yes, the war was fabricated, the goverment needed a distraction and nothing like a good war with an enemy that’s not even remotely human and can’t get any sympathy.
The whole movie is satire on ultra-nationalistic patriotism and military jingoism. It’s not meant to make sense, just like “Dr Stangelove” is not meant to make sense. IMO, both are classics.
Well, I’m mostly with you. Of course the real world parallel is you propagandise your own people so as to ‘dehumanise’ the perceived enemy.
Heard after the final cut of Starship Troopers is played for studio executives:
*Producer 1 *(after seeing : Man this is complete crap. It’s going to wreck the studio.
Producer 2: We have to figure out a way to convince people it’s not a total waste of their time. Any ideas?
<long silence>
Intern: I know. Let’s call it satire.
Producer 1: Satire? That might just work.
Producer 2: Yes. Let’s call it satire!
Paul Verhoeven: What is satire?
The point is that calling ST satire indicates you don’t understand what satire is. It was not the intent of the writer, the director, or any of the actors. It’s just a retroactive rationalization of a terrible movie.
“Look! Silicone life forms!”
I think it was Broken Lizard’s best movie. I really liked the part where they said ‘meow’. Sure, Heinlein didn’t write it that way, but it’s a much better adaptation than Verhoeven’s version.
First review on IMDB.
Yeah, very subtle with the black trench coats and all.
That said, Hitler’s response to giant space bugs would have been to design a 16 mile long howitzer to blow them up, not to shoot at them with pistols. Granted, Hitler would have been eaten before the howitzer’s completion but it’d still be better military strategy than Starship Troopers ever showed.
The human military in general is just bugfuck (heh) retarded in that movie. No air support, no artillery, no orbital artillery for that matter, no tanks, just giant waves of might-as-well-be-naked infantry.
George Mallory clause :p.
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
The point is that calling ST satire indicates you don’t understand what satire is
[/QUOTE]
If you didn’t grok that it was satire upon first watching, I don’t know what to tell you.
There are movies where I believe this is true but Starship Troopers is not one of them. Look at Paul Verhoeven’s work in aggregate. Many (most?) of his movies use Satire.
I don’t know how you think Dr Strangelove doesn’t make sense. It makes perfect sense.
An (admittedly psychotic) general believes that the Soviets are subtly undermining our way of life, and launches a preemptive first strike with his bombers. He hopes that the President will follow with an all out strategic attack and eliminate the Soviet threat once and for all. Not only does it make perfect sense, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that option was seriously discussed during the cold war [coughcurtis lemaycough]. There’s nothing unbelievable in that movie. Everyone in there is at most an exaggeration of real attitudes. They’re not pulled out of some fantasy land like ST.
Compare to Starship Troopers: government that doesn’t make sense (is it totalitarian? Fascist? Modified democracy? Do the people under it even understand it?) either is in a real war with the bugs, is over hyping a (small but real) threat of the bugs, or completely fabricating the war out of whole cloth. The movie, being so porly made, doesn’t give a clear answer to this question. Either way, why does no one complain about the total tactical clusterfuck that is the execution of the war. Where is the air support? You may make a claim that the film is satirizing Viet Nam, but we didn’t send soldiers over there in bermuda shorts and cap guns. We gave them real weapons that were actually useful.
The person making a satire has to both know what he is satirizing, and how to make a decent film. Compare to Robocop, a masterful satire that is also works as a great film at the surface level. Hard to believe they were made by the same person, actually.
Huh, it never occurred to me that the human government was fabricating the war. I’m not sure how it improves the film.
It’s a bit like a cinematic variation of Poe’s Law: Without a clear indicator of the director’s intent, a badly-made parody is difficult to distinguish from a badly-made but sincere attempt at a movie in the same genre.
That’s pretty much it.
I left the premiere with a friend, another well-known figure in Heinlein studies. Neither one of us said anything for about ten minutes. Then he asked, thoughtfully, “Wouldn’t ST make a great movie?”
I got the impression ST was similar to the movie “I, Robot”, where there was already a movie in a pre-production phase of development and someone noticed similarities to an existing novel by a noted SF writer. So they thumbed through the novels, tossed some money at the publishers and whoever else needed to have money tossed at them, and added some elements of the novel and the title to the script.
I cannot believe that if RAH was alive he’d have allowed ST to use his ideas like that. Ginny lived for 6 more years after the film was made. I don’t know how they sneaked it by her. How the hell can you do a ST movie without powered suits? Though, I’ll admit the History and Moral Philosophy lectures wouldn’t make it in a movie.
The novel is good; the movie is good but they’re not good for the same reasons. I’m okay with that.
Put your hand on that wall!
Oh come on, the nazi uniforms were a dead giveaway.
It doesn’t have to. If you like what you saw, okay.
Fwiw, I grew up watching British films on the BBC. I must have got to my mid-twenties before I realised there was a whole different angle to Zulu - imperial entitlement, dehumanising indiginous peoples, everything Cecil Rhodes ever did …
Come, now this is a Café Society thread on a science fiction work. Take this commentary over to Great Debates and/or Elections!!!
j/k
I liked about half of it - Starship Troopers is essentially a fairly clever movie superglued to a fairly stupid one. I have or had a DVD copy I picked out out of a Walmart $5 bin but never unwrapped or watched, if that’s at all indicative of my ambivalence.
When they had all the TV ads that clearly indicated this was a fascist society and came across as parodies of WII “Why we fight” propaganda films, even before you get to Doogie Howser dressed up like a member of the Gestapo and even if you discount that it was made by the Director of Robocop, it was obviously satire.
What the movie did was take a cliche, the idea that “war dehumanizes people” and demonstrated that by having the movie begin with the humans dissecting the bugs and by the end rather than having huge numbers of bugs swarming over the humans, it ends with one giant intelligent bug swarmed by huge numbers of much smaller humans. It begins with the talking head on the News show talking about how we need to “be like the bug” and ends with the humans in the end literally “being like the bugs” as all the humans who showed human emotions of love, compassion, etc. have been killed off.
As to the question, no I don’t think the war was “faked” nor do I think Buenos Aires was a false flag, but I do think if you read between the lines it’s pretty clear the humans started the war by encroaching on Bug planets. Remember even before Buenos Aires we see human high schoolers dissecting bugs in schools.