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Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

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

#121

Post by abolibibelot »

lmm wrote: post #120
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?

Old Man's War is an ironical counterpoint to Starship Troopers (something that becomes more blatant in the later novels). It's a bit like Hadelman's Forever War mixed with slapstick. It's no masterpiece, but the humor makes it a great read.

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

#122

Post by fab13n »

fit2rule wrote: post #107

When I saw it, the thing that shocked me the most was that the people around me just didn't get it. I came out of the theatre (Manns Chinese in Hollywood) dumb-founded at the snippets of conversation I heard that revealed that, honestly, kids just didn't get that the target of the satire was them . I wasn't prepared for the enlightenment that this movie gave me. I came to realize that we were living in the exact worl…

Young homo sapiens males have a natural instinct for war, which can be expressed or not depending on circumstances. Going to war is the historical high risk + high reward option: you might be killed, but if you survive, you have a good shot at becoming richer, more powerful, and having offspring (both by becoming a desirable husband/son-in-law, and through the pervasive rapes in which victors indulged after a won battle). Founding a startup is a modern incarnation of that instinct, appealing mostly to the same young males demographic, albeit skewed toward those with very favored socio-economical backgrounds.

So, the less hope people have to thrive the "regular" safe way, e.g. because of durable economical crisis and loss of upward social mobility, the more likely they are to respond well to jingoism.

As a side-note, polygyny and jingoism are strongly correlated. Indeed for each man with several spouses, there are unwilling bachelors. They're willing to take the high-risk road and fight battles to become patriarchs; as a bonus, war casualties increase the female/male ratio.

I recommend reading The Red Queen if you're interested by all aspects of mating strategies and risk acceptance, not limited to human beings nor even whole organisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evol...).

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

#123

Post by astrobe_ »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #54

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…

As long as you don't evaluate the satirical message by the qualities of the film, that's ok.

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

#124

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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 movie was just stereotype and mockery. //

Aren't they the essential features for a parody. You enlarge the characteristics of your subject to demonstrate their absurdity - in short you build a stereotype and mock it. That's parody, no?

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

#125

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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.

I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes back as a robot. Awesome.

I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.

If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.

The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.

Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals means, for you, that Orwell failed?

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

#126

Post by maxerickson »

enraged_camel wrote: post #11
richforrester wrote: post #4

After reading this, watch Robocop again. Same director, same critique on society. Really adds another layer to it.

My memories are hazy, but Robocop felt very different. It did not criticize the establishment (i.e. the police) very much. In fact, the main character was a cop who got fatally wounded by "the bad guys" and then was resurrected as a badass robot and delivered sweet payback. Most of the satirical elements in Robocop were directed at corporations.

The police officers portrayed in the movie are not part of the establishment that exists in the movie.

Especially the several officers at the precinct. They are shown fighting the good fight, fighting for the people, in the face of the impossible conditions coming down from above.

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

#127

Post by lmm »

abolibibelot wrote: post #121
lmm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Old Man's War is an ironical counterpoint to Starship Troopers (something that becomes more blatant in the later novels). It's a bit like Hadelman's Forever War mixed with slapstick. It's no masterpiece, but the humor makes it a great read.

I mean, I read it all the way through, but yeah, there didn't seem to be anything that wasn't in The Forever War. Did it really top the Locus poll just because of slapstick humour? shakes head

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

#128

Post by caycep »

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…

If they failed to see that, the Nazi uniforms should have been a dead giveaway. Plus Neil Patrick Harris in a Darth Vader suit...

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

#129

Post by hindsightbias »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #87
hindsightbias wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a country that took the original Red Dawn as a serious drama. Nicaraguans invading the Rockies. There's nothing too ridiculous a good portion won't buy.

Red Dawn was a serious drama. It was also pretty ridiculous. Stuff isn't always black-and-white. Seriously, there's plenty of reasons not to like Red Dawn, but I get tired of people talking like it's just a bunch of rah-rah America-wins jingoism. You may have forgotten that the movie ends with most of the protagonists dead and no end to the war in sight.

Uh, there was a lot of rah-rah and jingoism. You must be exhausted of someone else saying it had a happy ending.

"I was there, serving at the time as senior vice president for production in the administration of Frank Yablans, then-CEO of the company, when Yablans declared in no uncertain terms that he wanted to make the ultimate jingoistic movie and that Al Haig would take him there. “It will be a sure-fire international blockbuster,” Yablans enthused. ... Even Milius, a stoic, good-natured individual who is more about bluster than action, became alarmed. Wandering into my office one day, he confided his concern that he was being railroaded into what he described as “a flag-waving, jingoistic movie.” Milius said his intent was to make a movie about the “futility of war,” adding, “I have a nervous feeling that Yablans and Haig are jabbering away on their hot line about a different movie.”"

http://variety.com/1997/voices/columns/red-dawn-shooting-it-...

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

#130

Post by jfoutz »

jholman wrote: post #94
jfoutz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The novel is really short. It's good, I enjoy Heinlein's writing anyway. He lays out an interesting model for democracy, but it depends critically on permanent war. It has been a long time since i read the book, but i think the author gives it a fair shake. Nothing really screams unfair representation to me.

> He lays out an interesting model for democracy, but it depends critically on permanent war. That's not true in the fiction, and I can't understand how you would claim that it would "really work that way" or any other claim. In the book, this model of government has existed for a long time, and there has been no war for a long time. So, Heinlein claims that it works without war. But, you know, maybe he's full of shi…

That's a pretty interesting point. I don't remember the book well enough to recall astronauts or firefighters getting the vote. I must have projected some later thought on my reading.

In that light, it seems a lot more like the Fifth American Republic (i think that's what they were called) in the Diamond Age. People would be required to show up at a certain place and time and perform some activity. For example, walk in a room, pour poison into a cup, leave the room. Five minutes later, walk back in the room, drink the liquid in the cup. Someone else has the job of emptying the poison and replacing it with water. They never get to see each other, but they build immense trust in their fellow citizens.

In any case, thanks, I thought mechanized infantry veterans who had actually seen combat were the only voters in the Starship Troopers system.

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