131–140 of 140 posts
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…
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…
I don't think people got it, simply because it hit far too close to home. The message in the film and the message in the media at the time were too closely aligned. "Would you like to know more?" was Fox News. The movie presaged an age where knowing more actually meant: "knowing only what we want you to know" ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_rzQtNGaZU&feature=player_d...
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 they say, can't see a forest for the trees :)
Relax, man, you don't like it, obviously. Tastes are different. Galaxy Quest is a nice funny movie, Starship Troopers is a brilliant masterpiece. Kandinsky's black square is just a square a child can paint (i think i drew a lot of black squares among everything else while dreaming at classes in school).
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.
Except that the "we" that see that in the case of the book excludes many of its critics (and, notably, the creators of the movie), and that, in the case of the movie, it doesn't actually take "closer inspection" to see that, since it pretty much hits you over the head with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about that. Heinlein seems pretty keen on his notion of citizenship through military service, albeit perhaps as a means of preventing "unnecessary" wars rather than enabling them. Either way, it's a pretty terrible political philosophy. That aspect of serious advocacy is completely absent from the movie.
The problem with Heinlein's corpus is there are so many characters who can be read as author avatars representing his views that it's hard to tell if any of them should be read that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is an in-movie ad for a product that exists in the Robocop universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmSSVt7Mfkk
That's not much of a satire, given that the Nuclear War card game has been around since 1965. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_(card_game)
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.
I don't know about that. Heinlein seems pretty keen on his notion of citizenship through military service, albeit perhaps as a means of preventing "unnecessary" wars rather than enabling them. Either way, it's a pretty terrible political philosophy. That aspect of serious advocacy is completely absent from the movie.
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 bat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bat…
I think these sorts of glib 'truisms' are used to justify an awful lot of bad behaviour. Just ask the feminists if they think its an acceptable justification for young male misogyny .. its not going to help anyone if we justify continued transgression against our species with "natural law requires this 'natural' behaviour".
Those who suffer from mental confusion between how things are and how they ought to be, tend at best to be ineffective, and often to discredit the cause they wish to defend. As you hinted, some variants of feminism are confronted with such issues.
Another kind of confusion to avoid is between "natural" and "legitimate". "Natural" means "spontaneous", it's almost the exact opposite of "civilized". Describing something as natural is certainly not justifying it. Some forms of populisms abuse the natural/legitimate confusion to manipulate masses, but that's no reasoning, let alone sound reasoning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the point that it's satirizing its own source material?
In the broad sense, it is satirizing a sort of militaristic/jingoistic mentality. Specifically it does this by satirizing one particular manifestation of this mentality, its source material.
It satirizes a strawman of the source material since it cuts out or alters almost every part of the book that does not support the movie's satirical objective.
I think that is what pissed a lot of people off who read the book.
If they wanted to satirize jingoistic mentality they could have done it without butchering the book by starting with a new IP (but then they couldn't have taken advantage of the "Starship Trooper" title.)