Apologies. I thought it was a very valid point but I understand it was outside what is allowed in this forum. Play by the house rules and all.
The connection to Zulu, if a bit ham-fisted, was obvious. Of course, much like Starship Troopers, it shows the precise opposite of what happened in the movie and real life.
Also, ‘homeland’ does not mean ‘recently colonized territory’. Do you happen not to be a native speaker of english, Amanset? (I’m asking for clarification, here, as you seem to be using words in a slightly odd way.)
I am amazed we’re having a discussion (and a heated one at that) about whether humans or Bugs were there first. It really sounds like a discussion (with the same level of heat) of whether Israelis are entitled to their colonization (no Marley I’m not starting politics here).
Surprise, it is exactly what Verhoeven wanted.
The whole point of the movie is to make us realize that lack of perspective could transform any fascist/militarist/supremacist society into a “we’re the good guys here” society. The quip about whether the whole hostilities have been initiated by the humans, or are the Bugs the absolutely horrid monsters everyone is programmed into thinking they are, is delivered by the newsman, and it is just a question. It is painfully clear that the bugs were there first, that it belonged to their zone, and that humans entered and tried to colonize it (The big question here being whether they did it knowingly or not). It is hilarious to see that FinnAgain reacts exactly the same way Rico does, Verhoeven is a gifted storyteller indeed.
BTW, if you really didnt get why Verhoeven inserted that question, in those terms, and at that point in the movie, just listen to the audio commentary. Verhoeven (though it is Neumeier’s idea, but Verhoeven defends it and makes it his too) makes it perfectly clear that the Humans have entered Bugs territory, and that’s how the war started. But, now, with all the jingoism, nobody on the human side even remembers who or what started it, or even wants to know (reminds you of some recent Invasion?). You dont need the audio commentary to get that, but apparently what’s obvious is lost to some.
Rather obviously you’re relying on your interpretation and claiming an “implication”. I’m relying on what was actually said.
And now, after arguing that Verhoeven didn’t write the script, you’re arguing that his take on it is definitive. Can’t have it both ways.
What is actually “fascist” is, if true, Verhoeven’s twisted reading of the actual movie, whereby a colony on a planet where there is also a bug colony becomes an act of “aggression” and then wiping out millions of civilians is the act of a “victim”. Evidently the bugs simply needed Lebensraum.
I see you’ve also dropped several of your claims like the humans being an arm of the Fed and “part of the war machine” and what not. We can accept that they’ve been conceded as erroneous, yes?
Well, the movie is a failure on that point as well. What is actually shown, even if your claims are accurate (and according to what the movie say as opposed to what a hack like Verhoeven maybe wanted it to say but was unable to actually put on film), is that the bugs are a race of genocidal lunatics who respond to a species being on the same planet that they are on somewhere but not encroaching on their actual territory by attempting to exterminate a civilian center with millions of people in it. And then launching more rocks to try to kill more civilian centers.
As already proven, not one single thing there is true. Verhoeven might have had it in his head that it was, but the movie he made simply doesn’t contain any such things. We are, specifically, not told that the bugs were there first but merely that they’d already chosen to colonize it. We are, specifically, not told that it’s in any sort of “their zone” but that, quite the contrary, the human government has established a quarantine zone due to the dangers of potential bug presence.
Which again shows that Verhoeven is an incompetent storyteller and a hack movie maker. If he wanted to show humans settling in bug territory, the movie would have said A) that it was already settled, not already chosen for settlement by the bugs B) that the humans landed on and appropriated bug territory, not some spot that happened to be on the same planet that had some bugs somewhere on it. C) that the humans actually launched some sort of attack rather than just being there, being slaughtered by the bugs and then the bugs deciding to rain death down on human civilian centers.
If your claims are true, Verhoeven is simply at Ed Wood level incompetence. 300 human colonists, without approval and in fact in contradiction to official human policies, settle on the same planet where bugs happen to be present. The bugs slaughter them to the last man, woman and child and then launch gigantic rocks at human civilian centers, killing millions, after which point the humans respond by declaring a defensive war… and this is supposed to show how jingoistic and fascist the humans are.
Again, if your claims are true then Verhoeven is not only an incompetent storyteller and a hack, but the reason he sees “fascism” and “jingoism” in the story is that he believes that another race/group/species merely existing on the same planet that you’ve got some people on is a legitimate reason to commit genocide against the species those people come from. I, however, don’t think that V. has any such coherent moral narrative and simply wanted a paycheck, and after the fact bullshitted a bit about the uber deep meaning that the movie had.
“There’s another group on the same planet as some of our folks are on, first let’s slaughter them and then let’s nuke their home planet’s civilian centers from orbit, those war starting fascists!!!”
Indeed, what’s obvious, and all that.
Wasn’t there an adaptation that did precisely this? shudders
Yeah, but it was made by Terry Gilliam, so all’s fair.
Again: please comment on the film without commenting on other posters. I don’t want this thread to get out of hand.
Verhoeven tried to read the book but didn’t complete it.
http://www.ghosts.org/verhoeven/starshiptroopers.html
That said, it’s probable that Neumeier did read the book. There’s too much of the plot drawn from the book. Yes, the perspective is twisted and yes, details are different, but the outline is far too consistent to believe that the book wasn’t used as source material.
Fair enough, I’m willing to throw blame on Neumeier. You may be right that the perspective of what the story and society is like came from Neumeier (or someone else) and that Verhoeven just took their interpretation and ran with it. But that doesn’t get him off the hook for his crimes.
Well, it does show that to some degree. I mean, the humans are armed with repeating rifles and fairly significant grenades, and they get overrun by an army largely consisting of physical attacks (claws, wings, etc). So yes, that’s true. But the thing is the humans were not utilizing the full capabilities they should have, that we’ve been using since the Napoleonic era. I mean, even Viet Nam level tech would have been a significant improvement (Hueys to the rescue, F4s dropping napalm, artillery, tanks). That’s why it’s ridiculous. If Verhoeven wanted to recreate a scene where the infantry got overrun, he could have attempted to explain why they were cut off from supplies and support, not just depicted the military as not having any.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. I recall having watched TTWT, and enjoyed it, and then one day reading The Rolling Stones, only to discover flatcats and the exact same issue. Now Gerrold gave it a slight twist by using the tribbles and their population explosion in a creative way, so there was not just copying but creative adjustment.
I don’t specifically recall this (haven’t seen the movie in a decade), but that is a standard Hollywood trope.
I get that from the film. Again, that’s part of the Verhoeven/Neumeier interpretation. The story they want to tell is not Heinlein’s story, they’re just using Heinlein’s story as a vehicle, and sullying Heinlein’s name in the process.
I can have caught that in the propaganda film, caught that all the propaganda films were slanted (part of what made me uncomfortable watching the movie), caught all of the subtleties of the film and still think Heinlein was raped for every second that the film is on the cinema screen. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. Verhoeven/Neumeier may have made an interesting exploration of fascism, of propaganda, etc, but their crime was taking Heinlein’s work (which wasn’t that kind of society) and portraying it as if it were.
FinnAgain, I’m a pretty literal person, and even I think you’re being way too literal on this. I think it is pretty clear from the movie that the humans are at least perceived as the aggressors by the Bugs. I totally recognize that the news bits we’re seeing are propaganda, and as such they are sanitized to tell the story that the government wants told. Yet let’s look at the script you linked.
Notice the part about captive Arachnid Warrior? That shows the Arachnids were already on Tango Urilla. And that they treat it like an animal. Which is fair, given that we’re told they have an IQ of ~30. As for “already chosen by other colonists”, that sounds to me like a fancy way of saying “already colonized”. Finally, we’re talking about a race that doesn’t appear to have language anything like what we recognize, and function on a much different level of society. It’s clear that regardless of who did way, the war started largely because of an inability to reason with each other, of biological imperative of expansion and territory.
I agree, laying all the blame on the humans certainly isn’t warranted. At the same time, I do feel that the humans were the agressors in the movie, some of which came from a small sect deliberately ignoring the government’s instructions, and some was misunderstanding the nature of the Arachnids on first encountering them. Couple that with neither side seeing communication as the first step, and reacting with violence instead. But yes, the Bugs react to the colony infraction by bombing Buenos Aires. At that point, the humans don’t really have a choice about the war.
I dont really get what you mean, I’m refering to his comment, I’m not saying he is stupid or insulting him. Would it have been ok if I had formulated it that way:
“It is hilarious that FinnAgain’s comment reflects the same thoughts Rico has”?
That way it is not grammatically linked to a person but to a comment. As I am not sure that this is nothing but mere semantics, and not the correction you were looking for, please inform me if that’s what you asked for. I find it hard to respond to a comment without quoting or summarizing what you think are other posters’ thoughts.
But they were perceived as the aggressors for daring to be on the same planet. A “crime” for which, in retaliation, the bugs exterminated Beunos Aires. If the narrative that V. meant to tell was one of aggressor humans and victim bugs fighting in self defense, this is about the worst way to possibly do it.
Actually, it doesn’t, if you check again. The script specifically notes that it was archive footage. Archive footage is another name for stock footage, so the Fed News service just spliced in images of a Mean Bug to drive the point home that Bugs Are Dangerous. Think of it like during those silly Summer of the Shark! news panics a few years ago when every news story used the same sort of stock footage of a Sharks Doing Scary Stuff! It wasn’t actual footage of the man-eaters in action.
And since it was already part of the Arachnid Quarantine Zone, we can safely assume that first contact was already made and that the Fed had already determined that bugs were dangerous and best avoided.
Possibly, but sloppy if so when all they’d have to do was say “already colonized” rather than “already chosen”. Especially since it being “already chosen” for colonization meant that it was held by a xenocidal group that will exterminate any other species on the planet to maintain hegemonic control, and then nuke their home planet from orbit just to drive the point home, well…
In the book, I’d say that yes it was about a biological imperative, no questions. The movie, however, presents a much different picture where the mere presence of humans on the same planet as the bugs was enough to drive the bugs into a xenocidal, genocidal rage. There were apparently no attempts to negotiate at all.
If that’s the case though, the movie really doesn’t make that point. It would’ve been really easy to do, too. Just show the Mormons landing, seeing some bugs building their delightful native bug architecture homes off in the distance, and shooting nukes at them or something, for sport. Or whatever.
All the movie does show us is that human colonists, against Fed orders, settled on a planet that may or may not have already had bugs somewhere else on it at the time, and in response the bugs massacred them all and then bombed BA. It could’ve been a decent narrative about two cultures that meet, want the same things, don’t negotiate and come to war over that problem. But it wasn’t as it stands.
I think that if Verhoeven had made the same movie WITHOUT Heinlein’s title and the other bits of the story that were based on Heinlein’s book, that the movie would not be remembered at all. It just wasn’t that good, except as a complete perversion of Heinlein’s book. IOW, using Heinlein’s title and some of the same “characters and situations” as they say, was just a marketing device, because the movie would have fallen flat on its own.
Great thread! I first read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel when I was eleven or so, and then Space Cadet, and then a bunch of Heinlein’s others. Really hooked me. My favorites remain Starship Troopers, Time for the Stars, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and those two. Never read Podkayne, but I’ve been meaning to.
Bricker, I’m glad you found those other descriptions of Federal service (post 56). I was vaguely remembering the caterpillar reference. Thanks. And Sam Stone, very well put! (post 86)!
I enthusiastically second Word Man and others who’ve mentioned both Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War for terrific powered-armor military sf that owes a lot to Starship Troopers.
BrotherCadfael, ISTR it was a “ten-second bomb” that Rico dropped, but I don’t have a copy in front of me. I always chuckle when I read about the roomful of Skinnies emptying very quickly once the bomb begins talking.
A thinly-disguised version of Heinlein appears in the Niven and Pournelle alien-invasion novel Footfall, BTW, as the elder statesman of a group of sf writers advising the President.
Nope. It was a 30 second bomb. I have the book in front of me.
The details of that contact are largely glossed over. We’re not really shown what happened, we’re just given a snippet to set the stage. Of course Verhoeven didn’t go for full exposition - he was trying to be subtle.
Ah, good catch. Fair enough.
Well, I’m certainly not trying to claim the point was that the Arachnids were innocent victims or that their retaliation was justified. I don’t think Verhoeven meant for it to be taken that far, but frankly, trying to defend Verhoeven makes me need a bath.
Look, Verhoeven was going for subtlety. He was trying to create a feel. Those “news” reels were propaganda films, and he crafted them based upon real propaganda films from WWII. They were staged precisely to get under the audience’s skin. You laugh along with the over-the-top feel of them all the while feeling just a little uncomfortable with what they are saying and doing. That discomfort was intended on Verhoeven’s part. It was part of his statement about the nature of their society as “fascism” and the extremes they would go.
Well, he could have done that, but then the propaganda films wouldn’t have been doing their job. The point of the “news” wasn’t to show people what happened, it was to stir up the human sentiment against the Arachnids. Verhoeven was attempting to put in subtle hints about what really happened vs how the events were described back home.
Well, that wasn’t the story that Verhoeven was trying to tell. Verhoeven wasn’t really telling a story about how the war began or the causes for the war, he was trying to tell a story about a messed up human political system and the glorification of war. The bugs were just cardboard cutouts for his backdrop.
I totally agree, Verhoeven was using Heinlein’s name and rep to artificially inflate his own movie’s importance. Hell, I wouldn’t be so mad if he had named it “Spaceship Soldiers”, not invoked Heinlein’s name, and equivalently fuzzed over the character names a bit. Then it would have been clear he was writing a satire of the work, and not been promoted as if it was a faithful rendition of Heinlein’s story and Heinlein’s ideology.
I disagree. I think a lot of people that really enjoyed the film had no idea there was a book. I know I didn’t when I saw it - I read the book several years later.
I think that most of the first viewers were those who had read and loved the book. I know that I was excited to hear that this movie was being made, because, silly me, I thought that it would be true to the book, and I’m a longtime Heinlein fan. I practically cut my teeth on his juveniles. I read other SF authors in my childhood, too, but Heinlein was one of my favorites, and fortunately my local public library, my school library, and my grandfather’s library had just about all his juveniles between them.
Probably the people who enjoyed the film actually didn’t realize that the title, characters, and situations were from a book…but I imagine that the film got most of its first viewers from the pool of Heinlein fans.
Love this movie. Didn’t care for the book.
I’d like to point out that the bit about Buenos Aires being destroyed as retaliation is a complete lie. How many million light years away was Bug territory? Did they somehow manage to time travel to make it hit just afterward? There’s no way it was what they said it was, or meant what they said it did.
I do not believe it was an actual Bug meteor from any point in time, as the female dissection teacher specifically mentioned that the bugs colonize by sending their spore or children or whatever along for the ride. There’s no evidence outside of the propaganda films that the bugs ever just simply attack without provocation aside from from immediately present sources being in their territorial vicinity, and surely Bugs emerging from an earth crater ala War of the Worlds would have been more fodder for the warmongers than just destruction.
Also, in the movie, the Bugs never show any sentience beyond what your basic Irish setter could demonstrate. I think that part is also a lie by the war machine, and a very clever move on the part of Verhoeven. They needed some victory to stir on the war machine after their devastatingly stupid invasion, and capturing a new kind of ‘Brain Bug’ was just the thing. A meaningless rallying point, so to speak, but they genuinely believed that the Bugs were equal to their level of sentience, and projected a hell of a lot from there.
The end serials show the captured Brain Bug being probed in various idiotic and destructive ways that will not help them to learn about it at all, any more than stepping on a beetle could assist you in studying how it mates. It presents the question- did they (whoever was in charge of the war machine) know that the Bugs were not really sentient, or were they as blind as their society? It’s so brilliant, it’s very difficult to tell. The viewers are taken in by it themselves. For example, the one person presented who thought the idea of their sentience was ridiculous was an obviously ridiculous and laughable person himself. That was deliberate, just as everything within the propaganda sections was deliberate, so the answer is yes. The sentience of the Bugs was a deliberate lie by the war machine, and staged so cleverly in how it was shown in the movie that the viewers themselves were taken in by it, even knowing the movie was a farce in so many other ways.
As for the devastatingly stupid invasion- in the opening lecture by Mr. Razchec (probably spelled that wrong, apologies), he basically says that force is the only means by which anything can be accomplished in human society, and even outright says that the act of voting is using force. It’s no wonder that they thought the very things which would bend humans into submission could lay waste to the Bugs. More projecting, of course, but the internal logic of it within the movie is complete. The question still remains- did the ones in charge of the war machine know that force against the Bugs was as useless as going after swarming bees with a machine gun? The part where the Captain says her military intelligence reports say the Bug Batteries will be random and light while the ships being blasted out of the sky comes to mind as possible evidence that the powers that be were ignorant, but then Verhoeven twists that a short time later by having Zander say mournfully “We thought we were smarter than the Bugs.”
Brilliant movie. Completely brilliant.
Maybe it is a US/non-US thing. As has been widely reported, the film did much better outside of the US, so perhaps the mix of who saw it there contained far more people that had no knowledge of the book.
It actually is much worse than that, if you want to take the sequels as movie canon (I think we can skip the second movie, it’s pretty much obviously a propaganda film-within-a-film anyways), but in the THIRD movie…
The Brain bug has managed to link up with Sky Marshal Anoke, a human telepath, and converted him to the bugs’ hive-mind religion. It turns out that the captured brain bug has been playing the Federation forces all along by taking control of their leader.
But yeah, that’s really only maybe third place at most of the weirdest things that happen in Starship Troopers: Marauder.
Here’s a fun discussion topic for the second film (for the two of us that will admit to having seen most of it): It’s obviously a film-within-a-film, but is it a pro-war movie or an anti-war movie, in that context? 
I stand corrected! Thanks.