Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 140 posts

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#111

Post by gojomo »

beloch wrote: post #88

Odds are that, if you read the book first, you'll probably hate the movie. They really are totally different. Personally, I don't believe fidelity to the source is necessary for an adaptation to be successful. Plenty of films have been made that are slaves to the source and are terrible as a result! Great films are often made from bad books, so why can't great films just be different from the great books they're base…

Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly.

I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought.

But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both respect and criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting, and necessary.

Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#112

Post by wobbleblob »

beloch wrote: post #88

Odds are that, if you read the book first, you'll probably hate the movie. They really are totally different. Personally, I don't believe fidelity to the source is necessary for an adaptation to be successful. Plenty of films have been made that are slaves to the source and are terrible as a result! Great films are often made from bad books, so why can't great films just be different from the great books they're base…

Verhoeven has a history of making completely ridiculous, tasteless movies, with poor scripts, atrocious acting and over the top special effects.

I don't blame people for missing the parody in Starship Troopers, because Verhoeven has consistently made such movies in absolute sincerity throughout his career. I suspect all the praise for Starship Troopers belongs with the writer of the screenplay, and that Verhoeven never had the remotest clue that he was making anything more than another dumb action movie.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#113

Post by lmm »

Science fiction has always had a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with fascism; I'm reminded of the response to Spinrad's "The Iron Dream", where he was trying to point out the fascism inherent in a lot of sci-fi stories:

To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point... And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. "This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it," the gist of it went. "Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?"

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#114

Post by wobbleblob »

gojomo wrote: post #111
beloch wrote: post #88

Odds are that, if you read the book first, you'll probably hate the movie. They really are totally different. Personally, I don't believe fidelity to the source is necessary for an adaptation to be successful. Plenty of films have been made that are slaves to the source and are terrible as a result! Great films are often made from bad books, so why can't great films just be different from the great books they're base…

Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought. But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers o…

Verhoeven said in an interview that he never read the source material, only the screenplay. (sorry, no source online)

Fair enough - he was making a movie, not a book report for Heinlein fans.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#115

Post by rombdn »

rahoulb wrote: post #62

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…

> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty accurate as well.

One scene I liked is when the only person in the film questioning the state, a TV reporter, is saying something like 'maybe this war wouldn't have started if we didn't attack them first, so maybe should we leave them in peace' and is promptly interrupted by zealous marines

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#116

Post by lucian1900 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #101
justin66 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As satire the brilliant part about that, and a few of the other really shocking things like the drill sergeant beating up a new recruit to establish himself as head of the pack, or the whipping, is that it's lifted fairly directly from the book. A subset of the fans of the book get mad because the violence and fascism seemed so much cooler in their heads. Other fans recognize that Heinlein's books were to some degree…

The problem I had with the movie is that it took a well thought out book and reduced it to hollywood stereotype. For example, later on in the book and the movie, a recruit asks why they learn to throw knives when guns make them obsolete. In the book, the sergeant gives an explanation of tradition and admits that knife throwing is a fairly useless skill for mobile gundam suit pilots. In the movie, the sergeant just th…

The book showed its fascist world in a somewhat flattering light, or at least explaining it as necessary. The film rightly mocked that attitude by showing just how close the US already is.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#117

Post by lucian1900 »

rurounijones wrote: post #50
mynameishere wrote: post #40

So, you take a famous sci-fi novel, completely change it, then use it's good name to make money and push your own politics. What exactly is misunderstood? You love money, you have a particular agenda, and you fuck over something else to achieve your personal goals. Other people are upset about this. Again: What is misunderstood?

Quite, if you wanted to make a satire then start with a blank slate. Do not take a known work (of which the audience will have their pre-conceptions if they read it) then eviscerate it for your own satirical needs then act surprised when said audience gets pissed off for the butchery.

I thought your comment was satire. I'm still not sure.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#118

Post by gojomo »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #82

Communication is the writer's job, not the reader's. If a creator sets out to convey a message and 99% of the audience does not receive the message, it's not the audience that has failed.

What if the creator just wants to reach a particular 1%... and maybe some of the other 99%, when they're a bit older and wiser?

Neither creator nor audience has 'failed'... they just aren't yet right for each other.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#119

Post by gojomo »

wobbleblob wrote: post #114
gojomo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought. But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers o…

Verhoeven said in an interview that he never read the source material, only the screenplay. (sorry, no source online) Fair enough - he was making a movie, not a book report for Heinlein fans.

Verhoeven may have said that. Whether it's true is another matter; he could have been trolling the book's fans.

For a project that supposedly started as another entirely unrelated movie, by a director who hadn't read the book, it managed to fit in a lot of the book's particular rhetoric and plot points.

Re: Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

#120

Post by lmm »

abolibibelot wrote: post #57

I love Verhoeven and the long running joke he played at the expense of Hollywood (mostly with Starship Troopers, Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls - Flesh + Blood is great but not as sarcastic as his later american movies). Starship Trooper, the novel, is hilarious on its own, with its hawkishness and interesting political views (it's less creepy than Ender's Game in that aspect though). But Heinlein is a much be…

I've never understood the praise for Old Man's War; I read it, and it felt like a Heinlein tribute act, with no creativity or originality, and saying nothing that Heinlein and his contemporaries hadn't already said. Did I miss the point?
Post reply on HN