Hacker Cinema
Starship Troopers
1997 · Film · 129 min
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
AdventureActionThrillerScience Fiction
Set in the future, the story follows a young soldier named Johnny Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry. Rico's military career progresses from recruit to non-commissioned officer and finally to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an arachnoid species known as "the Bugs."
59 positive33 negative15 mixed73 neutralfrom 180 commenters
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202 comments on Hacker News
Nerdsniped by Starship Troopers, I think it's important to make the distinction there between a direct book adaptation versus "a movie inspired by".
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
'Children of Men' is probably the best contemporary example of this - appalling book that informed a piece of cinema that's basically beyond reproach.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Yes, that's what I'm meant, I just worded it ambiguously. Let me make it more explicit:
It was disliked by:
- Fans of Heinlein, who took offense at what they thought was a satirical misunderstanding of the source material.
- People unfamiliar with Heinlein, and also with Verhoeven, who failed to understand the movie was satirical and thought it was actually endorsing a weird mix of Beverly Hills 9210 and fascism.
In case you wonder, I have read Heinlein (not just Starship Troopers) and know what he meant. I also appreciate Verhoeven!
> Starship Troopers movie
This movie is so misunderstood. It's basically disliked by Heinlein fans who took offense, and by people unfamiliar with both Heinlein and Verhoeven who thought it was actually Beverly Hills + Space Fascism without irony.
I like it for what it does, but I'm more of a fan of Robocop.
> somehow I don't think that is what Carpenter was going for.
Same deal with the Starship Troopers movie. When Helldivers first came out, it was really incredible to see how many people truly didn't get the irony.
Th amount of conservatives/republicans that love Starship Troopers (the film) because they take it at face value is pretty scary. The ones that call it poor satire are especially…interesting.
They continue to prove Verhoeven’s point many times over even decades later.
Same goes with Starship Troopers - Clearly biting satire, but at the time was considered to be a dumb action movie by most.
Many US citizens didn't get that Starship Troopers was a black comedy. There are serious video reviews taking it seriously as an action movie where the characters are true US heroes.
I have a feeling these people are the same as the ones you're talking about.
Verhoeven makes some extremely heavy handed satire.
A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.
You got it: I wasn't addressing the movie or the book itself but the general ideas about moral developed in your precedent post.
Antibiotics are obviously mass murder toward bacteria, that's exactly their function I guess? Using them to cure a life-threatening infection (bacterias) isn't seen as immoral by most, neither do I. May you point out what part makes you think otherwise?
I agree that slavery is not morally acceptable but i'm not sure to follow you point afterward. Perhaps you rank slavery as the worst moral practice and as some humans still enslave others, the movies's characters that don't are "morally superior"? That's a fair and rational view. I also see invasion, violence and a lot of sadism from the humans in that movie. I don't give them a moral advantage.
My whole understanding is close Slg post [0] about the fascist critique. It's also a very popular view: A quick search on internet return many articles in this frame and as you referenced "director's commentary":
1 > I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism
0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982514
1 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl
>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?
Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.
In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.
Ain't Art grand?
I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.
They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.
Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.
from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/anti-fascist-leanings-paul-verhoeven-starship-troopers/
> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.
I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl
For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:
sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.
But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/-em-starship-troopers-em-one-of-the-most-misunderstood-movies-ever/281236/
https://screenrant.com/starship-troopers-movie-meaning-fascism-military-explained/
From Wikipedia:
> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.
Starship Troopers (the movie) is a terrible example of satire because it fails to show anything substantially bad. When you present a society that's more ethical than real life, nobody's going to care if some people wear uniforms that look a bit like Nazi uniforms.
There is a genuine existential risk, and it's addressed in the best way possible. Military slavery ("conscription") is more evil than disenfranchisement, especially when citizenship is not required to live a good life. Nobody is tricked or coerced into signing up for military service. Potential recruits are even shown disabled veterans to make the risk more salient. There are no signs of racism or sexism.
Other objections are not supported by the film. There is no suggestion that the Buenos Aires attack is a false flag. I've seen people claim it's impossible for the bugs to do this, but it's a film featuring faster-than-light travel. The humans are already doing impossible things, so why can't the bugs? I've also heard complaints that there is no attempt at peace negotiations. There is no suggestion that peace is possible. It's possible among humans because most humans have a strong natural aversion to killing other humans. Real life armed forces have to go to great lengths to desensitize their troops to killing to prevent them from intentionally missing. But humans generally have no qualms about killing bugs, and the bugs in the movie never hesitate to kill humans.
The movie is an inspiring story about people making the right choices in a difficult situation. Some people look at it objectively, and some only react to the aesthetics. Those who look objectively understand it's actually faithful to the spirit of the book despite Verhoeven not intending that.
What is it with people feeling compelled to talk about starship troopers movie being different (lesser) than the book?
Like, there's not that much to the book. It's a decently written "joins the military" story with a couple of well developed characters and one unique idea about sci-fi warfare (the suits spending most of their time jumping, which in retrospect would just make you a giant target...)
None of this is bad, it's just like, there's dozens of other mil-sci-fi books and yet everyone has to jump in and go "but the book is better!!!"
There’s Toy Story 1-4 on there and Star Wars Force awakens, but for popular films it doesn’t have the incredibles, no Star Trek (perhaps include ii), few/no bond films (Casino Royale?), few Miyazakis (Nausicaa, Mononoke), not many Tarantinos (hateful 8), not too many Burtons (Batman 2, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow). Is there any Indiana Jones? Could include Starship Troopers.
Agent Smith is 1/3 of Trinity. C'mon, that's right in the face.
In the flanking symbolism (three figures, a central one flanked by two others), Trinity represents the flanking formation itself.
Agent Smith represents one of the flanking figures that disconnects from the main formation. He's basically Furiosa.
Similar flanking trios are seen in Star Wars (Han, Leia, Luke), Starship Troopers (Rico, Carmen, Carl).
Somehow, it also alludes to the popular trope of "protagonist, girlfriend, best friend" seen in many popular movies, and dissected in The Truman Show.
This has nothing to do with AI agents. Some of those ideas go back millenia in the past.
I think the writers were high as fuck and thought that we computer people see this as "the operating system of society" or something (because they're full of bullshit just like that).
Whoever wrote the screenplay or script for the movie definitely read the book.
Several Starship Troopers movie scenes are lifted directly from the book, almost word for word.
Starship Troopers is the darling du jour online for this phenomenon.
A movie lampooning militarism, xenophobia and… armoured supersoldiers grinding through bugs and taking their resources? Sounds cool.
Compare to games like Factorio and Helldivers 2. About 1% of the time I think “wait, am I the baddie?” and the rest is just raining down technologically enhanced Armageddon to further my mineral stockpiles.
I appreciated the change to make Chani fill a role like Sherif Ali in the film Lawrence Of Arabia (the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, if not the film, is plainly a huge influence on Herbert's Dune, and it's probably impossible for a director to film so much as a scene set in the desert without thinking of Lean's film).
So much of Dune takes place inside people's heads that it's basically unfilmable if you don't make some changes. Plus, even with five hours of film, you're going to be cutting whole scenes from the book whether you want to or not. Lynch's solution was to make it a more straightforward hero's journey—and given the length of his film, and no expectation of sequels, I can't really blame him. Villeneuve had more space and so could tell a darker and more foreboding story, closer to the original, but still needed to externalize some of that internal struggle and foreshadowing, for which he used, especially, Chani.
[EDIT] Oh and as for this:
> I know its nerdy but I absolutely hate when movies of classic books think the story needs to be changed
Every now and then such a deviation ends up being excellent as its own way, while still benefitting from the connection to the original and being better as an "adaptation" than an independent property. Verhoeven's Starship Troopers would be one of the more extreme examples of this kind of outcome. A gentler one might be Kubrick's The Shining.
And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.
Starship Troopers. Nothing like the movie, more of a political science treatise and tactical analysis of how power armor would work.
Convinced me to join the Marines out of high school. Then 9/11 happened and that choice got... not so great. Got a clearance and EW training out of it, and that worked out okay in the long run, I guess.
Unashamed capitalism is a bit of a trope in sci-fi, reminiscent of Starship Troopers (the film) and Helldivers (spreading Democracy in space!); it being over the top is its own kind of criticism.
There's a ton of discrimination in where you shoot and with what.
Yea, the basic enemies on the easiest difficulty levels can just be shot with maximum pew pew. Then you encounter the bug that has a bullet proof headplate and it sticks it down to the ground like a shield when you start shooting - and your bullets will ricochet from it, possibly hitting your teammates if you just go hog wild on it.
Then there are the bigger enemies that have specific weak points - usually on their backs and sides, where you can't shoot but your teammates can when it focuses on you.
And the automatons shoot back, pretty accurately from far away.
The difficulty is pretty dynamic too, there are rules on how it works, but you very rarely get a break in the fighting and on higher difficulties running away is an important skill - you don't get points for shooting every enemy on the map, you just waste limited ammunition.
And then there is the plot with an actual human GM deciding what happens instead of some algorithm combined with nice immersion and a bonkers Starship Troopers-esque (the movie not the book) world.
To me, there is something intrinsically goofy about space marines going out to fight the insectoid aliens, even when it is not as much on the nose as e.g. Starship Troopers. It is also not meant as a negative, I really like the movie for what it is.
Thank you for the interesting write-up.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk
Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that <i>Snow Crash</i> is satire, I recommend reading <i>Headcrash</i>, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to <i>Snow Crash</i>. If <i>Snow Crash</i> is the original <i>Robocop<i> (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then <i>Headcrash</i> is Paul Verhoeven's <i>Starship Troopers</i> (completely over-the-top).
> like Gibson.
It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it.
Almost everyone gets a gritty <i>Blade Runner</i> image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin.
Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. <i>Johnny Mnemonic</i> (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of <i>The X-Files</i>.
I don't think it's fair to judge how good a movie is based on how faithful it is to a book. They're different media entirely and you don't have time in a movie to get into the substance of a book. Movies usually leave fans of the original work disappointed, series are much better at that cause they can take the time to develop characters and go into multiple arcs. On a less philosophical example, Reacher is a good example to me of a movie that has nothing in common with the book apart from some names, and a series that is spot on.
On top of that, it's another piece of art. Directors should be allowed to provide an opinion. Take Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship troopers as an example, which is widely a critic of the source material. They're both different stories in their own right. I enjoy both of them differently, and I'm glad Verhoeven didn't go out of his way to relay the message that militaristic dictature is the way to go.
This take reminds me of how Stephen King considers Kubrick's The Shining a terrible film[1]. I had the misfortune of accidentally renting the Stephen King approved The Shining miniseries[2], and I have to say - it's worse in every way: slow, plodding, and forgettable. I can't comment how either compares to the book - I've never read it - but the Kubrick version is the superior film.
This is all a long way of saying that faithfulness to the source material is overrated in film. Some written works just don't work well when closely adapted to the screen. A few notable movies even manage to twist the original to express a completely different idea or theme (e.g. Starship Troopers). The original author is not some ultimate authority regarding the meaning of a work.
[1] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-stephen-king-hated-stanley-kubrick-the-shining/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(miniseries)
In Starship Troopers (the book), I'm pretty sure the ptoagonist (was it still Rico?) was Phillipino. Almost wonder if Heinlein might have drawn on this episode as inspiration for his ideas around service for citizenship.
Starship Troopers movie is great, and I'll die on this hill.
Glad this film wasn't made. It would've been less accurate to Herbert's vision than Starship Troopers was to Heinlein's.
Marrow - A group of people find a Jupiter sized ship of unknown origin and start a galactic cruise with many different species in the far high tech future.
The Stars My Destination
Starship Troopers - very different from the movie, sci-fi classic. Even on the Marines reading list.
Forever War - partially on Earth most in far flung space battles.
The Martian - solid Jew hard sci-fi again very different from the movie
Plenty more but, sadly sci-fi falls under Sturgeon's law.
I think Starship Troopers explored this a bit, but I only saw the movie and never read the book.
The film is a satire of fascists propaganda, and as good satire often it, it is also an good example of fascist propaganda, just like Snow Crash is satire of Cyberpunk while being a good Cyberpunk.
The book isn't exactly fascist though. Verhoeven said he didn't read the book and does not plan to, so he is satirising somewhat superficially.
Heinlein did explore a lot of various political systems in his books, and I think Starship Troopers is focusing most on voter engagement - how people who vote should know something about what they vote on, and that is why only those who served (which includes military but also other "national service" like being a worker colonising planets or postman or whatever) get vote.
Is that fascist? I don't think so. Is it a good political system? I don't think so either but it is a good enough idea for a book.
In both the book and the film Starship Troopers:
* persons can choose whether or not to do government service
* Rico's parents are quite rich even though neither are citizens
* the Moral Philosophy class tries to _discourage_ individuals from government service
* the instructor for Moral Philosophy explicitly tries to get the students to think for themselves
In the book but not the film:
* the only benefit of government service is the right to vote
* only veterans (i.e. no active service members) can vote
All of these (and more) are contrary to fascism. The book is not fascist. Verhoeven never read the book and didn't satirize fascism -- he satirized a _caricature_ of fascism.
It was satire by someone who absolutely understands how satire works. Starship Troopers, the film, is brilliant.
The same director did Robocop, and if you don't get the genius satire of that, then I can't help you.
> Similar on how people got Starship Troopers wrong. Is not about cheering fascism, but to ridicule it.
Well - the film also had a disconnect with the book on the topic of fascism. The book was more on the pro-fascism side.
I think the humans in Starship Troopers (even in the (first) movie) are the good guys. What do you expect a humanity fighting an existential war to look like exactly? Current-day Ukraine under what is pretty much martial law is not exactly a liberal utopia.
Well, Starship Troopers (the novel) came out in 1959. Warhammer didn't arrive till 1983.
But I guess it's plausible that the depiction of the Arachnids in the 1990s film adaptation took some inspiration from the Tyranids. Which, in turn, might have been inspired by the novel's Arachnids...
For my part, I just don't get the point of writing this.
Within the part of the article that's actually about the game, the author does basically nothing but scoff at things like the "workmanlike", "not ... subtle", "primary colors" nature of the story, or the "cheap, sparse, painfully plastic-looking sets", or how the characters use the callsign rather than the full real name of a fallen soldier during a funeral. There is almost nothing there about the story itself or its characters.
I played this game a lot as a teen, and I thought the story had a lot of deeply sympathetic characters and emotionally resonant themes. It felt great to be the protagonist who uncovers fascist treachery at the top and averts a war. It felt great to do that with a team of comrades who shared your values and vigorously debated tactics. None of that gets a single word in this review.
Of course not everyone is going to agree about what's a good movie, but I thought it deserved better than a collection of nitpicks that doesn't engage with the story at all. It seems like the critic just wanted the game/movie to be in a different genre, something more sophisticated or "subtle" with more "shades of gray"? But what's the point of that? It seems like criticizing Saving Private Ryan for not being Apocalypse Now or Starship Troopers. Okay, it's not the type of movie you wanted to see, I guess? But isn't it a little cliche, in itself, to reflexively disdain everything that is straightforward rather than meta, ironic, deconstructive, and self-referential?
Starship Troopers is a great movie. It starts as every silly archetypal superhero movie but ends up being much more profound.
Yes, I agree with the short story part, these are attractive to film makers and for instance I think all of the good Stephen King films are based on his short stories.
I always though Man who fell to earth (Bowie) was an (unofficial?) version of Stranger in a strange land, I can't think of any other Heinlein films apart from Starship Troopers (which is a pretty short story and nothing like the book).
If you're interested in a more thorough elaboration of his political conception, I would read 'On the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and Other Human Institutions' in its entirety - it's the essay from which OP is excerpted.
Here are two different translations (good for comparison, since the flow is somewhat lost from translation to English):
https://archive.org/details/essayongenerativ00mais/page/n11/mode/2up http://maistre.uni.cx/generative_principle.html
One of my favorite passages is from the preface:
"It is written, by me kings reign. This is not a phrase of the church, a metaphor of the preacher; it is a literal truth, simple and palpable. It is a law of the political world. God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races, maturing them under a cloud which conceals their origins. They appear at length crowned with glory and honor; they take their places; and this is the most certain sign of their legitimacy. The truth is that they arise as it were of themselves, without violence on the one part and without marked deliberation on the other: it is a species of magnifcent tranquility, not easy to express. Legitimate usurpation would seem to me to be the most appropriate expression, (if not too bold,) to characterize these kinds of origins, which time hastens to consecrate."
Funny about 'Starship Troopers' - the consistent association of the novel (and I suppose the film, when taking as non-satirical) with fascism comes off as to me as the pot calling the kettle black. Heinlein was undoubtedly a liberal, very much influenced by Lysander Spooner and concepts of self-determination. Maybe - just maybe! - "liberalism" and "fascism" have more in common than what conventional separation of these concepts permits to good sense!
Why does "hacker" equate "has consumed all the scifi works under the sun"? I've watched the Starship Troopers movie, but have otherwise no idea who Robert Heinlein is. (And I only found out that he wrote it by googling the name.)
I watched starship troopers a few weeks ago.
It's one of those movies that I've maybe seen 2-3 times but mostly while it has been on TV, punctuated by adverts.
Finding it on [Streaming platform] and watching it properly all the way through with zero distraction was bliss. The satire is still as great today as it was when it first came out.
If you watch some of the in-world adverts, they remind me so strongly of the live-action cut scenes in the command and conquer games and they have a similar humour.
Here is a collection of some of the movies that I have liked the most
- The Matrix (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/
- Gremlins (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/
- Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/
- Sneakers (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
- Tron (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/
- Jurassic Park (1993) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/
- The Terminator (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
- Back to the Future (1985) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
- Dark City (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/
- WarGames (1983) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
- Starship Troopers (1997) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/
And there are many more as well :D
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
Am highly thinking parody, based on the textual tagline to sign-up for email... "Do you want to know more?", is straight out of the Starship Troopers movie...
OTOH, this solves the problem of skeletal remains when people "Eat the Rich!" - we can just sell them back to the rich - talk about genius late-stage-capitalism startup!
A more interesting discussion IMO can be found here, mostly focused on why audiences of the day didn't see the film as satire, but basically as a return to goofy 1980s movies:
https://collider.com/starship-troopers-audiences-susceptible-propaganda/
> "Perhaps it was the lack of any clear dystopian imagery in the day-to-day life of the Federation's populace (that any lesser film would have insisted on spoon-feeding to its audience) that resulted in the joke getting lost. It seems that without that heavy nod to the audience to telegraph that what they're seeing is intended to be seen as satirical propaganda, Starship Troopers is basically identical to any other war or action film produced by Hollywood."
> "The valorization of not just individual soldiers, but also of the military institution and its noble purpose; the careful casting of attractive actors, backed by teams of make-up artists to depict what is supposed to be the average, everyday soldier; the insistence on portraying the enemy as a faceless and malicious entity, motivated by a singular desire to destroy all that is good and civilized… These are all common themes that everyone can recognize."
A similar movie, though not intended to be satire, was "Invasion USA" starring Chuck Norris (1985), featuring black-clad communist commandos invading Florida and launching an all-out assault on churches, family dinners and Christmas trees, shopping malls and local city councils, only to be thwarted by the martial arts hero. Here, the bugs are played by creepy Soviet agents and their Cuban sidekicks, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITEod2_WHoU
The relation between this movie and the original book is quite unique actually:
>Verhoeven tried to read the novel but "stopped after two chapters because it was so boring ... it is really quite a bad book ... it's a very right-wing book." He had Neumeier summarize the narrative for him, and found it militaristic, fascistic, and overly supportive of armed conflict, which clashed with Verhoeven's childhood experiences in German-occupied Netherlands during World War II. Verhoeven determined that he could use the basic plot to satirize and undermine the book's themes by deconstructing the concepts of totalitarianism, fascism, and militarism, saying "All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)
I've not seen the movie. BUT - just from comparing the actual book (written by Heinlein, (c) 1959) with the Wikipedia page about the book...I would not take the article too seriously. Starship Troopers seems to be a book which lots of people "know" about (and have very strong opinions about)...but where the actual contents of the book regularly and repeatedly contradict what most people "know".
When young, I generally attributed this to malice, stupidity, etc. Now, I'm more inclined to figure "the most revealing things which people say are their lies". [Not sure who the quote is from.]
Verhoeven, who lived through Nazi occupation as a child, created the film. Initially it had nothing to do with Starship troopers, but gained branding rights later on at which point the original movie (Bug Hunt at Outpost 7) was merged. Might you ever, in a million years, want to live in the world he builds? No, nobody* would. Yet could you imagine reasonable people finding allure in the ideology that's represented? Absolutely.
Verhoeven doesn't really misrepresent that ideology, but instead also shows it leads to an absolutely horrific world without ever really appealing to any unimaginable scenarios. In other words he's not trying to show that the ideal is "evil", he's trying to show where it can lead. And this is far more compelling than modern satire of a similar nature which fails because it largely focuses on trying to make the ideals themselves so unimaginably evil that nobody could ever possibly be genuinely drawn to them without exceptional "otherizing", perhaps contributing to the ever widening perception gap. [1]
This issue is perhaps once of the many reasons history seems to just play on an endless loop. In an effort to emphasize how wrong the past was we demonize it ever more. Yet if one goes out seeking the Devil, a grizzly beast wielding a pitch fork, forked tongue, and flames lapping about him, then you'd certainly never to stop imagine that the otherwise normal looking man in front of you is one and the same. The more we demonize the past beyond recognition, the less there is to learn from it.
[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/
"Starship Troopers" is clearly a propaganda film created in a future militaristic society, something like "Why we fight" of their time. Would you like to know more?
Another excellent example of this was Starship Troopers. There were those that 'got it' and those that did not [1]. The one critical thing about subtlety versus overtness is that the former may be understood by a smaller chunk of your audience than the latter, but it will tend to leave a far greater impression. A point lost on much of contemporary Western media.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/11/11/goosestepping-at-the-movies/83272787-18ae-4126-b8c4-3d46b1b31277/
I keep thinking about the Republican Space Rangers TV show from GTAV every time the Space Force is mentioned. So I can't take them seriously anyway.
They're a branch of the military, and every other branch has a theme song, so I guess they get to have one, too. I'd have picked the theme from Starship Troopers, but I wasn't given a vote for probably that reason.
To spoil Ender's Game a bit: the bugs were initially hostile, in a very "we genuinely don't understand non-hive species" way such that they were intensely horrified when they realized that all the people they killed were individuals. They were then purely on the defensive as humanity launched the second war.
In Starship Troopers (this varies between the book and the movie), as I recall, the bugs are more or less a peer species to humanity. They're engaged in territorial struggle, which escalates to war. (The movie version engenders a lot of debate over whether the inciting incident of the war was a false flag by the earth government.)
Eh, is it really "dodging that"? If an alien landed on our planet, took over our resources, filled our air with mutating pollution, and shot at us anytime we tried to take them back, we wouldn't give them a pass just because they were trying to leave :D
I always kind of embraced the idea of being the bad guy in this game. I find the ease with which I (and others) just kind of shrug it off intersting.
A more stark example would be the movie Starship Troopers: superficially, you might feel like the "bugs" are the bad guys, but take a step back and you realize that the humans are the ones attacking them.
... when does the actor's race matter? It would when the story is about racial tension, I suppose: it'll be a century or more before you could have a white actor play Malcolm X. But most of the time, it doesn't matter that you've recast, say, Johnny Rico from Starship Troopers as a white character.
Regardless, the criteria above about actors needing to match their characters in every detail is risibly ahistorical and unmoored from any principle of film or theater; it's pure applesauce, rationalization pretending at erudition.
Neither did Verhoeven, he apparently only read a couple chapters and had an assistant summarize the rest (https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-troopers-director-never-read-the-book/). So I wouldn't assume that the movie strictly adheres to the events laid out in the book.
Yeah, Starship Troopers is honestly pretty brilliant. It's an in-world propaganda film complete with commercials. And, like most propaganda, comes off as super silly to us as outsiders.
Watched it for the first time a few weeks ago and found it fascinating. Just like his later film Starship Troopers, I love how Robocop works on two levels, and I'm amazed how many people don't (immediately) understand the underlying satire.
>Wouldn't call it fascism though
If you focus more on the kind of world Robocop occurs in rather than the plot, it's easier to see elements of it. Robocop is celebrated in-world for his violence (see, those normal cops weren't able to be violent enough without head-to-toe bulletproof armor and full-auto pistols) as a solution to social frustrations (high crime and corporate greed) and reinforces their hero culture through his sacrifice. There's even a secret conspiracy/plot between those two frustrations and a sub-plot about labor organizing.
But, at the end of the day, it's hard to have an action-focused cop movie without some of these things so we're sort of desensitized to it.
Starship Troopers (also directed by Paul Verhoeven) is even more on the nose about it. The plot itself is just a goofy sci-fi military movie but the human culture in it is absolutely terrifying.
"Starship Troopers" (the film) had an asteroid as a city-buster.
I totally get that. But.
He could have picked a different franchise (or created a new one) instead of hitching the movie's title to a book with a totally different message and atmosphere.
I wanted to see something darker, something about a kid growing up into an officer. I wanted to see Jonnie realize how much trouble he was in and feel lucky for only getting a few lashes, and I wanted to see Zim give him a microscopic bit of comfort just before that sentence. I wanted to see a father and son reunite for 45 minutes at the starport, and the proud father bounce off to his new ship. I wanted an exploration of morality in military service as a mirror for how we guide our own lives in the real world. I wanted to see the stupid powered suits, okay?
Instead I got a terrible political commentary with bad acting. He could have done that with his own story (wait, he did).
I don't know why the film was called Starship Troopers. Oh wait, I do; it was a money grab. Verhoeven didn't even finish reading the book.
Starship troopers gets a lot of flack -- "Based on the back cover of the book by Robert A. Heinlein" was a popular critique, "90210 in outer space" was another, and Doogie Howser (as NPH was them known) wasn't a great casting choice IMO -- but the special effects are flawless and Peter Venhousen really nails underlying themes of the book and the anti-bug propaganda. I don't know anyone who saw the film and didn't want to go fight the bugs - thank goodness he wasn't remaking Triumph of the Will.
I read an internet review of Starship Troopers so good that it made me go and watch that (terrible) film again.
Took me a few minutes on DDG, but enjoy: https://agapow.net/misc/humour/starship-troopers-a-review/
I'd recommend another Verhoeven film, Robocop, over Starship Troopers.
And as far as sci-fi movies which are deeper than one might expect, I'd also recommend the original Planet of the Apes and its early sequels.
Then there's Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven masterpiece of layered meaning and interpretation. On the surface it's a jingoistic pro-military recruitment poster as movie, full of shallow facile characters. But oh boy, if you read between the lines there's no bottom to how deep that movie goes.
Also both movies have Michael Ironside, which is always a plus.
Teacher: Why are only [veterans] allowed to vote? Student: It's a reward for doing government service. Teacher: No. No! Something given has no value.
Teacher: What's the moral difference between a civilian and [veteran]? Student: A veteran accepts personal responsibility for safety of the body politic, defending it with his life. A civilian does not.
-Starship Troopers classroom scene https://youtu.be/EBxgrr0wL8M (Heinlein had some weird ideas and the movie's satire isn't obvious enough to those who most need it to be.)
The best response to "Starship Troopers" is "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman, which gives a great account of the use of propaganda to manufacture a war.
The movie is a terribly stupid take on a very good (and widely, perhaps deliberately, misunderstood) book.
It says a lot about Heinlein that he wrote Haldeman to praise his take on the subject.
I’ve personally only read Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, that said Stranger in a Strange Land came really early in his career.
My understanding in my comment comes almost entirely from the discussion in this episode of Alienating the Audience
https://alienating.libsyn.com/episode-5
Thank you for reminding me again of starship troopers. It is a great movie and in my experience has quite a bad rap amongst the "intelligentsia", mostly I think because people just go off the trailer and dismiss it as a "stupid alien action movie". When I discussed the satire, images etc with people they often look at me like I'm crazy.
I think that's the mark of effective satire though - or it can be, I'd say there's a spectrum. Some satire needs to call itself out to the audience - make it clear what it is going after, and why. Others is the latter half of it - and Starship Troopers is definitely in this category - play it so straight that you do have to actually key in to it, and it might not hit right away.
I was early teens when I watched it, so while the "do you want to know more?" definitely hit as a "okay this is kind of absurd" we were definitely there for action and bugs exploding. But it certainly hit different when I revisited it and you realize just how effective a satire it is at pretty much every level.
And I think that's the important part: you can totally miss the point of the movie, and that's basically critical to it's message: it is written and structured as fascist propaganda, and the fact that that can seem reasonable if you accept it uncritically is the message - it's a whole movie which very subtly is pointing out that fascism and its death cult heroism worship is exactly that, but because we dressed it up to look pretty while making what's happening abundantly clear on screen (you die horrifically in a pointless war), you're almost thinking this is reasonable.
I remember watching it as a teenager back in 1997. I was the only one laughing in the cinema, it was just hilarious.
It immediately dawned on me after though: why was no one else laughing, really? In Austria of all places.
Hadn’t anyone else paid attention during history classes - at all?
Continuously chilling yet I’ve never been really surprised by the creeping normalcy of fascist thought since the 90s - in part because of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers (1997) is an interesting movie that is basically a “war propaganda” movie seen from the viewpoint of a fascistic government. The whole point of the movie is to make the enemy seem like “the other” , and in this case these are actual alien bugs in the movie. All of the human characters in the movie are beautiful and everything on “our” side as we view it is shiny and “the good side”
Paul Verhoeven also deliberately made the first scene shot for shot similar to a german Nazi propaganda film.
The whole movie is to make you root for “our side” and demonize the other. I personally didn’t realize this fully when I watched it, which makes the process so insidious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
I'd argue that if you need a palate cleanser after reading Starship Troopers, go watch the Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers which is "surely you can't be serious about this!" take on Heinlein's book.
Verhoeven famously gave up on reading Starship Troopers after a few chapters, calling it “boring and depressing.”[0] He was a kid during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands and couldn’t stomach the pro-war, pro-military, openly jingoistic messaging. He had to be talked into making the movie, and only then when he was allowed to put a satirical twist on it. It’s quite a good trick he pulled!
[0] https://www.looper.com/358395/the-real-reason-the-starship-troopers-director-never-read-the-book/
Just noting that Starship Troopers the movie has a rather different flavor than Miller's film adaptations, as regards what people recognize as ironic, or earnest, or problematic.
That was quite a "one-of-a-kind" experience for me with Starship Troopers. The movie was straight up taking the entirely predictable "Atlas Shrugged, but with commie space insect alien warfare" book source and turned it into a satire on the original material. And not just that, they executed it masterfully.
I've never encountered anything like that since then, and if someone has suggestions of a similar "source material => adaptation" experience, those recommendations would be heavily appreciated.
The great thing about this is how many people first experienced "Starship Troopers" through the Verhoeven movie, which was, in retrospect, incredibly subversive; like, he actually reclaimed the work from its author. A neat trick!
Here's my recommendations without any particular order and just books ive read recently and havent sorted into the library.
Factfullness by Hans rosling: The world is awesome, stop focusing on some tiny negatives that are being mispresented by the media.
Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: Contemporary top scifi author
Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein: The movie was awesome, until you read the book and see the movie as an abomination.
Pheonix and Unicorn Projects by Gene Kim: Devops > ITIL.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: Stoicism, how to be a good leader, how to live life.
How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie: Everyone should be forced to read this multiple times. I really need to re-read.
Lying by Sam Harris: Seriously don't lie. You'll find things get better unexpectedly.
12 rules for life by Jordan Peterson: Here comes the downvotes.
I agree. The majority of the reactions here to Foundation seem exactly the way I felt so many years ago to the Starship Troopers movie. I hated seeing it in the theater with a passion and it was because I was one of the people that read and enjoyed the book. Even today when the ST movie is talked about as a cult classic I bristle a little bit - but I can see now it is good as a movie unrelated to the book and a disappointment to a fan.
Foundation is the most confusing show for me. Somehow it's telling a story which is completely unrelated to the books, while also faithfully recreating certain key moments from the books pretty much exactly as I imagined them; it manages to completely ignore all of the themes and indeed the core thesis of the books, but somehow still feels respectful in how it presents the universe; I feel bad that some of my favorite parts of the original story are all but certainly written out, but I love that I have no idea where this is going.
It feels a lot like the 1997 Starship Troopers movie where it was initially supposed to be an original work, but the studio said "hmm that's kinda like this classic story, can you turn this into an adaptation?" and the writer said yes but their fingers were crossed.
Starship troopers in particular has a very curious relationship between movie and book. Where the book manages to glorify the military the movie deliberately chooses an ironic treatment of the characters and plot elements to form the book’s antithesis. The movie is best enjoyed by not trying to fit it into the mold of the book, and vice versa.
I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!"
I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.
Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.
Their success might be the main reason I no longer go to the movies. I like sci-fi action movies like Starship Troopers, Terminator, Alita: Battle Angel, Total Recall, Avatar, The Matrix and such.
But these days no one seems to care for such products. What makes the big bucks seems to be super heroes made by disney. Would have been fine had they not have completely taken over the market now.
Yes, I'm an old fart and movies/TV is targeting the young population. Totally normal. But am I just old and bitter, or is this superhero trend just marketing? I think it's mainly the latter.
It just says a lot about your “taste”. You may not like the lack of character building in Jurassic Park but you can’t deny the amount of work that went into practical effects in order to make that movie (same with Every single Harry Potter movie by the way).
Same thing with Starship Troopers which by itself is also quite a funny piece of political satire apart from creative use of gore and trashy characters.
What is arthouse for you? A man and a woman speaking french and driving into the sunset?
RoboCop and Starship Troopers are both far headier movies than what a lot of arthouse snobs would consider high art. And they actually made money!
You can deliver a quality film with a substantive plot while still making an action movie for the masses.
I'm just as into film as you are, if not possibly more so, but please just fuck off with your snobbish anti-Hollywood nonsense. Most of Europe's actors, directors, & what-have-you all work in Hollywood from time to time to eat.
Shit, while we're on the topic of Paul Verhoeven, the guy made the most successful (most seen) film in the history of Dutch cinema (1973's Turkish Delight) and put Rutger Hauer on the map with it. And did it again later with The Fourth Man (loosely remade later as Basic Instinct) which was a global hit and the most financially successful film made in the Netherlands.
I guess I have this thing, I had never heard of it before but I have it based on Wikipedia's description, I also have very few memories of my life, which can be disturbing, maybe this is why.
For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into.
e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book)
Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring.
How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything?
On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
Hmm... maybe its my german heritage, but i don't see Starship Troopers as THAT dystopian:
Every politican has skin in the game (mandatory military service for gaining the right to vote or be voted for)
No racism or sexism or other discrimination, at least there are no traces for that in either the movie nor the novel.
If you don't want to join the military: No problem, you don't have any major disadvantages (besides no political participation), see the wealthy family of the protagonist.
Science seems to flourish
Ehm... sorry for the digression... what were we talking about?
It's why we don't see many satirical films in the same vein as Robocop and Starship Troopers anymore. It would be something that the Chinese censors would never allow. Whether it's the over the top violence or the skewering of the state and corporate power structure. Stuff like that annoys the Chinese govt more than most, so Hollywood would just bow out on such a film
It's funny how many strange one off films and games are being made online through crowd funding now (not all are good but a few are decent) due to this global pleaser approach to film making.
I heard the movie was basically ready to go when someone noticed how similar the story was to Starship Troopers. They had to get the rights just to avoid a lawsuit. I'm not really sure I agree on how similar they are.
The director, Paul Verhoeven, has been very interested in World War 2 and has in fact made multiple movies set in WW2. The satiric elements in Starship Troopers and its parallels to Nazi Germany (and especially the propaganda elements) were definitely intentional.
I’m still not sure what Starship Troopers even was. Was it a comedy, satire or just a flat, wide-eyed warning about war and nationalism in the vein of WW1? It’s a movie that starts in a regular high school, dating, and (spoilers ahead, NFSW ahead) continue with most of the crew being eaten alive, slowly, in full view of the camera, while begging to be killed. The seriousness of the nationalism in the movie and the following / preceding carnage, the apparent lack of irony and the characters basically having the acting skills of cardboard cutouts sort of make it into … something I’m not even sure what.
It’s like an army recruitment movie for a losing war except this one continues to film after the cadet signs the papers, and then and follows him on camera to his horrible, painful, slow death. Then unironically waves the flag at the end and with a number to call for more info.
It’s either so good that the entire movie is a hilarious deadpan parody about horrors of war, or it’s so bad it’s inadvertently become that. In either case, it’s definitely something. It reminds me of the Wilfred Owen poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est
> Con Air and The Rock were not written by a writer as good as the ones you mentioned but they did have the right actors to make those movies really enjoyable for a lot of people. I would submit the actors salvaged those movies.
I mean we can expand the scope of the conversation and lower the bar, but the article writer's scope seemed to be one of being "on a quest for the one-in-a-hundred experience" to which I was responding to the dearth of such.
Are Jerry Bruckehimer movies really one-in-a-hundred experiences?
I mean I get where you're coming from: I loved and still love Starship Troopers but I'm not gonna assert its high-value cinema or on the level the article writer is seeking.
Friends is some of the most mindless television I've ever seen but its basically the most popular and successful TV show ever, so what do we want to measure?
Starship Troopers but they were more of a "Black man dies first in horror movie" type role.
Unfortunately, many contemporary American critics completely missed the point of Verhoeven's not-so-subtle dystopian critiques, presumably because they were so accustomed to reviewing films featuring the unironic glorification of state sponsored violence.
See also: Starship Troopers.
The novel of Starship Troopers doesn't really work as a comparison, IMO. Verhoeven basically didn't read it and Heinlein had different goals. Even if you believe that Heinlein was writing satire, the satire is way more apparent in the movie.
In comparison, the popular consumable representation of the imperium is just straight up good guys. You have to dig into the novels (which only a small number of people read) before you find any of the satire.
Charles Stross has a short story called "Missile Gap", which I heartily recommend. Just mentioning it relating to this topic is a bit of a spoiler; it contains the line "Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds". It appears to be online here: https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/spring_2007/fiction_missile_gap_by_charles_stross
I can't think of any where a civilization coalesces or evolves into one being and that gets explored in depth; only where it happens briefly "and then they uploaded/transcended/melded with the God-entity, the end" style. I suspect it would be hard to imagine being in a single superintelligence, I can only think of them seen from outside by ordinary humans. There are a few I can think of which have one-mind/hive-mind ideas on the small scale:
Starship Troopers, the enemy bugs are insect-style intelligences where only the queen is really sentient and the rest are worker-drones.
Joe Haldeman's Forever War ends with a reveal of the enemy being a hive mind of some kind, and it was all a mistake. Seen from the human side with no exploration of the enemy except that they exist.
Peter F. Hamilton has this idea in a couple of his books; one is Morning-Light-Mountain[1] which is an alien hive-intelligence which outcompeted all others in its solar system. The other is a trans-human faction starting to go the same way, "multiple-people" who clone themselves and have brain implants to sync their brain state into one mind shared between all their clones. Only on the small scale of a few dozen bodies, not a competitive intelligence. They're smaller plot parts in large space operas.
John Windham's Midwitch Cuckoos, the alien children are believed to be a hive mind, as teaching something to one of them turns into something all of them can do. Also seen from the outside, we never find out about their origins or the adult aliens.
(In the film Avatar, the aliens have a tree where they can tap into the wisdom of their ancestors, it turns out to be a kind of hive-mind of the dead).
[1] https://peterfhamilton.fandom.com/wiki/Morning-Light-Mountain
[2] https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2019/03/01/rogue-farm-by-charles-stross/
I'm of two minds when it comes to this issue. I quite liked Fight Club precisely because in my younger years it was 'macho porn', but it left me with some thoughts that later on bloomed into understanding that the film is really criticising all of that.
I've had similar experiences with other works. Starship Troopers isn't quite the fascist power-fantasy that it appears to be on first sight. American Psycho can sorta be seen as a power fantasy, initially, but it's really about a pathetic guy struggling in his environment. And so on.
I don't feel it would do the world a service to criticize these (initially) ambiguous works because they're not spelling out the message they contain. And so while I often liked Ebert's reviews, I felt he was judging Fight Club in precisely the superficial way that doesn't do it justice. I imagine he might review 'Lolita' as a work glorifying adults loving prepubescent girls, when clearly the book isn't really doing anything quite like that.
Err, I suppose the counterpoint in my 'two minds' perspective is that I do get that there are cases where it does feel like the 'criticism' is a flimsy excuse to revel in its opposite. I don't think that applies to Fight Club, but it's an edge case. Better examples would be shows like Breaking Bad. I enjoyed that show a ton, but I could not find a proper excuse to watch it other than 'crime porn'. Any 'message' it tried to convey was clear from the first season. We all kept watching because we loved to see how bad Walter White could get.
Your third point is the second most important, but the most important is number one by far. People are willing to let social media turn into a shitshow because they're not invested. It didn't cost them anything and it doesn't continue to cost them anything, so it has no value.
Starship Troopers (both the book and the movie) hit the nail on the head... "Something given has no value."
> When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?
- Yes he did, I reckon that’s why this is such an underrated movie. American audiences largely didn’t pick up on the sarcasm.
> No one looks at each other. No one flirts. A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.
- Not quite true. Rico and Flores do end up shagging
Wanted to add this RE the shower scene in Starship Troopers:
"Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."
Felt like it needed the starship troopers sort of treatment as a movie.
You don't read Frozen. You watch Frozen.
You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.
As much as I understand the more nuanced messages which could be taken out by a more sophisticated audience, much more so, I see the impact the movie has on actual real-world little kids.
I both read and watched Starship Troopers as an adult.
> Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself.
Reading Frozen as teaching that is like reading Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers (which, sure, is abysmal on all sorts of other grounds) as an endorsement of Fascism.
Yea, those things occur in the movie, but the movie is quite specifically about it producing bad outcomes that must be dealt with by people doing exactly the opposite.
Something that occurred to me last night: "politics" comes from the greek polis (city).
I agree on the spectrum[1] of shared trust.
As for the state/non-state status of loosely connected cities, consider the case of my own: in the thirteenth century it got a charter of freedom from the bishop who previously administered it as property of the diocese, and in the fourteenth century its self-administration was formalised to the point of reporting directly[2] to the Holy Roman Emperor.
As modern wags have said the HRE was none of the three, I believe that means that a free city was much more on the state[3] end of the spectrum.
For an example of how recent nationalism is, Triumph of the Will has a scene[4] where a Nazi repeatedly calls out "where are you from, comrade?" and is answered by another Nazi proudly saying "I'm from X" (where X ranges over locations around the country), which I take to imply that in the 1930s, part of what Hitler had been selling was the notion of a Deutschland that was superior to the sum of its regional[5] affiliations.
[1] Pedantically, my usage of granfalloon is consistent with Vonnegut's, as he explicitly uses "Hoosiers" (a demonym for the state of Indiana) as an example of a granfalloon, so if regional identities already count then national ones certainly do. (End of Pedantry)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_imperial_city
[3] During its quarrels in this period with neighbouring Ducs and Freiherren, my city deployed its own military, both building and sacking castles, in pursuit of its own foreign policy.
[4] anticipating the Starship Troopers movie's "I'm doing my part" commercials.
[5] I don't know where you're from, but although in our day I think the idea of a german nation (especially post-reunification) is very strong, regional dialects remain more actively differentiated than in, say, france.
> These kinds of articles have been detrimental to a lot of impressionable young people
This article is a satire, similar to Starship Troopers movie
~~~
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)#Critical_response
"too damn well-made for its own good" and said that it confused audiences and critics.
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Similarly, "How to get promoted" may be confusing. But you may also use these "tips" to identify [and fire] employees which try to abuse your corporate promotion system.
I agree with much of what you say but I’m still optimistic that smart, high concept genre films can be made with integrity and turn a profit without the need for calculated compromises or a kind of censorship against anything being too cool or interesting to the point of alienating 1/2 people. But it’s possible that a film like The Matrix, as an example, is about as good as SF/Fantasy could possibly get and we should count ourselves lucky that films like that sometimes are made and become successful.
Take Starship Troopers for example. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who dislikes that movie. It almost seems like everyone between the ages of 10 and 20 when the movie came out has seen it in some form. But it seems like a movie such as Starship Troopers would be impossible now, especially with its satire intact. I often feel like we are regressing in many ways as a population of mature adults and the overall state of the film industry suggests exactly that. I remember hearing Spielberg talking about how he can’t get funding to make theatrical releases anymore. Even Spielberg has become high risk. What are we even becoming as people?
But I digress. I hope the trailer for Dune is slightly misrepresenting the film. I want fantastic cinema to make a comeback.
That's a new take on Starship Troopers I've never heard before.
The entire movie is supposed to be a pro-military propaganda film for that specific universe. One cannot be a citizen without military service. They even used child soldiers [0]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_7FaWnlhS4
Another way the movie Starship Troopers would predict the Iraq War.
mostly because it's way too on the nose
You say that and yet so many of its critics at the time did not get it. It is among the most blatant of all satires (right up there with Idiocracy) ever made, yet it still flew over the heads of critics like Roger Ebert [1].
Ebert claimed to have memorized the novel as a child. Right out of the gate, he calls it "true to its source." No, it's completely antithetical to its source! Verhoeven hated the source novel so much he turned his adaptation into a farce intended to depict how banal and juvenile he thought Heinlein's idea of a militaristic society was. Now, plenty of people disagree with Verhoeven and love the novel, but it's completely incorrect to call the movie a faithful adaptation.
The film was simply operating on a level that people were not prepared for at the time. Today, it's a different story. Of course, it borrows heavily from Huxley's Brave New World which itself is terrifyingly prescient (and also faced criticism at the time). Some stories might just be ahead of their time. Over-the-top satires of contemporary society seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon.
[1] https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/starship-troopers-1997
Ehhh. I don't think I'd rate Starship troopers in my top20, or even top 50 films I've seen.
Its kind of straightforward to me. So I'm not really going to defend it. Its neither high-brow nor low-brow... requires a bit of thinking but not really enough to keep my brain active the whole time.
A movie that was more-low brow (ie: Mission Impossible) would be better, as would a high-brow movie. Starship troopers kinda sits in an awkward spot as a film for me.
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I think the point that David Roth is making here however, is that we're seeing more, and more politicians make "Starship Trooper" arguments today, in 2020, to defend themselves and their actions.
Starship troopers was never a "good" or "great" film. Its more horrifying to see that the modern political discourse has leaned into Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers was a over-the-top, almost cartoon-interpretation, of political satire. The fact that modern arguments of 2020 are looking anything like Starship Troopers is the problem.
Star Wars leans on Nazi symbolism and fascist themes, it doesn't wade neck deep in them. People don't try to defend the weaknesses of Star Wars by saying "But it's such a great satire", they don't have to because the franchise stands alone.
Whenever I point out the fact that Starship Troopers makes zero sense and is just a plain bad movie, the singular response I get is that "It's great political satire". Again, maybe it is. That's not the genre of movie I was interested in watching, it still isn't.
Also, for what it's worth, the only Star Wars movie released in the 90s was The Phantom Menace which was nearly as bad as Starship Troopers.
As for Starship Troopers, you really could call it a flop. It cost $105m to make and the US box office was $22m. Since then it has made $121m, so barely a profit.
I'd put Starship Troopers in the "bad" category because it is really campy. It is so on the nose that it becomes absurd and funny (past the on the nose that is annoying). It reminds me of a scene in Birdemic where they are like "Man, that was a good movie: An Inconvenient Truth." which was thrown in out of nowhere as if the writer only read the summary on the wikipedia entry for "foreshadowing" and said "oh, I need some of that in my story." In Starship Troopers it is undeniably clear that they are drawing parallels to Nazis, they even make fun of this in this article where they talk about the identical flag. Everything about this movie is extremely over the top. But this is also what makes it so funny.
Enjoyable and a lot of fun, but definitely in the bad movie category.
This is why people put it in the "bad movie" category. It is very campy. But if you like bad movies, Starship Troopers is great. That said, I also love The Room and Birdemic.
By coincidence the Youtube algrorithm landed me on the very first re:View the other day where they explained the distinction between the type of movies they would feature on Best of the Worst vs re:View. Basically, BotW would be for "so bad they're good movies", movies that are truly awful but have redeeming quality in their ability to be laughed at, whereas re:View would be for movies that they think are truly good but are not as well known today, or at least not known as good movies today (as is the case for Starship Troopers).
What do you mean by "bad" though? "Bad movie" is a genre. Starship Troopers is SUPER campy. Entertaining? Yes. Campy? Also yes.
The movie is great. But it falls into the "bad movie" category because it is campy. "Bad movie" is more a genre. And it is hard to argue otherwise with Starship Troopers because it did poorly on release and got popular during the same time bad movies became popular (there's also a strong overlap between lovers of bad movies and Starship Troopers). "Bad" here doesn't mean unenjoyable, really the opposite.
Starship Troopers isn’t a bad movie.
product placement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0
(somewhere I once ran across a discussion of "Starship Troopers" the book vs. "Starship Troopers" the movie, complete with a matrix of reactions depending upon how ironically one thought the ideas presented in each should be taken)
> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
The brain in brine thing reminds of the queen insect in Starship Troopers.
That last scene with Neil Patrick Harris' character also destroyed that movie for me.
I LOVED those books in high school! After rereading them a year or so ago, they are pretty indebted to Heinlein and Starship Troopers, but still entertaining. He also goes into preachy libertarian sometimes. This was the guy who wrote the "Trouble with Tribbles" Star Trek episode, which explored some of the same ideas.
Also, be prepared that the series was never completed (IIRC he had a son with autism that took time away from writing).
So hear me out. Although Metropolis is a milestone in technical cinematic terms, the actual story is silly, the moral at the end is patronising, and the sci-fi content is weak, even for its time. So the modern equivalent would be something with a huge budget, flashy production and amazing special effects but with a rubbish story. Something like Starship Troopers maybe (although thats actually quite good as a satire). Or maybe 'Cowboys and Aliens'.
When you watch it and it seems a bit hokey, don't make excuses for it. It most probably seemed equally hokey to people at the time. For example here's a contemporary review by H. G. Wells:
The film’s air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence. It has nothing to do with any social or moral issue before the world or with any that can ever conceivably arise. It is bunkum and poor and thin even as bunkum. I am astonished at the toleration shown it by quite a number of film critics on both sides of the Atlantic.
https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2018/07/h-g-wells-reviews-movie-metropolis/
He sounds like a fan of Starship Troopers (that or the Gemcraft games) - if you haven't seen it, it's a great movie.
Enjoyed the books (and even the movie) He was a bit weird but the concept of earning citizenship as depicted in starship troopers always intrigued me.
> Your points are all well-made, but I don't know if a message has to be surprising to be worthy of studying, whether satirically or otherwise.
For satire to work, the message must be surprising either in content or in context. Sure, the effectiveness of fascist propaganda is worth studying (in both the investigatory and artistic senses), but I don't think Starship Troopers does so effectively, and particularly not as satire.
> It's in conversation with its genre of 'science fantasy action schlock'
I might agree that ST does not completely fail as somewhat meta-level (and cautionary) satire of the way that 'science fantasy action schlock' (and war porn more generally) function as militaristic authoritarian propaganda simply by being so deliberately modelled on and prominently incorporating heavy-handed fascist propaganda and still succeeding, enough to foster production of sequels, largely as 'science fantasy action schlock'. I don't think that was Veerhoeven’s intent.
> It's cautionary less in the direct sense of "Nazis are bad", than "Take a closer look at the mythologies you believe in".
I don't disagree that it wants to do that. I just don't think it produces the level of identification needed to do that effectively. I don't think audience members see thenselved and their own mythologies in the movie’s Johnny Rico, and his transition from doubter to drone in the militaristic mythology to which he is subjected.
Here's kind of the definitive analysis of Starship Troopers the book, how well it works, Starship Troopers the movie, and where the movie didn't work in the same way the book did: http://www.kentaurus.com/troopers.htm
> The film is a straight up criticism of fascism and authoritarianism
Well, dull, shallow, heavy-handed mockery more than criticism, but sure.
> but it's not a criticism of the book
It is in exactly the sense that it is of fascism and authoritarianism.
> because Verhoeven only ever read one or two chapters of the book.
...because by that point he was convinced of it's fascism and militarism, and felt he didn't need to read more. See, e.g., his response to a planned reboot that would hew closer to the novel: https://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/
That is just an ignorant statement.
personally I only like "Starship Troopers" and would say he was one of my most disliked SciFi writers. It just feels like a Hippie fueled throw up to see what sticks on the walls, minus Starship Troopers and why did they make that movie when it didn't have anything that the book had to say in it?
Bear in mind that the project wasn't originally connected with Heinlein at all, but was originally titled Bug Hunt. Only later did Verhoeven and company come across Starship Troopers, realize that they could actually get the film rights, and rework their existing script to (kind of) match the novel.
No it's not, but the movie was.
Just check the wiki page, he wrote it himself (under Major Themes, Militarism): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers
And it's also a good example of how the lines delineating satire can be fuzzy. (Hence </s> tags and the like.)
After all, as you suggest, you don't have to approach Starship Troopers as satire. I think it's a better movie viewed through that lens. But you can absolutely watch it as a straight (and not very good) adaptation of Heinlein's novel.
> Starship Troopers was an A+ movie masquerading as a B movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.
Starship Troopers is great on multiple levels, ranging from a fun action movie I was sad to see and to a commentary on Nazi Germany.
Starship Troopers was an A+ movie masquerading as a B movie.
I think that, like Mars Attacks and Starship Troopers, it's a movie that one benefitted a lot from expecting a B- or C, and being pleasantly surprised by a B (or B+)-ish experience.
I adore the film adaptation of Starship Troopers. It was the right way, I think, to bring many of the themes of the book to cinema. Particularly it’s strong satire of modern militaristic hubris.
I’d imagine a similar treatment might work for the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, unlike the Netflix’s the Expanse where it devolved from excellent work building into a single overearnest spaceship crew solving all the solar system’s problems.
I'm not totally sure what Heinlein intended from Starship Troopers, but my favorite reading is the movie, which I think definitely is _not_ what Heinlein intended, but I like better. The movie turns into parody what I think Heinlein took Very Very seriously.
I think Starship Troopers is outright the best of all of Robocop's sequels.
Yes, it is fascinating how divorced the book and movie are in what they think they have to say. I've always felt that Robert Heinlein was more of a provocateur than often given credit for, and while a strange adaptation, I think the movie still has an interesting conversation with the book. I'd like to imagine Mr. Heinlein would also have found it an interesting conversation.
In a way, that's very strongly one of "old guard" Sci-Fi's best qualities where (mostly short) stories flew back and forth on similar topics in conversation with one another. The movie manages to touch on many of the same topics and poke and prod at them and say "I think it would turn out this other way", and that's very much an interesting Sci-Fi conversation, whether you more appreciate the book or the movie they are still saying interesting things to one another (and both strongly in ways specific to their medium, which is also fascinating).
> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic.
The novel was certainly militaristic, because the protagonist is in the military, and also in the middle of a war. The society described in the book does not in any way appear to be fascist, however. I think it is completely reasonable to ask whether such a system really could exist without being fascist, but the fact is, as described, it's not.
In the novel, the human government requires 2 years of service before adults get the right to vote. One important aspect of the system is that if someone wants to serve, then the government has to take them. Even if you were blind, if you wanted to serve, the government would have to find something for you to do for two years. And afterwards, you'd have the right to vote.
In the book, most Earth adults have not served and consequently can't vote. But on some other planets, almost all adults have served and have the right to vote.
Lots of movies have done a disservice to their source material, but in the case of Starship Troopers it has always seemed particularly unfair to me. I know that lots of people (not all) who have read the book feel the same way.
Late to this game...
Galaxy Quest
V, but the original miniseries from the 80's
Close Encounters
Dune, this is controversial I'm sure!
Starship Troopers
The Day After Tomorrow
The Fifth Element
Terminator I
Alien
Aliens
Tron, oh god I nearly forgot this one from the 80's!
I think the biggest benefit is video calling. Get your parents one, get one yourself, schedule a video call with them once a week (or whatever). Easier than Facetime since you don't have to hold up the phone. Reminds me of the videophones in the Starship Troopers movie.
I thought Starship Troopers was a great movie. It was a satire in the same style as the original Robocop.
Verhoven did not share in Heinlein's militaristic vision of the future where only citizens are granted the right to vote. The movie so blatantly portrayed humans as fascist that Neil Patrick Harris was wearing an SS uniform.
As both an overall fan of Heinlein and of his Starship Troopers book, perhaps I'm in the minority in that I also liked the movie.
That said, I don't take it too seriously which arguably misses any intended satirical point. As you say, to the degree that I found the movie more amusing than serious satirical commentary on Heinlein it may well have failed in its purpose.
> the knife throwing scene in the Starship Troopers adaptation
That was on purpose. Verhoeven allegedly didn't read the book (which I doubt) and set out to create a parody of it. The movie is ridiculous because it is supposed to be ridiculous, mocking the US military as dumb hicks (enlisted AND leadership), its culture and its purpose as "fascist" and pointless, in 1997, at the tail end of a relatively peaceful period with no major conflicts for the US.
I suspect the scene [2] is a reference to the book chapter where a soldier is executed for mutiny, which Heinlein uses to demonstrate why a wartime military has strict discipline and which Verhoeven openly mocks (indeed Zim's speech about why infantry is needed in the nuclear age [1] in the book answers the same question as the movie scene).
I have not watched the new Ghost in the Shell but I doubt the director set out to ridicule the original, so the spirit of your remark still stands.
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Chapter_5
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNhYJgDdCu4
I've only seen the movie, but this sounds like the type of society espoused by Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers where "service guarantees citizenship"
Starship Troopers was written by Robert Heinlein, who attended a service academy and was an officer before WWII. The fact that it's science fiction somewhat obstructs the satire present, namely citizens' relationship to war and violence as a national value. The movies are basically entirely unrelated in this way.
e: Heinlein wasn't in the Navy during WWII.
Since my name is a bit personally involved into this debate, I have to add some arguments:
* Doom was only considered art by some people to prevent the German or British government from censorship. Remember, Wolfenstein is illegal in Germany because of the swastika, and Doom was banned in Germany for over 17 years for glorification of violence to protect minors. I.e. it could be sold and used, but it was illegal to advertise it. Similar to the movie "Starship Troopers" which was an artistic farce, not even a commercial game.
* The art aspect of Doom officially came with "Arsdoom". Only this game mod was considered art. By art historians and such.
I think this goes for many Verhoeven's movies - lot of them contain a non-negligible amount of parody. But as the common wisdom says, working parody must be a good example of the genre it parodies and Verhoeven's movies are excellent examples of their genres.
At least, I think it works with Starship Troopers, Total Recall and Robocop. I'm not sure what to make of Basic Instinct and Playgirls.
I think he captured Heinlein's fascist streak quite well, albeit while poking fun at it.
Starship Troopers is a very well made movie, quite cleverly constructed. For people without a sense of humour, it appeals to their own militaristic tendencies; it hits two audiences at once.
Said the man who literally wrote "Starship Troopers" a documentary about a fascist utopia.
Would you mind elaborating on this assertion, preferably using direct quotes from Confucius himself?
It's true that Confucius focused a great deal on leadership and the hierarchical aspects of society, but I don't see how he was anymore authoritarian than Plato, whose Republic was much more authoritarian (see the film "Starship Troopers" if you want to see Plato's Republic in action). Confucius' philosophy survived 2,000 years in China because it focused on making leadership wise and just. In fact, for hundreds of years in China, anyone, no matter their background, could rise to leadership if they could demonstrate an understanding of Confucian philosophy. That seems pretty egalitarian to me.
> Would the 1998 Starship Troopers movie have been released based on the 1959 book if copyright had been at its original 14 years?
Certainly, and it might have been made sooner, but not having to pay royalties to create a derivative work would definitely not stop someone from making it.
> How about a lot of the "cult classic" works of today that only became really popular and earned money tens of years after their original release?
These later creations would attract new audiences to the original authors newer works. Its not a void where your public domain creations are gone and no longer influential.
> we'd have the same state of affairs if the incentives we can gave people to create creative works automatically expired after their death.
Can you find any evidence of independent IP creators exclusively working under the pretense of being able to will their IP to descendants for profit?
The vast majority of writers, musicians, photographers - any creative profession - are never in it for money. Because very few people can make money from these professions even with draconian IP, because its a popularity contest. You get one in a thousand that become popular successes, while the rest create out of passion with no expectation of profit. When the vast majority of creative IP is being made without profit motive, obviously copyright terms are uninfluencial upon all those except the successful - it goes as far as the existence of IP hurts the hobbyist creator because they have to navigate a minefield of how derivative their ideas are.
> I'm not advocating 14 years; I think 28-56 is fair.
As I said I don't agree with the current state of copyright and think it should probably be much shorter, but it's interesting that discussions on this matter are rarely backed up with data. Why do you prefer 28-56 over 14, or 28-56 over 18-46?
Before you mentioned that "every artist on this list is dead" as if it were patently absurd for copyright to survive the author. Maybe it is, but to use my previous example why would a talented author is his 80s with young children write another novel if that were the case instead of going into the real estate business?
> Yes, a Starship Troopers movie would have been released with > shorter copyright terms. It is cheaper to make a movie if you do > not have to pay for the IP.
You have to factor in movie studios being reluctant to base their works on public domain work because it makes it harder to create a franchise out of it. With a big hit like Starship Troopers being in the public domain nothing's stopping some other studio from releasing Starship Troopers 2, or selling action figures with that name etc.
It's sometimes advantageous that a work you want to use is copyrighted, because that means you can secure exclusive rights to publish a derived work based on it.
When Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, copyright was 28 years, or 56 if you are approved for an extension. I'm not advocating 14 years; I think 28-56 is fair. Clearly Heinlein would have written the book under those terms, because he did.
Yes, a Starship Troopers movie would have been released with shorter copyright terms. It is cheaper to make a movie if you do not have to pay for the IP. Movies based on expired works are common, like Disney's movies based on books by Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. Derivative works can be very profitable.
I don't agree with the current state of copyright, but I think pointing out that every one of these people are dead is a nonsensical argument. The question is what incentives should we give people to create creative works, and what should the cost to society be?
If you're a smart guy with Robert Heinlein and copyright is more limited to a few years would you ever have written Starship Troopers? Or would you have gone into something like the real estate business which can last generations and keep your children and grandchildren happy & fed after you're long dead?
Would the 1998 Starship Troopers movie have been released based on the 1959 book if copyright had been at its original 14 years?
How about a lot of the "cult classic" works of today that only became really popular and earned money tens of years after their original release?
I don't know what the right answer is, but it's a fallacy to assume that we'd have the same state of affairs if the incentives we can gave people to create creative works automatically expired after their death.
Music is critical to star wars. This film is scored to the standard of the originals.
// Music in star wars
Sound is critical to Star Wars. There's lots written about this, http://houstonsymphonyblog.org/09/15/before-luke-skywalker-there-was-siegfried/
Examples,
* IV. Luke Skywalker watches the binary sunset, and feels the pull of the force. The force theme has been hinted at previously, but is played more richly here.
* VI. Interplay between themes in the space battle/endor/emperor chamber. Use of the imperial theme, the rebel alliance theme, troubled variations of rebel alliance theme. Tension, victory.
* Leia's theme. In the original trilogy, Leia is constantly successful and ends each episode on a joyful foot. Yet - her motif is distinctly melancholy. Why? What is the darkness in her future that earns the troubled motif?
Williams is a master. His tunes from the original films worked well then, and have stood the test of time.
// The prequels
The prequel scoring was awful.
The 'trick' in Anakin's motif was unsubtle and uninteresting. There were no interesting new motifs, and they watered down some of the existing motifs by applying them to purposes that they weren't suited to.
Either Williams was left out of the creative process, or he treated it as a time+materials job. There's nothing interesting there, and it's over-egged in the films.
// Episode VII
As I was waiting for the film to arrive, I was wondering how it would compare for music against the original and prequels.
Several segments were scored as richly as the best bits of the original. Example: the scene where they launch the Millennium Falcon.
There are strong new motifs. Kylo Ren's motif is good, and gets used well. For example - the battle after the first light-sabre scene.
The plot has been taken in a direction that satisfies Leia's melancholy motif.
Disney has brought in a team who know what they're doing. Nice work guys!
// Other
Away from music - I was disappointed at the Poe situation. If you're going to stamp out a new series by sticking closely to the old formula, at least stick to the formula!
The original films were edgy. Esbalished characters were killed off (Luke's relatives, pilots), and Han shot first. We should have seen blood at the crash site, and no more of Poe. Killing off an established character is part of strong writing.
Not enough female characters. Rei is good. But only one? All the nazis - why are they all men? Poe - could have been a woman (and then she could have been killed off). Even the author of Buffy makes a Star Wars film dominated by male characters.
Back to the Nazi thing - this has been pretty heavily played out. Davros and the daleks were fun. Starship Troopers. But it has been thoroughly picked over. Old is boring. Find something new. Why not do something with the samurai themes, feudalism?
There were too many strong American accents. Cushing made sense with a strong English accent in episode IV because it helped establish the idea of /empire/. But strong American accents are a distraction in the star wars universe.
I loved the monsters in the freighter. The Tai Fighter hijacking was cool.
Fin worked. Hope he evolves into a badass and not a comic relief character.
Kylo Ren is a strong addition. He is a powerful /angry young man/ character. Another nail in the coffin of the originals - fabulous. His accent is fine.
As another writer comments, the tributes to the original films were excessive. Everyone has seen the originals. Get on with it. Hopefully this is a one-off cost.
The droid is excellent.
Starship Troopers, the movie, wasn't intended as a satire of the book, it was intended as a satire of fascism. The original screenplay was percieved by some involved to have some similarities to Starship Troopers, the book, so the film rights were picked up and some cosmetic changes to the script made. I think that is a pretty shallow and uninteresting satire of what it targets, and that it further suffers from being tied into the book -- which Veerhoeven admits that he read very little of -- which gets it viewed as simply a hostile reaction to the book or an even weaker satire of the book (compared to how it is as a satire of its actual target.)
I don't think it was misunderstood; it was just a poor job of being a satire of the book. To properly criticize a subject, /you have to take the premise seriously/, which is what Verhoeven didn't do.
The premise, the basic engine of the book, is a young man's coming of age story into military and society, and his longing to reconnect with his father. It's not really about fascism or propaganda. This shows that Verhoeven didn't really even care to understand the book. He critiqued what he thought it was about.
This is a longer post I wrote on reddit back in 2013:
"I argue that's why it sucks as a critique, because it just allows you to laugh and blow off the propaganda as fluff, instead of taking it seriously.
What's scary about Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, etc. is how many people fall for it and then commit horrible acts, believing they're doing the right thing, while getting teary-eyed for the state.
When you read Starship Troopers, you find yourself getting a misty-eyed sentiment for the corps and "The Brave Sacrifice that our men and women make..." and then you think "WTF? This novel is about space bugs. Holy hell, this propaganda shit works!" and you begin to realize how insidious and effective the propaganda truly is.
When you watch Starship Troopers, you just laugh and say "Oh, what a ridiculous movie. Ha ha ha, isn't that funny." You don't fall for the propaganda, which is what an effective critique would have you do. Instead, you can stay above it and laugh condescendingly at those poor idiots who do, and then get eviscerated by space bugs. But you, as an audience member, are too smart for that, because you can clearly see that it's a sound stage. It allows you to remain safe in your comfort zone, whereas real art would expose you to your own vulnerability.
It's like the people who think they're getting a dig in on Hitler by calling him an "asshole" and saying "Fuck you, Hitler!" Sorry, not really the level of critique and understanding we need for Nazism. That's not a strong-enough tearing apart of Nazism.
Likewise, we need something stronger then a self-aware B-flick science fiction parody to criticize Starship Troopers. It doesn't really do the job. It's not a critique of the book, though it is a critique of militarism and state propaganda.
A true critique of Starship Troopers would address the actual mechanisms that Heinlein employs in the book, such as nostalgia, camaraderie, and espirit de corp, or the main character's estranged relationship with his father, and the role that seems to play in his finding fulfillment in military life. It's actual military service and culture, not state propaganda, that informs Rico's beliefs and feelings in the book.
Instead we get a movie seemingly inspired by Starship Troopers, taking place in the same universe, but not actually dealing with the themes presented in the book. And at that, a boring, B-grade science fiction parody that's supposed to be interesting because it knows its a parody wink, wink. It's not a criticism of the book."
"A criticism is basically a comedy, and a comedy has a straight man and a clown. In a parody or a farce, the comedic target is the buffoon, and the audience is the straight man who's job it is to say, "Hey, get your act together, stop fooling around!" But the mechanism of the comedic critique is that the target is too stupid to know better, and continues acting the clown.
When the movie is winking at the audience, it's not the clown because then it's in on the joke. Being over the top and cheesy, we know that the movie isn't taking itself seriously; it's playing dumb instead of being actually dumb. It's saying "hey, isn't this silly" instead of presenting actually silliness. As the audience, there is no position for criticism because the movie already knows it's misbehaving. It's our role to say "hey, this is silly", and when the movie does our role for us, it's boring because it allows us no participation.
Take this scenario:
Man on sidewalk: Hitting head with hammer.
Passer-by: "Hey! Don't do that! You'll hurt yourself!"
Man on Sidewalk: "But how will I get rid of these lice!?"
That's a comedic scenario (regardless of its quality). The Man is doing something actually dumb, being a buffoon, and the passer-by is criticizing the action, being the straight man. Now take this:
Man on Sidewalk: "Hey buddy, wouldn't it be silly if I hit my head with a hammer, like this?" Hits head with hammer "It's that crazy?"
Passer-by: "Yeah, that's crazy".
That's not a comedic scenario because the Man on sidewalk has taken both the roles of buffoon and straight man. In presenting the action as stupid, he's also acting as the straight man, his own critic, and the Passer-by has no role in the interaction; he adds nothing, he just agrees with the Man.
When you read Starship Troopers, its presented sincerely, at face value. That leads you to take it seriously, think about it, question it, arrive at your own conclusions. You play the straight man, questioning the actions of the guy on the sidewalk.
The movie is presented as a farce, a joke, "Hey look at this, isn't this ridiculous?" "Yes, it is, why am I watching it?" It's clearly over the top, an exaggerated caricature. It doesn't lead you to think deeply about the issues presented, it allows you to blow them off as silliness and fluff. There's no role for you here, nothing to engage in. You just agree: "Yup, this is totally ridick!"
It's like getting 1984 wrong. These books are seminal in American and trans-Atlantic thought about government and the individual. It's too important not to do the best job at."
The movie was deeply satirical, but the book wasn't (either that, or the satire was well masked).
For instance, Haldeman (the author of Forever War) is on record stating that Starship Troopers glorifies war, and he's not the only one.
I don't think the author of this post ever actually read Starship Troopers, I imagine they've only seen the movie, since the book is hardly pro-war.
Its what happened with ST as well. The Wikipedia page for the movie covers it pretty well, with sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_%28film%29
"I, Robot" was a great movie, but not based on the book.
"Starship Troopers" was, as I like to repeat a quip, "based on the back cover of a novel by Robert Heinlein".
"Frozen", while not involving a contract to the long-deceased author, is allegedly based on "The Snow Queen" though I fail to see the connection.
There are numerous other examples of a movie being almost entirely unlike the book for which rights were purchased at significant cost. Producers seem to often go to great lengths to ensure an even tangentially involved author is at least satisfactorily paid. Sure, there are famous examples where the reverse is true ("Forrest Gump", IIRC), but it seems in everyone's interests to err on the side of generosity where due, lest a case like this one codify outright screwing of the sources of ideas - and their eventual defense in substantially less profitable ways.
I was thinking, "Atlas Shrugged, what the fuck?" but then I re-read the title of the article. As is [ironically with a sense that is lost upon them] common to admirers of Ayn Rand, the author feels compelled to "should" on their readers. I was warned.
I've read most everything on the list, though the dead horse of Animal Farm was first beaten for me in sixth grade...and that was long enough ago that Cold War MADness was a reality in the days when "PG" on a movie meant "tits" and Murray and Ramos could parody the US Army...if the list has talking animals, where is Watership Down?
But I digress...
A few years ago, I came back to science fiction and started reading the Hugo Award novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel#Winners_and_nominees
What I found is that the list gives context to the novels...the line of telephones ringing are forgivable in 1985's Neuromancer in a way that they wouldn't be in a movie made today. The competence of the grunts in 1960's Starship Troopers is a reaction to the USMC in the Second World War and the experience of the US military during the shooting phase of the Korean War. 1998's Forever Peace shows how much computers changed the meanings of "combatant" and "battlefield" in the subsequent 40 years.
One of the other interesting themes of science fiction is the evolution of the post-apocalyptic world. The alien invasion of 1950's Day of the Triffids and the pandemic of 1949's Earth Abides [not a Hugo Novels] giving way to the nuclear wastelands of 1961's Canticle for Leibowitz's and 1966's This Immortal [when Zelzany's novel tied Herbert's Dune for the Hugo and rightly so].
By 1996's Diamond Age or 2010's Windup Girl the apocalypse is a slow moving tragedy of the commons brought on not by rash misunderstanding but by long term economic rationalizations...bringing us full circle, and you were warned.
Your comments on school history etc are completely valid in the context of inference.
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
https://www.declara.com
>Star Trek, bad sci-fi writing, unbelievable monsters, magic science, red-shirts, ridiculous sets with no purpose and humanoid aliens-of-the-week
as they say, can't see a forest for the trees :)
Relax, man, you don't like it, obviously. Tastes are different. Galaxy Quest is a nice funny movie, Starship Troopers is a brilliant masterpiece. Kandinsky's black square is just a square a child can paint (i think i drew a lot of black squares among everything else while dreaming at classes in school).
I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes back as a robot. Awesome.
I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.
If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.
The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.
Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals means, for you, that Orwell failed?
Verhoeven has a history of making completely ridiculous, tasteless movies, with poor scripts, atrocious acting and over the top special effects.
I don't blame people for missing the parody in Starship Troopers, because Verhoeven has consistently made such movies in absolute sincerity throughout his career. I suspect all the praise for Starship Troopers belongs with the writer of the screenplay, and that Verhoeven never had the remotest clue that he was making anything more than another dumb action movie.
The object of the film's satire became front page all around the world in 2001. Until then it was easier to take it at face value. For example, in the 80s it was common to portray torture as a suitable, non controversial means of war in films with well known action stars, without satire or criticism.
Think of it now as Starship Troopers, the George W Bush's cut, without any actual edits having taken place.
I've read the book, and seen the movie. Let me tell you, I can't say that anything more than a skimming of that book is necessary. It's about as one dimensional as sci-fi gets. Worse even than Scott Cards work, and I don't say that lightly. Both Enders Game and Starship Troopers replace that tedious work of actually figuring out what sort of character development you want to be in your story with "young naive guy matures as he learns the value of war."
The movie, for all of its self-aware cheese, has much more to offer.
In-movie propoganda reel from Starship Troopers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faFuaYA-daw Note Neil Patrick Harris sharply dressed in a rather SS-officer-esque uniform.
I'd say it's a tossup.
Multiple sources I've come across over the years have claimed that the movie started out as an original property and only became an "adaptation" of Starship Troopers shortly before it went into production, when the studio realized they had an option on Heinlein's book and that it was sorta-kinda similar. (This is much the same thing as what happened to the movie I, Robot, which started out as an unrelated script, I believed called Hardwired.)
My suspicion is that Verhoeven -- like Alex Troyas with I, Robot -- knew full well that their movies had very little to do with the source material and put on a game face in interviews. I've always wondered if the movie might not have done better in its initial run without the studio forcing that connection onto it. A film can't really be both a military dystopia satire and a good adaptation of Starship Troopers, any more than a brutal deconstruction of Objectivism would make a good adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
I never read Starship Troopers (actually, never knew it existed) but always enjoyed it as a fun movie. I know, fun and dumb do overlap at certain points, and maybe that's why I liked it. I like one of the comments here describing it as "Ken and Barbie go to outer space" or something like that - sums it up well for me.
I love Verhoeven and the long running joke he played at the expense of Hollywood (mostly with Starship Troopers, Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls - Flesh + Blood is great but not as sarcastic as his later american movies).
Starship Trooper, the novel, is hilarious on its own, with its hawkishness and interesting political views (it's less creepy than Ender's Game in that aspect though). But Heinlein is a much better writer than Card and Stranger in a Strange land makes up for the juvenile tripe he wrote earlier. I guess Vietnam had to happen for some people to reflect on the Rah-rah-rah kind of military Sci-Fi.
(I know there's a cult of Heinlein on HN - I've always wondered if there was an intersection with the Cult of Rand and the Cult of Card)
Edit: as a thought experiment, it would be interesting (as in "depressing") to imagine the exact opposite: an adaptation of Old Man's War by the current Hollywood industry.
The central characters in Robocop were treated empathetically, the scathing social satire and black comedy were not central to the main storyline of heroes and villians, so there was still an engaging film even for those viewers lacking the social awareness needed to appreciate irony.
In Starship Troopers, every character was disposable, hence the gigantic 'whoosh'.
I recommend 'Hollow Man', Verhoeven's last, and largely forgotten Hollywood film, released in 2000. It's even more subversive, and the subversive message is even more subtle. So subtle in fact that I doubt even the film's producers were aware of what was going on. It's either a terrible B-grade hollywood sci-fi thriller, or brilliant black comedy, depending on whether or not you latch on to the subtext.
I'd like to like Starship Troopers more but I can't.
Starship Troopers had a couple smart things to say but said it through a shit movie. Turgid dialog, horrible acting, repugnant characters and general cheesiness. I know the writers wanted to say all these people are idiots but society doesn't go astray because everyone is an idiot – you have to show how smart characters are caught in situations that constrain them to be idiots or at least a have few characters that realise the ridiculousness but are overridden or sidelined. You can't just write a bad movie and blame the characters for being stupid.
My standard rule is that to properly satirise or ridicule something, a story must simultaneously be a good example of target being parodied as well as having a strong parody element.
Starship Troopers tries to parody the military machine but it fails because its a terrible military action movie. To be a good parody of the military (and the political and social machine around it), it must also be a good military action film – both levels must work for the film to be good.
I like to give Galaxy Quest as a good example of a film that's both excellent parody and an exemplar of the genre being parodied. It absolutely pillories Star Trek, bad sci-fi writing, unbelievable monsters, magic science, red-shirts, ridiculous sets with no purpose and humanoid aliens-of-the-week but at the same time it has likeable characters, excellent acting, a properly scary villain and has a real sense of "earning" the ultimate victory at the end.
Starship Troopers has none of this and tries to use cheesiness and parody as an excuse for failing to make the movie better. Sorry, I have to evaluate a film based on more than its satirical message.
This movie isn't misunderstood or clever at all. It was originally exactly as dumb as people think it is (working title: "Bug Hunt On Outpost Nine), but the studio realized they could get the license to Starship Troopers for free.
Verhoeven didn't even read Starship Troopers-- he skimmed a few chapters, decided it was depressing and that Heinlein was a fascist, and made the movie a parody of the book, and a lazy parody at that.
When people call this movie dumb, they're completely right, albeit not for the reasons they may think.
If you liked Starship Troopers, watch their straight-to-video sequels. Low production value, kitschy special effects, but written by the same guy.
They're terrible movies really, but a nice dose of the ultra-blatant satire.
I have to wonder if the failure of so many people to pick up on the blatant satire in, for example, Starship Troopers and Robocop is due to something akin to Poe's Law as applied to so many other films which were not satirical muddying the waters.
Dirty Harry is, seemingly, not satirical, yet it is every bit as ridiculous as Robocop.
>>The movie does criticize the establishment, it just stops short of criticizing the actual street cops.
That is what I meant. Contrast that to Starship Troopers, where the military (the organization the main characters are a part of) is spared no criticism.
It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb.
One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of course Verhoeven and Neumeier are right, it does that too). If no one stands up for a society, then that society is vulnerable to predators. Sometimes it's foreign invasion, sometimes it's internal predators like corruption and profiteering. I think this call to have a little backbone is relevant in every era. (This position is straightforwardly argued by the mouthpiece character, Dubois.)
And another issue, a little less prominent but often-criticized, is the idea of only giving the franchise to those who earn it. Heinlein later wrote that he wasn't so much advocating this particular plan for the franchise, (e.g. forwarding an alternative: only give the franchise to mothers!), but that he felt that democracy was going in a bad direction (bread, circuses, demagoguery, and holy-war-style partisanship), and that maybe this "franchise-for-all" premise should be revisited.
Why do I think Verhoeven was spitting in Heinlein's face? I probably shouldn't try to paraphrase Heinlein, because he was a complex guy with complex political opinions, but I think he generally favored military strength (though he generally did not favor a strong central government). I'm not as familiar with the Verhoeven oeuvre, but seems to be focused against military-industrial complex (though that's more straightforwardly a Robocop thing), and his anti-war rhetoric is so un-nuanced (it's so slapstick that some people thought it was pro-war) that it's tempting to believe he's anti-all-war (contrasting with people who think the phrase "just war" is meaningful, a group I feel confident includes Heinlein). As I said earlier, I think it's a bit tasteless to try to make a franchise work into a direct attack on the original.
For some contrast: IIRC, Haldeman wrote The Forever War in part as a direct reply to Starship Troopers. Haldeman had lots of direct combat experience, too (as contrasted with Heinlein, who I think never saw combat), which partially informed his views on books like Heinlein's. Personally, I think The Forever War is too good at raising new issues to be seen entirely as a reply to anything, but I understand that was a motivator.
I watched Starship Troopers a few months back. One of the thing I loved the most about the movie is those TV segment where it just broadcast propaganda and always ends with: "Do you want to know more?"
It remotely felt like when I read 1984 for some reason. Couldn't entirely tell why.
It's funny the article mentions rifftrax. For their halloween special they did a live performance over night of the living dead. One of the jokes during the movie was the fact that online bloggers will never stop trying to educate the rest of the world about the brilliance of starship troopers.
Heinlein is generally better read as a libertarian, possibly to the point of anarchist. He wrote about Fascist societies, but reading both his fiction and his nonfiction does not generally lead to the conclusion that he considered this desirable or stable.
I think the people who get that he's a fascist are making the mistake of assuming that because an author writes about it, they are endorsing it. This obviously falls apart under any sort of thought whatsoever, but that's more thought than most people give it. Alternatively, they get it from the Starship Troopers movie, in which IMHO the director misread Heinlein as a fascist, leading everyone else to the same conclusion by the nose. This is not the best source from which to conclude anything about Heinlein; I think it was a good movie on its own merits but little of Heinlein's politics shown through.
In N-Space, Larry Niven directly addresses another example of this; Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominion future, in which their co-written A Mote in God's Eye takes place, is set in a galactic empire consciously set up to be feudalistic, including starting from a fairly idealistic conception of feudalism where obligations are bi-directional, and decaying (in the sequel) into the sort of feudalism where the nobles begin to consider their privileges their right without any corresponding responsibility. Neither author is endorsing this political structure, per se, but observing the course of human history, one can not deny that under the right circumstances feudalism could very well rise again, and it can work well for a story.
I don't think many will get this reference to Starship Troopers, a rather good film in spite of its reliance on endless gore.
The problem is not prior art, but the descriptive or generic nature of the term.
Just because there's a software company selling music or even a music label with trademarks on 'Apple' doesn't mean I cannot call a song about apples 'Apple Song'. See the case cited in section b of [1] as to why 'space marine' might not be the best choice if you want to put a trademark on a book's title.
'Prior art' is helpful insofar as it establishes the nature of the term in question. The term 'space marine' is not as widely used as I initially believed (eg it's neither used in Starship Troopers nor Aliens, and might not be in Starcraft - did not verify with the game itself and online sources are ambiguous).
However, it can still be found in a lot of places:
Misfit by Heinlein, Grayson Space Marine Corps in David Weber's Honorverse, Doomguy and the Quake marines, the Star Blazers TV series, Death of the Daleks, the movie 'Space Marines' from 1997, Colonel Scott of the US Space Marines from Moonraker, to name the ones I could come up with.
[1] http://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/titles.html
Starcraft rips off both WH40k and Aliens, but I think it rips of Aliens more. Plus, Aliens was released 1 year before WH40k, so it has precedence. And Aliens ripped off Starship Troopers (the book), and Starship Troopers (the movie) rips off Aliens. It's complicated.
WH original and Warcaft are both simpler - they both rip off LOTR.
I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded.
Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components: 1. asserting that historgrams are bad 2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms.
Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close.
If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it.
We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings.
I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good").
They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform.
Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one.
I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.
I think it's a problem of brevity. You write something, you refine, you cut out the pet witty comment. You cut your message to the bone. Now you're done.
Read the text of the article describing each movie. The correlations are absolutely meaningless. He doesn't hit on them at all. In fact, with comments like "almost nobody" he's specifically looking at averages. Then coming to a conclusion effectively based on the average of Score 1 and the average of Score 2 to determine what type of movie it is.
So on this Quality/Rewatchability grading system:
Starship Troopers: 3:4 The Fifth Element: 4:4 Blade Runner: 4.5:3.8
Drop that in place of the graphs and the conclusions would sound as seemingly valid.
Actually the influences for Starcraft were -- I think -- much broader than those for Warcraft.
Warcraft was heavily inspired by Tolkien and Warhammer, whereas Starcraft drew inspiration from basically every sci-fi series ever made, most particularly the Alien series (compare the Zerg Hydralisk to Giger's Alien) and of course from the art direction of Starship Troopers. But yeah, Warhammer 40K was inspirational too.
The artwork for the two alien races in Starcraft were each redone three separate times. The biggest challenge was that players couldn't easily (and quickly) grok the differences between the various units.
In Warcraft, you look at a lumber mill or barracks, and you have an idea what it is and what it might be used for. In Starcraft the difficulty was that -- upon initially playing the game -- it was tough to tell what any unit or building did for you.
Consequently making game units that looked visually familiar by including known sci-fi elements is useful in that -- when done well -- gives players a clue as to the function of a unit.
Or at least that's what we told ourselves when we ripped elements from other games & movies :)
It reminds me of the Starship Troopers movie, actually, and it's incredibly annoying.
Hollywood is not what made exoskeletons familiar. Things like the Iron Man comic series accomplished that long before Hollywood thought about it. It has also appeared in countless games, such as the Halo series.
But if you want to give extra credit to Hollywood, you should look at earlier popular movies that used exoskeletons. Such as the defenders of Zion in the sequels to The Matrix, or Starship Troopers.
* Worked on the special effects of Starship Troopers.
* Built an ecommerce site that has handled over $2 million in sales.
* Went snorkeling with a couple of American actors in Australia during my honeymoon.
* Ran the website for a non-profit film festival for the past 6 years bringing movies to a town that is about as far from Hollywood as you can get.
* Currently working on two startups ... one funded, and one of my own.
It is a shame they haven't caught on, but I believe there's a positive-feedback mechanism in advertising these ideas. Once an ingenious idea is made, it is only disseminated to a smaller percentage of people. One of these people then has to be inspired enough by the idea to borrow from the original creator.
If the idea is borrowed, it is likely to live on for longer. If it gets borrowed in a movie, the idea will go global due to the sheer amount of people who will receive the idea compared to reading a sci/fi book.
Once the idea has been spread enough, it will get borrowed enough. Before Asimov, robots were basically a chromed Frankenstein. However, now it's rare and rather dated to see a Frankenbot. Now it's typically benevolent robot/AI hurts humanity to help it, which was a frequent element in Asimov's own work.
Megastructures haven't really appeared in Hollywood movies before. There was the Deathstar and the planetary ring in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, aside from that I seriously can't think of another without seriously stretching it. So until we see an actual-factual ringworld or dyson spheres, which are far more recognised ideas, I doubt we'll see a matrioshka brain, even though it has the biggest uses.
It's not certain technology evolves in the same direction everywhere. There were a million paths our civilization could have taken that would land us on very different societies than the one we are in now.
It is one of the very few scenarios where a war between different civilizations would be interesting: one where the technologies are so different engagement is almost impossible and you simply can't tell which one is more advanced. I think Starship Troopers explored this idea very well: there were planets humans were not even aware they were bug colonies. All weapons are designed making certain assumptions about their target. If all assumptions are wrong, the weapon is very ineffective. You can't use a torpedo to sink a mountain.
I didn't watch the movie, but from what I saw, I gather human technology can barely function there due to the magnetic fields of the gas giant and/or its moon. It's likely the technology evolved in such a place would be very, very different from ours.
you have to see the movie. It is so bad and so good at the same time. It is one of those full of cliches bad movies, which is actually really good/entertaining to watch. http://www.hulu.com/watch/37498/starship-troopers
Wow. This reminds me very heavily of the tactics in Starship Troopers. (The book. Haven't seen the movie.)
Yes, I think the book explained that the team mainly recruited Asians, half-Asians, and Greeks to take advantage of the pit bosses' racial prejudices. The protagonist, for example, is supposed to be of Anglo/Chinese descent.
This reminds me of the Starship Troopers movie, where the Filipino protagonist is played by Casper Van Dien.