Paul Verhoeven retrospective at IFC Center in NY

Cafe Society
1

From this link:

2

Well, they got the “bastard” part right.

3

And “mindless”. And “ass”.

Starship Troopers is not a good movie. Verhoeven removed everything that was good about the book, from the power armour and fighting style to the characters that you could actually respect, and replaced it with his own unwarranted anti-imperialist bullshit.

4

To be fair, he did add boobs.

5

Tonight’s TV selection is tricky. The 10 pm movies on are A Farewell To Arms and Verhoeven’s Zwartboek. Tricky choice, so maybe I’ll go for the 9.30 movie, a work by comic genius Will Ferrell - Old School.

Just kidding, Verhoeven wins out.

6

:smiley:

7

I’m quite in agreement with the quote in the OP. Verhoeven’s work (especially his hollywood work) is mostly a sarcastic (or if you’re less forgiving: cynical) exaggeration on what sells: beautiful people doing horrible things.

8

Verhoeven is a hack, and he’s been getting hackier with each film. Calling his work “satire” means that you don’t understand what the term means and his act is getting old.

9

you berate him for mindlessness and then you chastize him for not making “mech warriors: insect planet” :rolleyes:

**
RealityChuck** ; have you seen Zwartboek?

10

Nevermind, not worth the effort.

11

I appreciate a lot of the satire of Starship Troopers & Robocop. Basic Instinct pisses me off & is plot-stupid, but there are some good lines in it. Other than those, I have managed to avoid the man. Might watch Starship Troopers again some day, don’t really need to see the others again.

12

MEh, call me when someone does the Uwe Boll retrospective, I might be interested then…

13

I think “berate” is a bit strong for someone taking insulting words out of context. “Take cheap shots at” seems more accurate.

Have you read the book? If someone is going to bother making a movie based on an existing IP, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they treat it with a bit of respect, even if it is sci-fi.

He took a fighting force that would genuinely be interesting to watch and turned it into a mob whose knowledge of tactics is limited to “Run from point A to point B, firing”. He took educated, civilised characters and turned them into jackbooted morons. He took one of the defining examples of powered armour in sci-fi, and took out the powered armour. This is a bad, stupid movie, even if Verhoeven did it on purpose.

14

And he lied while he was making it. He and his people previewed some of the CGI at World-Con the year before, and recruited extras for the sports scene at the beginning of the movie. They were specifically asked about the armor and the character development. They lied to us. Bald-faced lies.

Fuck Verhoeven and the horse he rode in on.

15

As I said up thread I saw it on TV last night. Big fan of the gratuitous, totally unbelievable overhead bucket of shit scene eh? I think that’s the end of Verhoeven for me. Good movie though if he could keep his problems out of it. Unfortunately he can’t.

16

From scifisquad.com’s list of 10 best scifi adaptations:

and

17

Well, there’s being unfaithful, and then there’s screwing a pig on your honeymoon. :smiley:

18

Spoken by someone who can’t read.

19

It is possible to have no love for Heinlein, to have never even read the novel on which “Starship Troopers” is based, and to hate the movie anyway.

I don’t know if a faithful adaptation would have been good, but I doubt it would have been worse. Appealing to the authority of Peter Martin (?) doesn’t change that.

20

Okay, lissener, I will buy your perspective if you answer, to my satisfaction, two questions:

  1. What did Heinlein, by his own admission, attempt to do in writing Starship Troopers?

  2. In what way did Verhoeven satirize the worldview in Heinlein’s book, the one held by his characters?