One of the best made bad movies of all time!
The bugs are located on the other side of the galaxy, chucking big ass rocks at the Earth that for some reason don’t take a gazillion years to get here!
As to Facist connotations, well, remember, it starts out with a history lecture, about how the liberal democracies collapsed and were rescued by the mililtary elite, Yeah, just a tiny bit facistic…
And they sure could of used some higher caliber assault rifles.
Well, if someone wants to make a science fiction anti-war movie, why not film Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War or Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game? Why insist on adapting a book about the necessity of military virtues (courage, duty, sacrifice, and so on)? It’s not like I agree with everything in Starship Troopers (the book), but I can respect the author’s POV.
Oh, well…veering off into Great Debates or IMHO territory here, I suppose.
Part of Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” was an examination of personal values, and the conflict between personal responsibility, family responsibility and your duty/obligation to the state. He felt (and wrote in several books) that certain “rights” (such as the right to vote!) had to be earned.
Verhoeven (or a spokesman for him) claimed during the making of the movie that “we’ve gotten rid of all that stuff about responsibility and duty, there’s no powered armor, but we’ve got spaceships and explosions and neat special effects which is waht people look for in a sci-fi movie”. (I’m paraphrasing mightily, but that was pretty much the intention of what was said, as reported in Premiere magazine many many months ago).
The book is a marvellous read, and is/can be somewhat thought-provoking. If you find Heinlein to be a little too “right wing” in his views, try The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
I love this movie. I have no possible explanation why, but I do. I found it interesting, when it came out on video, that Entertainment Weekly came up with a long review and at the end could NOT give it a rating as usual, i.e., A, B, C, etc. (This never happened with a movie review from them before.) I guess this was because it could be viewed on a couple different levels…I guess reading the book would be helpful.
Heinlein would have had Verhoeven’s testicles. Literally. Every single part of the actual message of Starship Troopers as Heinlein wrote it was carved out to make room for the “cool special effects and explosions”.
Sorry…discussion of the movie tends to precipitate personal explosions from Heinlein fans.
Let’s make a list.
There are people who:
like “Starship Troopers” (the movie).
like “Showgirls.”
Hi, Opal.
like Pauly Shore movies.
like people to urinate on them during sex.
But I still worry about all of them and think Jesse Helms should be told about them soon (except #3,of course).
All urilogical humor aside, Heinlein was a good science-fiction author and deserved a better movie than this to be remembered by. Well, at least it’s somewhat better than the one L.Ron Hubbard got.
MEbucker-please don’t give Hollywood any more ideas. Can you not imagine what they will do with those very good novels? No, I suppose none of us can imagine that. That’s why we shouldn’t suggest it to them.
I highly recommend that we occasinally need to turn off the tube and open a book. My compliments to you salinqmind for thinking about reading the book.
(I know, I know, I have the wrong name for this rant.)
The last thing GQ needs is another movie critic thread. I’m declaring this asked and answered.