It’s almost a tolerable film if you watch the the VIP edition with snarky commentary by David Schmader. I have stolen his phrase “density of failure” many times since.
Never saw Elle.
Liked Robocop. The formula worked there.
Basic Instinct not a good movie. Does not hold up.
Starship Troopers another bad movie that’s supposed to be good because it’s bad.
Total Recall fun and cheesy but I wouldn’t call it really good. It’s a fun goofy popcorn movie.
Hardly the first time a director came over from Europe to tell Americans that they’re a bunch of pigs: Von Stroheim and Douglas Sirk had made that its own genre.
I only provisionally dislike bad movies. It’s important to wait for laudatory reviews that find existential significance in bad films, so you can revise your opinion.
/s
But that makes this even more true…
That very same director has made a satire like RoboCop, that shows a film can be a biting social satire that uses ridiculous over the top scenarios to make real commentary on modern society AND be an enjoyable well made movie. So I’m not buying it when he churns out utter drivel (like Showgirls and yes, Starship Troopers) where every line of dialogue is so bad it makes you want to turn it off immediately and forget you ever heard it, and claims it’s because"satire"
I found Soldier of Orange (1977), The Fourth Man (1983) and Black Book (2006) generally worthwhile viewing. I don’t recall being able to get past the 15 minute mark the one and only time I tried to watch Showgirls.
I didn’t mean to suggest Showgirls was good. It’s been ages but I don’t think I got far before turning it off either. But the director was not a compete hack and did some worthwhile movies too.
Robocop is a transparent satire of not only Reaganomics, but what the entire approach did to filmmaking. Verhoeven had read the script and was going to pass on it when his wife (who started reading it as well) noted how unintentionally funny it was, and in particular that the only sympathetic figure of the film was a character who had literally been deumanized. It basically set the stage for Verhoeven’s approach to his career as a Hollywood studio director, critiquing both the industry and the moviegoing public alike, although both parties missed the mark in understanding the satire and latching on to the ultraviolent and salacious elements of the film.
Basic Instinct is a “thriller” that is basically making fun of the audience for being voyeuristic. If you’ve watched it more than once you’ve definitely missed the point, which is basically that you shouldn’t feel good about watching this completely unrealistic story about a character that is basically seductive evil personified. Starship Troopers exists essentially to mock the jingoism of the source material (not without merit). Unfortunately, instead of taking the material straight and finding the satire in it, it essentially just takes the title and the names of a few characters and crafts a film that is chock full of unwatchable performances, bad special effects, and pointless plot twists that isn’t even relatable to Heinlein’s novel, so the satire misses the mark (even for those familiar with source material), and it is just a terrible movie.
Total Recall (based in part from the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”) meditation on the solipsism of internal experience and filtered perception, turned into a standard Schwarzenegger film full of ridiculous dialogue and absurd levels of violence. It was a blockbuster hit in the summer of 1990 and had a lot of eminently quotable lines and memorable scenes, but underneath all of the spectacle there is a much better story struggling to be told. Unfortunately, the 2012 remake didn’t find it either, and aside from the production design doesn’t have anything to recommend it.
Verhoeven is a really good director (as Soldier of Orange and Black Book shows) who really didn’t like the Hollywood machine or the kind of movies they paid him a lot of money to make, so he made films that were progressively more mocking and absurd, and not coincidentally successively more unwatchable.
I have not watched Showgirls but I’ve seen interviews with both Elizabeth Berkeley and Kyle MacLaclan who still seemed to think they made a good film, so I’m sure that people are missing the point that the actors and director was trying to make, but just because a film has some kind of satirical statement does not make it a good film.
Stranger
I don’t know that I agree with all of this – I haven’t even read the novel – but it misses what I consider the true significance of the film, namely: it’s the greatest giant bug movie ever made. I don’t even like bug movies, let alone giant bug movies, but I have to respect Starship Troopers for this accomplishment. I suspect it was a conscious goal, at least among certain members of the crew.
The bugs are big, mean and CG-gnarly, allowing the cast to blow the shit out of them repeatedly (if not always convincingly). That is the critical raison d’etre of the giant bug movie genre. There is no other film that can compare when it comes to variety and overall numbers of giant bugs onscreen or frequency/dramatic intensity of scenes where giant bugs menace humans, suck brains and/or get blown away.
Needless to say, that doesn’t make it a good or likable flick, but (for some) it transcends the film’s other deficiencies.
Never seen the movie but I do recall that there was some poster on the website, a decade ago, who was convinced that it was the greatest film ever made and he waxed poetically about it many many times.
If you search the archives, you might find his posts and maybe it will jog some idea in your mind.
All I recall from it was the assertion that it was satire and, if you understood that, then…
This was the same argument for Starship Troopers, which I have seen, and while I’m willing to accept that it’s satire, I think you could probably only find it biting if you stopped advancing in ethical/political introspection at 12. It ain’t no Dr. Strangelove.
You probably mean lissener who I quoted above. He never said it was the greatest, but he did defend why it was actually good, at least to him.
Me, I don’t think it is good or as bad as many make it out to be. It is mediocre at best though.
It’s also the best [I]vagina dentata[/I ] movie ever.
Really?
Stranger
I have to side with @Stranger_On_A_Train on this one. Aliens is a far better movie in everyway including Bug Hunt.
But the Book for Starship Troopers is far better than Aliens. I did read the Alan Dean Foster novelization and it was forgettable. Even if you have problems with Starship Troopers, I doubt anyone would accuse it of being forgettable.
The operative word in “giant bug movie” is “giant.” Except for the Alien queen, the xenomorphs in Aliens are not giant, they’re just a little bigger than humans. And there is only one queen, as opposed to hundreds of giant bugs in Starship Troopers.
Blurred for grisliness.
That by starring in the film Elizabeth Berkley was actually undergoing the sexual debasement her character portrayed?
ETA: similar to how starring in 9½ Weeks actually was an exercise in masochism for Kim Bassinger.
So I should watch a movie that either 1) I appreciate because I hate it or 2) I should be ashamed of myself for liking.
The only way that would work is if they gave every patron their money back after watching it, and then told them if they want to see it again they’d have to pay for it.
That is definitely a better movie but I never thought of the aliens as bugs (insects) either.
Minor nitpick.
I did enjoy Starship Troopers though. It won’t win awards but it was a fun watch for me.
Yeah, it had fun moments. So did Showgirls. Neither was bad, but neither were good either.
The marines did, though 
“Is this going to be a stand-up fight, Sir, or another bug-hunt?”