The Only Sci-Fi Movie Roger Ebert Called A Waste of Money
Roger Ebert didn't hate science fiction. But he had zero patience for sci-fi done stupid—and this 80s movie pushed him over the edge.
On paper, 1980's Saturn 3 should've worked. You had Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel, and Farrah Fawcett stuck on a remote space station, being terrorized by a malfunctioning robot and a creepy scientist. Sci-fi thriller, right? Except it wasn't thrilling. It was dumb. Like, impressively dumb.
Ebert gave it one star, and used the opportunity to go full scorched-earth. "Why is it that filmed science fiction almost always seems required to be dumb, dumb, dumb?" he asked. Saturn 3 didn't give him an answer—it just doubled down.
He called the screenplay "shockingly low" in intelligence, claiming the story "would be laughed out of any junior high school class in the country." The most baffling part to him? That this thing got made at all. "Yet the movie was financed. Why? Why do they feel compelled to support the lowest common denominator of filmmaking?"
The movie cost $10 million—not enormous for 1980, but still enough to sting. And Ebert made it clear: it wasn't just bad. It was bad in every possible way.
"This movie is awesomely stupid, totally implausible from a scientific viewpoint, and a shameful waste of money."
By the time the credits rolled and Ebert saw producers Lew Grade and Elliott Kastner listed, he wasn't done. His suggestion? They should've just handed their money out randomly to other filmmakers—"the results couldn't be worse."
This wasn't just a bad sci-fi movie. This was the moment Ebert looked into the cosmic void and asked: who keeps greenlighting this crap?
And honestly, fair question.