ST, the film, is not a satire of Heinlein. Verhoeven never read the book. He read the script written by Edward Neumeier. It’s a satire of–put it this way: it’s even more relevant today, in the context of the US war on Iraq, than it was in 1997. As far as Verhoeven’s concerned, it has nothing to with Heinlein. From his perspective, it has more to do with Triumph of the Will and pro-war propaganda films like The Green Berets. And warmongering societies in general.
Well, not Robocop, his best Hollywood film.
This is more or less the sticking point most people have; they can’t get over the book. It’s better to watch the movie if you haven’t read the book at all, or to just pretend the titles are different. Movies aren’t books, books aren’t movies, and complaining a movie is not like a book would result in no movie based on a book ever being worthy, because they’ll never be the same.
Having said that, independently of the “it’s not like to book” criticism, I think Starship Troopers (the movie) is a mess. Verhoeven’s point is, regrettably, delivered with a movie that doesn’t work well as a movie.
So in other words, you have no intent of answering my questions, and instead use them as a springboard to talk about Verhoeven’s supposed satire of warmongering societies?
Uh, your questions have no relevance to the movie. Your questions are about the book.
Okay, so let’s say that I think of the movie Starship Troopers the way I think of the movie I, Robot (and to be honest, I pretty much do.) That some producer saw that they had an idea vaguely similar to a well-known book by a well-known author and a little bit of money and some rewriting could buy name recognition. And because I’m a nice guy willing to give the writer and director a chance, I do my best to forget anything I know about the book the movie is supposedly based on for the duration. And then what I get instead of a bad adaptation of a good book, I just get a bad movie. I don’t see how that is an improvement.
I realize you said pretty much the same thing. So, is it agreed that Verhoeven hasn’t had a good movie in at least two decades?
My problem with the film is that it is almost an identical copy of a pro-war propaganda film except that it’s in the future. If no one saw Triumph of the Will and it played in theaters today, it would look like a satire because no one today would take the film seriously.
Good satire is more than just a copy of the source material it is mocking. It has to say more about the source material than people can figure out for themselves. I can watch FOX and Friends and know it’s retarded. One of my friends can repeat their arguments word for word and I would know that my friend is joking. But my friend’s satire would be no where as good as the stuff that Colbert does because it doesn’t tell me anything new; while Colbert highlights the ridiculousness in a way that makes FOX look even more ridiculous.
Starship Troopers isn’t as illuminating as good satire should be. It’s just a copy of a dumb and campy pro-war movies without saying much more – which makes it a dumb and campy movie.
It’s a straight-faced fascist propaganda movie . . . from a speculated future fascist state. It only works because it’s so straight-faced. The movie itself is not all there is to it; its imaginary context is part of the package. That’s where it’s not just a copy of Triumph of the Will; it’s a heavily sourced descendant of TotW, extrapolated into the far future, and thus saying something very clear and compelling about the present.
Colbert is a heavy winker. A different approach, but both are valid.
Look at the works of Douglas Sirk. The same uber-polished, big-budget-mainstream film vocabulary, but the subversive subtexts only work because the surface text is not in on the joke. If the characters are winking, then it’s spoof, not satire. Someone said (Joe Orton maybe?) that the only way for a farce to succeed is for the actors to play their parts in all seriousness. It’s not as funny to see an idiot make an idiot of himself as it is to see a straitlaced, serious person do so, especially if he’s unaware of it.
While ST is not a farce, I think satire (at least this approach) works best the same way. The characters are not winking at you; they are playing their parts in all seriousness.
Thanks, I will make an effort to catch some of these.
The characters in ST were not played seriously. They were played very campy, with deliberate bad acting because Verhoeven was mocking badly acted movies. The bad acting makes it look like a farce, but its not a farce because the source ST is mocking had bad acting too. So nothing is really exaggerated from the source. That’s where it becomes too much of a replica of the original source to illuminate anything special about it. Making it take place in the future is not enough.
How do you do straight satire of something everyone thinks is ridiculous already? I don’t think you can. You can’t mock really bad acting by imitating the bad acting. The real problem here is that Verhoeven chose to copy old war-propaganda films which no one takes seriously anymore.
What if I wanted to mock Saved By the Bell by creating a badly acted show, with cheesy plots, about teenagers in a high school in 2025? Would that really be satire, or would it just be another shitty show about teenagers?
Yes, I read the book. As has been mentioned before, books aren’t always movies and movies aren’t always books.
I read it over 15 years ago, so I’m going to rely on wikipedia’s analysis for my next point: ST can be regarded as a pro-fascist piece of literature. Militaristic culture, you only earn your liberty and life, only soldiers vote, etc. To the extent that Verhoeven disagrees with this political philosophy (or, more aptly ed neumeier) the book and the movie are going to have serious divergences. He’s turned the “educated, civilized” characters and turned them into jackbooted morons precisely because he is attempting the satire - he’s stripped off the veneer and turned “sacrificing yourself in order to earn your place in society” on its head in inane ways. now, whether the satire was done correctly is another point of discussion (I don’t think it’s some grand piece of cinema myself) but getting all huffy because they took the source material and molded it into something else is kind of weak.
And sorry, I don’t get a hard on because they didn’t incorporate mechsuits.
No love for Total Recall?
Total Recall is by far Verhoeven’s best film.
I’d agree, if all the acting were uniformly bad. But it isn’t: while the three leads are admittedly terrible, Clancy Brown, Michael Ironside, Jake Busy and especially Neal Patrick Harris all deliver decent, professional performances that wouldn’t be out of place in a non-“satire”. Did Verhoeven screw up by hiring supporting actors who were too good for their parts? Or is the more obvious answer correct - that the leads were badly miscast?
There’s pure camp, and there’s applied camp. Pure camp is unintentional; a discrepancy between the talent and the enthusiasm of the artist. E.g., Ed Wood. Applied camp is intentional camp; an attempt to artificially manufacture pure camp with a wink and a nudge. E.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Starship Troopers has both. All but the leads are applied camp; the leads are pure camp. Verhoeven hired Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien because they embodied the characters as he saw them: empty headed Barbie dolls/action figures. They’re not in on the joke, IMO. Verhoeven plops then down into a world that is carefully orchestrated–with, as noted, a supporting cast of serious, accomplished actors–and then lets them do their thing. Think of a John Waters movie: the movie itself is applied camp–Waters certainly knows what he’s winking at–but when he casts people like Divine and Edith Massey, he’s doing so for the pure camp that they bring. And as far as the novel being just as camp, well if so then it’s pure camp: Heinlein wrote it with a straight face, in all seriousness. In any case your argument about replicas and the campiness of the original is confusing to me; it sounds on the face of it like an argument against adapting any novel as a movie, not just ST.
The fact that the movie is even more relevant today, while we’re stuck in a seemingly endless war, is proof enough that your premise is flawed. And again, in any case, that’s an argument against the validity of any war satire; it’s as much an argument against Dr. Strangelove as against Starship Troopers.
Neither of these is happening in ST. He’s not mocking bad acting, and the actors aren’t imitating bad acting. He’s using bad actors to “mock” the fascism that’s being satirized.
Copy? No. Use as a source? Sure. And so what–even accepting your premise–no one takes them seriously any more? First of all, isn’t that part of what he’s satirizing? That we don’t learn from past mistakes? Second, “take seriously” is not the same as “culturally aware of.” The second is sufficient; the first is worthy of ridicule.
What if I wanted to mock Saved By the Bell by creating a badly acted show, with cheesy plots, about teenagers in a high school in 2025? Would that really be satire, or would it just be another shitty show about teenagers?
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I don’t see any parallels in your example. In any case, it’s not on paper that it would have to work. If it’s funny, it’s funny. And if you have more in your satire sights than just teen TV–if you used it as a vehicle for satirizing a wider cultural picture, then–and again, only if it’s done well–I’d find that perfectly valid.
You’re looking at it from the wrong angle. Verhoeven didn’t screw up. He chose the leads because they were such bad actors: they perfectly embody the empty-headed Barbie-doll/action figure of their characters. If the rest of the cast had not been more competent, as you note, then there would’ve been no point in hiring those leads. Kind of like italicizing an entire paragraph instead of just the most important words you want to emphasize. Or something. But picture it: all bad actors: a campy farce, weaker as satires. All good actors: just a bad movie, no real satire. The casting, as it stands, works somehow to emphasize the satire. I’ve never really thought about why, but picturing any other casting choice makes the movie not work.
[ETA: Sorry for the redundancies; I started and restarted this response like three times and lost track of what I had already said or what I had deleted and started over with.]
It’s been too long since you read it. No one in the book earns their “liberty and life” through combat duty. You do, in fact, earn your right to vote or hold office by serving in either the military or in a sort of Job Corps, doing peaceful work for the state. There’s no call to “sacrifice yourself in order to earn your place in society”. Heinlein himself pointed out that “in STARSHIP TROOPERS, nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of the federal civil service.””
I don’t know, **lissener **- I see your point, but I still have a hard time agreeing with it. I think Verhoeven was going for a good, serious action movie with satirical elements, something he achieved marvelously with **Robocop **and Total Recall, and failed - and then tried to pass the movie off as a successful satire instead of an failed action flick. Now, you may say that as a fan of **Robocop **and **TR **I was *expecting *a straightforward sci-fi action film, and thus was unable to accept a satire; again, this may be true, but I don’t think it is. The way I see it, with a tighter script and more talented leads, ST could have came out a great action flick, while the satirical elements, in and of themselves, are not strong enough to carry a movie.
I don’t know. I think Occam’s Razor is on my side in this.
Well, Occam’s razor is actually on my side. 
It’s far simpler than I’m making it sound. I’m having to “defend” against a whole slew of extremely complicated objections, and so my response sounds complicated. Nothing could be further from the truth. And Verhoeven never tried and failed to pass off anything; he doesn’t get involved in post-release debate. He’s never defended any of his films to anyone.
If you ever get a chance, listen to the commentary on both Robocop and ST. He lays out his initial intentions, and in the commentary on ST, he and Neumeier share a moment of incredulity at the number of critics who took ST as a straightforward piece of fascist propaganda. But mostly they just talk in the present tense about what they’re trying to put up on the screen.
And while Robocop is pure satire, one of the best I know of, I think in that one he worked harder to get campy performances out of good actors, rather than hiring “bad” actors who simply fit the part, like he did in ST and Showgirls. I’m not sure which approach would be more difficult to manage, as a director, but I think he’s been successful with both approaches.
There was something good about the book?
Actually, what Heinlein proposed isn’t significantly different from any modern nation that has mandatory military service. Switzerland and Austria, for examples, are both democracies in which citizens must serve for a time, so arguably they don’t get full citizenship rights until they complete this service.
I don’t know that Swiss or Austrian democracy is inherently more stable than American or Canadian, though.
To clarify, the reason I think I’m on Occam’s side is that, when you take his entire body of work into account–his repeated themes and techniques–it seems simpler to me to assume that Verhoeven did what he meant to do, and take that as a starting point.