Be an evil scriptwriter and $#!T on a beloved classic

Cafe Society
121

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Shortly after Wells’ “War of the Worlds” came out, someone wrote a “sequel” entitled Edison’s Conquest of Mars that pretty much matches your description, except it was the Americans, rather than the British, using the super-scientific inventions of Thomas Edison to subdue the Martians.
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Have you read volume 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlmen?

[spoiler]John Carter and Robinson Crusoe lead a revolt of the native races on Mars against the despicable tripod-driving blobs from War of the Worlds. Too late, they find out the blobs were just buying time so they could leave Mars, launching a massive invasion of Earth.

The League is called into action when the first of the Martians arrives on British soil. The Invisible Man sells them out almost immediately, revealing the British troop movements to the Martians, who then become nigh unstoppable.

Meanwhile, as Captain Nemo hold the Martians in London by blockading the Thames with the Nautilus, Mina Harker and Alan Qaurtermain hook up with Dr. Moreau, who provides them with a very special hybrid creature that will help them save the day…

… a hybrid disease made by combining Anthrax with Streptococcus. The Brits load the dangerous organisms into their artillery, shell the tripods from a safe distance, and sit back to watch them collapse as the sun sets.[/spoiler]
I’m not making this up, either!

122

[QUOTE=psiekier]
Have you read volume 2 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlmen?

[spoiler]John Carter and Robinson Crusoe lead a revolt of the native races on Mars against the despicable tripod-driving blobs from War of the Worlds. Too late, they find out the blobs were just buying time so they could leave Mars, launching a massive invasion of Earth.

The League is called into action when the first of the Martians arrives on British soil. The Invisible Man sells them out almost immediately, revealing the British troop movements to the Martians, who then become nigh unstoppable.

Meanwhile, as Captain Nemo hold the Martians in London by blockading the Thames with the Nautilus, Mina Harker and Alan Qaurtermain hook up with Dr. Moreau, who provides them with a very special hybrid creature that will help them save the day…

… a hybrid disease made by combining Anthrax with Streptococcus. The Brits load the dangerous organisms into their artillery, shell the tripods from a safe distance, and sit back to watch them collapse as the sun sets.[/spoiler]
I’m not making this up, either!
[/QUOTE]

It wasn’t Crusoe, but another Mars Novel series, now all but forgotten.
BTW–have you read War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches?

Martians! Percival Lowell may have been responsible for bringing them to Earth; Teddy Roosevelt evidently bagged one in Cuba; H.P. Lovecraft may have been one; and both Albert Einstein and Emily Dickinson seem to have played a role in defeating them. In this collection of stories that complement H.G. Wells’s classic novel, these and other speculations are entertained by such well-known SF writers as Mike Resnick, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Silverberg, Connie Willis, Barbara Hambly, Gregory Benford and David Brin. One entry, Howard Waldrop’s “Night of the Cooters,” which concerns Martians and Texas Rangers, is a reprint. The 18 originals center on the reactions of various historical personages to the advent of Wells’s invaders, including Picasso, Henry James, Winston Churchill, H. Rider Haggard, China’s Dowager Empress, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leo Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad. Anderson (Climbing Olympus, 1994) has brought together some solid stories here.

123

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
Not to turn this into a GD, but Heinlein’s book was a SF homage to the ideal of the citizen-solider. The movie was …something else.
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This may come as a surprise- and I am completely serious when I say that- but Starship Troopers the movie was an intentional parody of not only the book but also American and Nazi films gloryfying WWII. It was directed by Paul Verhoven, a german, the same man who directed Robocop, and those fantastic satirical commercials are his trademark. When I saw Starship Troopers for the first time, I laughed the whole way through.

I think for an existing travesty, it’s hard to beat Eddie Murphy’s Dr. Dolittle, which has so little to do with the wonderful children’s stories, that I don’t know where to begin, or see a point in trying to. Even that, though, pales in the face of what’s been done- and is being done- with some video game properites.

As for my own travesty… I’d ‘like’ to make a version of To Kill A Mocking Bird set in modern times. We’d hack the title down to something less cryptic and more edgy- just The Mocking Bird. Now the accused, Tom Robinson (Denzel Washington), is defended by the incompetent and unstable southern apologist Atticus Finch (Sam Neil). Tom bravely ignores Atticus’s advice to plea bargain and claims his own innocense, struggling to find evidence to clear his name with the help of Atticus’s sexually precocious daughter Scout (Dakota Fanning). Eventually dismissing Atticus and acting as his own lawyer, Tom succesfully defends himself in court by making a passionate speech about Mocking Birds, and then repays Scout for her friendship at the end by saving her from her reclusive neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Norton) who turns out to have been responsible for the origial rape.

124

[QUOTE=Strain of Thought]
This may come as a surprise- and I am completely serious when I say that- but Starship Troopers the movie was an intentional parody of not only the book but also American and Nazi films gloryfying WWII.
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I’ve heard this many times before and I’m not buying it. Verhoven used nonexistent characterization, moronic pacing, and annoying CGI, none of which can be said to help the cause of an intentional parody. His work on Robocop isn’t entirely germane: Lucas directed both the original Star Wars trilogy and the moronic prequel trilogy, forgetting how to make an engaging movie in the interim.

125

[QUOTE=Strain of Thought]
This may come as a surprise- and I am completely serious when I say that- but Starship Troopers the movie was an intentional parody of not only the book but also American and Nazi films gloryfying WWII.
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I’m not disputing that; it’s just that according to

which seems to me like he was saying that the movie was an accurate (if scornful) depiction of the book.

126

[QUOTE=Lumpy]
…which seems to me like he was saying that the movie was an accurate (if scornful) depiction of the book.
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Oh ha ha I’ll totally agree with you on that- there isn’t a faithful shot in the movie.

I’m a big SF lover and I’ve read a lot of Heinlein’s work just to try and understand his influence on the genre, despite the fact that I find most of his work detestable. I hated Starship Troopers (The Book) so much, I read it three times. It infuriated me that I knew instinctively how full of BS it was, but couldn’t immediately find the linchpin to pull out of Heinlein’s arguments in favor of his absurd society. I think the reason I enjoyed the movie so much was its relentless criticism of Heinlein’s essential idea, even if those criticisms weren’t always relevant to what heinlein had specifically argued in favor of.

Previously, most of the criticism of the movie I’d encountered was of the form “Godawful, and nothing like the book.”, and I hadn’t bothered entering a discussion about it before now, so I apologize for assuming that others simply weren’t aware of the possibility of parody. But I can’t fathom why so many people have insisted that it wasn’t intended as one.

127

This may come as a surprise, but Verhoeven has stated that he tried to read the book, but couldn’t get past the first few pages.
I’ve considered the idea of parody, but I don’t buy it. Verhoeven and, arguabl;y more importantly, Ed Neumeier, the screenwriter don’t seem to have any interest in Heinlein’s book or philosophy at all, not even to refute it. (You want to see a dispute over the ideas, using essentially the same technology? Read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War).

128

[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
It wasn’t Crusoe, but another Mars Novel series, now all but forgotten.
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D’oh! You’re right, it was Edwin Lester Arnold’s Gullivar of Mars.

129

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
This may come as a surprise, but Verhoeven has stated that he tried to read the book, but couldn’t get past the first few pages.
I’ve considered the idea of parody, but I don’t buy it. Verhoeven and, arguabl;y more importantly, Ed Neumeier, the screenwriter don’t seem to have any interest in Heinlein’s book or philosophy at all, not even to refute it. (You want to see a dispute over the ideas, using essentially the same technology? Read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War).
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What comes as a surprise, actually, is that I believe you- about him not reading the book, that is.

I’ve been going through old SDMB threads on this subject, and I’m fascinated at how much poster’s arguments over the merits of Starship Troopers (movie) revolve around Verhoeven’s merits as a director. I saw the movie on DVD, years after it came out, because my friends had repeatedly told me how much fun it was. I didn’t know who directed it when we sat down to watch it, and I was expecting another Armageddon-style Hollywood eye-sci-fi action flick. I started laughing very hard when I realized it was a political satire. I said something to the effect of, “This is just like Robocop!”, and my friend told me “Yeah, it’s by the same guy.”

So we watched the Director’s commentary, and got to listen to this guy who has just spent an hour ridiculing a fictional pseudo-american fascist ideology lecture with an unsettling german accent about how he’s been inspired by all these old war movies. So that’s where I got the war movies stuff- I haven’t watched many old war movies, and I enjoyed Starship Troopers (movie) purely as an excercise in abstract anti-fascism.

And no, the movie doesn’t follow the book at all, and it’s very clear that Verhoeven wasn’t trying to. It felt to me like a mean-spirited parody of a bunch of stupid ideas, and that’s exactly what I wanted. I don’t think Verhoeven needed to read the book to be able to properly make fun of it, or that he should have tried to address its arguments point by point, and while I think a little less of Verhoeven for not having the curiosity to read Starship Troopers (book), I don’t count it against the movie.

A cinematic point by point refutation of the ideas Heinlein presented in Starship Troopers (book) would have been boring and preachy, and more importantly those ideas don’t deserve that kind of high-profile refutation. In Heinlein’s Red Planet, when the young hero’s mother loses track of his alien pet, he tells his best friend, “That’s what comes of trusting a woman.” Should a parody of Red Planet waste the time to seriously refute a statement like that, or just portray the male chauvanistic lead as an ass and move on? The political ideas in Starship Troopers (book) are no less noxious, only much more complicated and boring to explain. They are best refuted not by parody but by another serious work, such as The Forever War sounds like, and thank you for mentioning it- it’s going on my reading list.

As for Verhoeven’s directorial capability- I haven’t even seen Total Recall. I checked his filmography and all I’ve seen by him is Robocop, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man. Hollow Man was terrible. Robocop was a classic, but Starship Troopers’ satire has got me thinking, and after reading certain things- for example, articles on the police brutality found in the film- I find it increasingly plausible that Verhoeven intended the entire film as a satire, not just the commercials and other obvious commentary, and that Robocop’s ability to work on multiple levels was an unforseen accident. But even if Verhoeven is so limited as an artist that all he can film well is angry genre satire of action films, arguing about his skills is a silly way to determine the merits of Starship Troopers (movie).

However, Starship Troopers (movie), in retrospect, definitely works only as satire and not on any other level. Even as a straight parody it’s mediocre, because it deviates so much from the original work. I didn’t know it wasn’t billed as satire, and I can understand now some people’s extremely negative reactions upon finding that it wasn’t the serious movie they were expecting. Titling a satire the same as a work it’s making fun of, and not making it clear beforehand that it is a satire is dishonest, plain and simple, whoever was responsible for it. But even after that, I still maintain that as political satire, Starship Troopers (movie) is a good film.