71–80 of 140 posts
are Americans that daft? seriously, how can one not see this movie for what it is? feels like a giant whoosh.
There's nothing too ridiculous a good portion won't buy.
I'd like to like Starship Troopers more but I can't. Starship Troopers had a couple smart things to say but said it through a shit movie. Turgid dialog, horrible acting, repugnant characters and general cheesiness. I know the writers wanted to say all these people are idiots but society doesn't go astray because everyone is an idiot – you have to show how smart characters are caught in situations that constrain them…
> My standard rule is that to properly satirise or ridicule something, a story must simultaneously be a good example of target being parodied as well as having a strong parody element. The obvious counterexample that leaps to mind is Catch-22, which isn't a good war novel at all but is a brilliant antiwar satire.
Consider Voltaire's Candide. Taken at face value, its genre is somewhere between "young man's growth story" and "colony-era adventure novel". Is it a good example of high-quality writing in those genres? Certainly not.
I'm surprised the author never even mentions the book by Robert Heinlein. Granted the movie tells a different story than the book but they share the similarity in that on the surface they both preach of the virtues and nobility of war but upon closer inspection, we see that they're telling a different story entirely.
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb. One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of cou…
My suspicion is that Verhoeven -- like Alex Troyas with I, Robot -- knew full well that their movies had very little to do with the source material and put on a game face in interviews. I've always wondered if the movie might not have done better in its initial run without the studio forcing that connection onto it. A film can't really be both a military dystopia satire and a good adaptation of Starship Troopers, any more than a brutal deconstruction of Objectivism would make a good adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>The movie does criticize the establishment, it just stops short of criticizing the actual street cops. That is what I meant. Contrast that to Starship Troopers, where the military (the organization the main characters are a part of) is spared no criticism.
The central characters in Robocop were treated empathetically, the scathing social satire and black comedy were not central to the main storyline of heroes and villians, so there was still an engaging film even for those viewers lacking the social awareness needed to appreciate irony. In Starship Troopers, every character was disposable, hence the gigantic 'whoosh'. I recommend 'Hollow Man', Verhoeven's last, and lar…
For me, the best thing about "Battleship" is how the director convinced the US military to donate the use of all that hardware to a movie with such an anti-military message. The DoD doesn't do that sort of thing lightly, they require script approval and have a strict policy that they won't help with a movie that is at all critical. Slipping that right under their noses like that was a real coup.
I'm surprised the author never even mentions the book by Robert Heinlein. Granted the movie tells a different story than the book but they share the similarity in that on the surface they both preach of the virtues and nobility of war but upon closer inspection, we see that they're telling a different story entirely.
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb. One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of cou…
Everyone assumes he does, but he denies it. For example, on his blog:
http://joe-haldeman.livejournal.com/51726.html?thread=31758#...
"Hey, you're writing an answer to Starship Troopers." I told him don't be silly -- of course the soldiers have powered suits, working in a vacuum, in space. What, they should fight in long underwear?
There is more there about his views on Starship Troopers, among other things.
I don't get why people wouldn't see it. At the beginning it has a speech about the failure of democracy, how violence is the only legitimate force in the universe. Government by an elite, with restricted rights for civilians (want children? become a citizen), a propaganda network, a perpetual state of war; including belittling the enemy ("I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive") and belittling anyone who want…
Okay, so a movie about all-out war for survival against genocidal aliens is supposed to be a good setting for an anti -war story? No wonder so many missed the satire.
No-one else has noted that Paul Verhoeven was a young boy in Nazi occupied Holland. There's no way he didn't know what he was conveying...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starship Troopers has the heroes wearing Nazi uniforms, and it has a scene from in-fiction television, "teaching" children that killing terrestrial insects is what they should do to assist with the war on the bugs. I don't remember much of Robocop, but how much more satirical can you get than that?
Here is an in-movie ad for a product that exists in the Robocop universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSSVt7Mfkk
I'd say it's a tossup.
I'd like to like Starship Troopers more but I can't. Starship Troopers had a couple smart things to say but said it through a shit movie. Turgid dialog, horrible acting, repugnant characters and general cheesiness. I know the writers wanted to say all these people are idiots but society doesn't go astray because everyone is an idiot – you have to show how smart characters are caught in situations that constrain them…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb. One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of cou…
> For some contrast: IIRC, Haldeman wrote The Forever War in part as a direct reply to Starship Troopers. Everyone assumes he does, but he denies it. For example, on his blog: http://joe-haldeman.livejournal.com/51726.html?thread=31758#... "Hey, you're writing an answer to Starship Troopers." I told him don't be silly -- of course the soldiers have powered suits, working in a vacuum, in space. What, they should fight…