago, what with all the radiation its SUN is hitting it with.