Retrospective: Starship Troopers (1997)
nu-monet
>
> It's been a few years now since Paul Verhoeven's
> adaptation of Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS...
But the guy who played the Military Intelligence
psychic. When he was in uniform, he reminded me of
someone. Now who is that?...
Oh, and a little behind-the-scenes bit. I had a friend
who played in an large African drum/music ensemble.
They were on a Hollywood roll at the time, and even did
the soundtrack for an entire X-Files episode (about the
African man who could scrunch up in a tiny space and
ate pituitary glands.)
Well, they got hired to do *one* sound effect for the
Starship Troopers movie. The sound of a giant bug
walking.
What they did was to buy the rights to one single episode
of that old Japanamation cartoon about the little boy
and his giant robot (what was its name?)(Gigantor?),
then re-work the sound of the giant robots' footfalls.
And man, were they paid in abundance for that one sound.
I guess so many sound effects are copyrighted that you
really have to shell out through the nose for originality.
--
$
There is no nu-monet there is only Zuul.
$
David Cavallo
news:2r301ug5ln18o1udp...@4ax.com:
> It's been a few years now since Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Robert
> Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS faded from the public spotlight. That's
> a good thing, because this is not one of the high points of science
> fiction movies. But in spite of the critical drubbing this movie
> received (especially from the legions of dedicated fans of Robert
> Heinlein, most of whom consider the novel "Starship Troopers" one of
> his best books), it's far from the worst science fiction movie around
> either. It may not be worth paying full price for, but I found the
> movie on sale for six bucks, and it's worth it at that price. For
> sheer, exciting, gory, brain-dead (if not mindless) entertainment,
> STARSHIP TROOPERS certainly gives you two hours of everything you
> expect in a Paul Verhoeven movie: action, excitement, blood, gore,
> action, nude scenes, and more action. If only the plot was brave
> enough to put some real brains in; if it had, we might have had a true
> science fiction classic here.
>
> Verhoeven shows his familiarity with Heinlein's story by taking the
> plot and exaggerating it by several factors. He includes most of the
> famous scenes of the book, especially the boot camp sequences and a
> corporal punishment scene, where the hero is sentenced to ten lashes
> with a whip. Verhoeven removes the "powered armor" made famous in
> Heinlein's book, and that's a mistake; evidently, his intent was to
> make the action scenes look like moments from James Cameron's ALIENS.
> The uniforms, weapons, and monsters are closely copied from Cameron's
> film; which is ironic in its own way, because Cameron obviously
> borrowed from Heinlein's own "Starship Troopers" when he made ALIENS.
>
> But there's a fake, cartoony, comic-book quality to the entire movie
> that keeps us from taking it at all seriously. This is good, because
> if Verhoeven tried to give us a grim and gritty, ultra-realistic look
> at "war" like PLATOON did, then this exceptionally gory, massively
> violent movie would probably have sent audiences rushing out of their
> seats. (It had trouble bringing them in, as it was; the movie was a
> box-office flop.) The boot camp scenes are entertaining, and we
> accept them even though they're blatantly fake. Watch the scene where
> Sargeant Zim greets the troops for the first time, and compare it to
> the opening of FULL METAL JACKET; the tension and the horror of
> Stanley Kubrick's film is completely absent here. But it's
> entertaining, nonetheless. If there's one thing that can certainly be
> said about STARSHIP TROOPERS, it's this: the movie is not boring.
>
> Quite a few movies have taken on a new level of irony or "meaning"
> since the September 11 attacks, and this movie is one of them. It's
> interesting to compare the similarity of the plot device -- sudden
> surprise attack leaves thousands dead; the world mourns; we go to war;
> the hero stays with the army because he lost his family in the
> destroyed city of Buenos Aires. The loss we all suffered in real life
> does give make this seem somewhat more believable, though not much so;
> it's still cartoony, but not quite as far-fetched now as it was when
> the movie was released. This movie has gained some small benefit in
> the "new" American culture.
>
> But even so, it would still benefit more of the screenwriter had dared
> to include a brain in the story -- and I don't mean a brain bug,
> either. I certainly can't deny that Verhoeven is a talented director,
> and nearly every scene in the movie is full of movement and energy,
> and the special effects are very good...but the sheer idiocy of a
> number of the plot devices makes the movie hard to swallow, and it
> kills whatever emotions we've built up.
>
> I've heard the arguments that the point of the entire story is to take
> a satirical look at military propaganda, and Verhoeven's success with
> ROBOCOP certainly shows that he knows satire. And when we compare the
> actions of the "Federation" as it goes to war to the real-life
> American campaign against Afghanistan and "terrorism," we can
> certainly be glad that our military commanders were smarter than the
> ones in this movie. Strictly in terms of plot, STARSHIP TROOPERS
> deserves some kind of an award for sending an army to invade enemy
> territory using some of the dumbest, most idiotic tactics I've ever
> seen in a "war movie," be it serious or satirical. You could make a
> list of the stupid mistakes made by the "military commanders" here --
> keeping their starships huddled together so that it's easy to crash
> into each other; sending their troops into unknown enemy territory at
> night, armed only with machine guns, not having any air support or
> heavy armored vehicles, and not even using their portable nukes when
> they need them; and so on, and so on. I can only assume that this
> stupidity was deliberately put in by the screenwriter. I've read
> Heinlein's novel, and the movie does follow the book (mostly); so it
> seems likely that the stupidity of the military was exaggerated even
> more, as a deliberate move on Verhoeven's part.
>
> Of course, the brain-dead military commanders only match the stupidity
> of the movie's ostensible hero, Johnny Rico. He's caught in a love
> triangle, though we know how it's all going to end. It's just enough
> to make him a two-dimensional Movie Hero, complete with a perfect
> hairdo that never gets mussed. He pines for his lady-love Carmen
> Ibanez; but she only has eyes on becoming a starship pilot. And he
> completely misses the unrequited love of his teammate, high school
> companion, and total babe "Dizzy" Flores. The idiocy of this running
> "romantic" theme matches the idiocy of the military tactics of the
> film, suggesting that the whole thing is meant to be one big cartoon.
>
> Verhoeven's misogynistic streak also reveals itself here, but it's
> kept under control more than in his other movies; the most offensive
> bit here is probably Dizzy Flores, whose entire life is dedicated to
> landing Johnny Rico in bed. Of course, Rico is too stupid to realize
> this until it's nearly too late; but at least we get to see some
> gratuitous nudity. Verhoeven is one of those rare directors who
> doesn't flinch when it comes to either violence *or* sex. When we see
> a Verhoeven action scene, we know there's going to be over-the-top
> violence (and quite often too much of it, as in TOTAL RECALL); and we
> can certainly expect over-the-top sex as well from the man who gave us
> SHOWGIRLS.
>
> And yet, the movie is still bursting with energy. There's not one
> moment in the entire movie when the pace flags. The action scenes are
> well-done (and there are many); the camera moves constantly, but never
> in a way that calls attention to itself (I hate those MTV video-style
> directors who swoop the camera all over the place with no rhyme or
> reason, as in THE CROW); and the film's reported $100 million budget
> is certainly well-displayed on the screen. The bug attacks in
> particular are outstanding, and they are far and away the best parts
> of the entire movie. Add on the cartoonish propaganda segments that
> occur every so often ("Would you like to know more?"), and the result
> is a big, splashy, dumb way to waste two hours.
>
> I's impossible to take this movie seriously, and that's why I enjoyed
> it when I watched it with friends. We whooped and hollered and
> exclaimed our astonishment as we watched the characters make one dumb
> move after another -- "You've got NUKES, you idiots! Use 'em!"
> "Dizzy wants you so bad, you moron! [CENSORED] her already!" As far
> as bad movies go, I'd rather experience one like STARSHIP TROOPERS,
> with its exciting action scenes and its sheer lack of seriousness,
> than a slow-moving slug of a film reeking with self-importance like
> BATTLEFIELD EARTH or even GODZILLA (the 1998 version). This movie is
> made for adults -- and it could have been a true classic if it dared
> to treat its audience like adults.
>
> --
> First Online Church of "Bob"
> http://www.modemac.com/
Very well put. A coherent defense of one of the most criminally underrated
directors of the last thirty years. I think you really hit it on the head
with:
>..the movie is still bursting with energy. There's not one
> moment in the entire movie when the pace flags.
That goes for most of his films.
Simon Spiegel
of the best satires to come out of Hollywood in the Nineties. It's
definitely not to everyone's taste, but good satires never are.
simi
Modemac wrote:
--
Simon Spiegel
Mutschellenstrasse 97
CH-8038 Zürich
++41 1 481 48 52
Bob
Modemac wrote:
> It's been a few years now since Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Robert
> Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS faded from the public spotlight. That's
> a good thing, because this is not one of the high points of science
> fiction movies. But in spite of the critical drubbing this movie
snip the rest.
Oh, what this film COULD have been, given a competent director, not one
who only cares about his own political viewpoint. I also disagree that
Verhoeven really read the book. He read, perhaps, a summary of the book.
Needles to say, IMHO, I put Verhoevens "Starship Troopers" in the same
league with "Battlefield Earth" and "Wing commander".
Truly, a piece of crap.
To those who disagree with me, that is your right.
Bob
David Cavallo
> Truly, a piece of crap
Ah, yes, but what a fully realized, wonderful piece of crap! Verhoeven
can't make a movie without pissing someone off, and after nearly two dozen
films, I kinda think that's his idea.
I'd be surprised if whomever sold him the rights to "Troopers" thought he
was going to do a reverent treatment.
--David
Franklin Harris
"Simon Spiegel" <si...@simifilm.ch> wrote in message
news:3C106CFC...@simifilm.ch...
> I haven't read the book, but as far as the movie is concerned it's one
> of the best satires to come out of Hollywood in the Nineties. It's
> definitely not to everyone's taste, but good satires never are.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work as satire? What is being satirized? The
military mentality? Sure. But we get a militarized society that doesn't seem
so bad. Non-citizens are still well off, even wealthy. Sex and race no
longer matter. The satire itself is uneven. The only thing that gets
skewered throughout is what passes for the news media, and the film isn't
about them.
It isn't much of a satire if it keeps missing the target.
--
Franklin Harris
Pulp Culture Online, www.pulpculture.net
"I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon." -- The
Kinks
Bob
Franklin Harris wrote:
> "Simon Spiegel" <si...@simifilm.ch> wrote in message
> news:3C106CFC...@simifilm.ch...
> > I haven't read the book, but as far as the movie is concerned it's one
> > of the best satires to come out of Hollywood in the Nineties. It's
> > definitely not to everyone's taste, but good satires never are.
>
> Unfortunately, it doesn't work as satire? What is being satirized? The
> military mentality? Sure. But we get a militarized society that doesn't seem
> so bad. Non-citizens are still well off, even wealthy. Sex and race no
> longer matter. The satire itself is uneven. The only thing that gets
> skewered throughout is what passes for the news media, and the film isn't
> about them.
>
> The film is about Verhoevens personal prejudices. Damn Shame. If he had even
> tried to film the sense of the book, it could have been a great film. As it
> is, it is a POS.
Bob
David Gerard
Modemac <mod...@modemac.com> wrote:
:It's been a few years now since Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Robert
:Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS faded from the public spotlight. That's
From the J.G Ballard list on Yahoo Groups. I heartily endorse this product!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgb/message/1298
From: interzone@c...
Date: Fri Nov 17, 2000 10:53 am
Subject: "Armours"
Since Umberto seems to be determined to continue to tease everyone on
this matter of what he calls "the armours," and since no one else seems to
have read Starship Troopers recently --
I think what Umberto was referring to is the depiction of the troopers' full
body-armour (completely enveloping powered space-suits, in fact) in
Heinlein's novel. This was reduced in the film to partial body-armour and
helmet visors, presumably because movie-makers don't want their actors'
pretty faces concealed, but it rather destroyed the point of Heinlein's
imagined scenario.
Thomas M. Disch once said, in a question-and-answer session following a
talk he gave back in the 1970s, that Heinlein was an artistic "diamond in
the rough." He explained what he meant by invoking Starship Troopers
and the motif of the body-armour, claiming that Heinlein was an artist
despite himself. By this, as I recall, Disch meant that the way in which
Heinlein's human heroes reflect and mimic their alien foe -- insectoid,
exoskeletal creatures -- by donning full body-armour which dehumanizes
them and makes them "exoskeletal" too, is a real artistic touch...
For those interested, below is Nick Lowe's review of the movie Starship
Troopers from Interzone #129, March 1998. He touches on the matter of
the body-armour, and he gives as good a reading of the film as any I've
seen (but then, Nick is the best film critic around, as J. G. Ballard himself
has said -- yep, JGB is a Nick Lowe fan, as he keeps reminding me almost
every time he renews his Interzone subscription).
-- David P.
[Extract:]
The extraordinary thing about Starship Troopers is that it understands
exactly how pivotal Heinlein's barmy novel is to the history of sf, and how
much baggage needs to be calculated for in plotting lift-off. It's not simply
that Heinlein's 1959 novel was the signal that first alerted the world to the
disquieting possibility that the most influential figure in sf was completely
off
his trolley. By 1959 it was too late for second thoughts: Heinlein's children,
the generation raised on his masterly magazine work and juveniles, were
growing up, and the future history of American sf was already written.
Feelgood libertarianism had inherited the stars; early left-leaners like Pohl
and Asimov had by now converted, and by the time the flecks of foam
around the master's mouth grew impossible to ignore, the 1960s had
arrived to find the future already colonized by naval-academy cadet types
with a half-read copy of Atlas Shrugged poking out of their kitbags. And
Starship Troopers was the novel that first laid bare the political undertext
to what had already become the standard image of the interplanetary
future, with its weird fantasy of minimal states with enormous federal
navies. What's more, it did it without a trace of irony, and targeted itself at
a male young-adult readership who scarcely noticed -- I certainly didn't --
that there was anything a bit bonkers about the slabs of didactic holding
apart the three (out of 14) chapters of action.
The man behind the miracle that anything as thoughtful, funny,
and sophisticated as Starship Troopers should have been made from
Starship Troopers is the project's largely-unsung originator, Ed Neumeier:
one of the very few well-paid writers in Hollywood with a genuine respect
for pre-cinematic sf and a sense for what makes it dangerous. Neumeier it
was who, after co-writing the film that turned a middle-aged Dutch
art-house auteur with one Hollywood flop to his name into the most
exciting figure to hit sf cinema since Jim Cameron, confessed in after years
to creating RoboCop in the first place because what he really wanted to
write was Judge Dredd, except that he couldn't get at the rights. And
though nobody on earth but Paul Verhoeven could have kept Neumeier's
astonishing script for Troopers intact to screen, I doubt whether
Verhoeven has actually opened the book, let alone understood its
monumental significance for the genre. The most provocative moment in
Starship Troopers isn't the heavy-handed spectacle when Col. Doogie
Howser re-emerges from his plot cupboard in SS greatcoat -- a gesture of
unease from Verhoeven, I suspect, lest the ever-subtler ideological ironies
of Neumeier's script are by this point getting lost on matinee audiences in
Tallahassee. As the sole contemporary A-list Hollywood director to have
actually experienced Nazi occupation, he's more than entitled. But far more
subversive is the final propaganda shot of Heinlein's Carmen in full
Captain's regalia on the bridge of her own starship, in a pose we've seen in
half a thousand Star Trek segments. You may claim, say the unseen
subtitles, that Roddenberry's future is an inspirational triumph of liberal
vision, but peel away the transhumanist slogans and you'll find the same
slyly-sexualized Riefenstahlian fetish for uniforms, authority, and good old
service discipline.
Despite such mischief, I actually doubt Heinlein's headstone is
twitching with outrage at the film's comparatively-venal narrative and
ideological infidelities, because one of the first surprises about Starship
Troopers is that it is, mutanda mutated, essentially Starship Troopers. A
lesser screenwriter would have flicked with a sigh through the novel,
highlightered the three or so cinematic pages, and thrown the rest away
and wiped hands on a towel before opening a new untitled document and
simply knocking out Independence Day with bugs. Neumeier has not only
tried to do something with all the dreary bits of the narrative -- the cadet
camp, the huge cast of forgettable minor characters, the dated and
embarrassing buddy-bonding -- but has clung on to, and discreetly
improved, all kinds of things from the book that you wouldn't have thought
worth bothering with at all, like Buenos Aires, or the whole structure of
prologue-flashback-catchup-climax.
Most of all, though, he's made the book's explicit political
pokes in the chest central to the scenario. Heinlein's impish central notion
was that citizen franchise should be restricted to military veterans on the
grounds that "a soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the
body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life.
A civilian does not." Neumeier has not only worked hard to turn this line
into something deliverable by a human actor, but makes it the climax of
Rico's progress: "A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human
race their personal responsibility!" Sadly, even Neumeier pulls up short of
doing anything with the novel's staringest idea, Heinlein's insistence that
History and Moral Philosophy (sic) is an exact science capable of formal
mathematical verification ("Are a thousand unreleased prisoners sufficient
reason to start or resume a war? ... Bring to class tomorrow a written
proof, in symbolic logic, of your answer"), and that if you do the
game-theoretical sums you come to the formal mathematical certainty that
there is one true civics and Robert Heinlein is its prophet. Some things,
presumably, are just beyond parody.
Still, the other key thing that Neumeier has recognized and
embraced is sf's inheritance of the mantle of the gung-ho genocidal war
movie. Only in sf can the good guys still say "One day, someone like me is
going to kill you and your whole fucking race!" The big difference between
1959 and now is that the millennial West has finally created itself a world
without war: not, unfortunately, in the sense that there's any less war in the
world, but in the sense that citizens of the filmgoing nations are absolved of
any contact with or sense of responsibility for it. Mass killing has become a
regrettable but distant quirk of developing nations who haven't had the
foresight to be central to NATO interests; it's politically impossible in the
Western democracies to declare war if there's any actual risk of
home-team casualties, which is why we take such pains to ensure that none
of the people we'd want to kick round the head has the ordnance to do us
any damage back. But the result is that the experience of a nation at war is
nowadays slightly less real for most filmgoers than alien abduction,
dinosaur safaris, and schooldays in Beverly Hills. To address the unsayable
things about war -- the politics, the mob psychology, the ease with which
genocide can be made to seem a moral act -- you need to make one up.
In its way and its day, the novel already understood this.
Heinlein's own Troopers was a massive exercise in nostalgic
wish-fulfilment, recreating a never-was military past in a never-could-be
future. Purist fans of the novel (if there are any still loose in the
community)
are bound to regret the loss of the cybernetic suits, Heinlein's inspired but
frankly desperate device to explain why infantry warfare would make any
sense on a galactic scale. By strapping his MIs into one-man humanoid
tanks that respond to and amplify the soldier's body movements, Heinlein
was able to imagine a contrived kind of retro future warfare in which the
individual infantryman, and the values that went with him, could recover
military significance in the nuke-toting world that already in the 1950s was
making him an anachronism. Given the difficulties of telling the characters
apart even with their cycle helmets on, you can see why the suits got
ditched in the movie; but it remains a flaw of the film that its drops now
make no conceivable military sense.
Still, this is compensated by the clever things done with
Heinlein's bugs, which Neumeier has enhanced with an honest-to-Smith
real sf idea: a species that wages galactic imperialism without any
technology whatever. The particle-beam bugs and escape-velocity asteroid
warfare ("They can colonize planets by hurling their spore into space!")
may be a sliver far-fetched, but they firm up Heinlein's own differentiation
between us with a capital US and them with a capital Them! In the far
corner, we have mindless, cultureless socialist insects whose only drive is
to colonize the universe with their hideous spawn, while in our corner we
have the rugged individualism and free will of, er, the Federal navy.
Best of all, though, Starship Troopers is centred, like the novel,
on the barely-disguised projection of Heinlein himself. The most glorious
thing in the film, as for that matter in all his other films, is Michael
Ironside,
and especially his stupendous first scene: a brilliant distillation into a
30-second monologue of the novel's entire bananas political polemic, much
of it cut and pasted from Heinlein's own words. If you've stayed up the
previous night plodding dutifully through the novel's interminable didactic
rants, it's a giddying initiation to have the whole lot fired at you in a
single
Uzi barrage before the film's even got started. Neumeier, of course, has
doubled the value by the inspired merger of Rico's adored Lieut. Racsak
with the originally-separate character of Jean DuBois, the nutty high-school
teacher whose authorial tirades are regurgitated in the novel via great
wedges of clumsy flashback whenever no other voice is available. And not
only is a crazed Heinlein mouthpiece the character Ironside was put on this
earth to play, but he gets to do it under the director who understands
better than anyone else why Ironside is a star in a firmament all to himself,
and with dialogue by the one writer in Hollywood who understands why
this stuff is so funny and scary to need sending for Ironside in the first
place. Just to hear this man deliver the line "They sucked his brains out!" is
worth sneaking back in through the fire doors to see again.
Obviously it's a joy to see, in Verhoeven's return to the genre,
one of the top three sf film-makers on earth reverting to what he does best,
and the one thing he reliably does well -- fast, funny future savagery with a
tasty edge of deadpan black irony and an arsenal of mass deconstruction.
But in a way Verhoeven's success in sf is a poignant symptom of his
discomfort, post-Showgirls, with the other kinds of film-making available
to someone of the frankly much wider range proven in his earlier Dutch
films. By comparison with other European directors who've gone west,
Verhoeven came to Hollywood late, reluctantly, and by wary degrees, and
admits he went into sf because he didn't feel culturally equipped to do real
contemporary America. In doing so, he blazed a career trail later travelled
by the likes of Roland Emmerich, Luc Besson, and now Jean-Pierre
Jeunet. There's no doubt that this injection of continental talent has
fabulously invigorated the genre; but there's a downside in sf's status as a
convenient sink for European migrant talent that Hollywood wants to
contain...
[End extract from Nick Lowe -- copyright (c) Nick Lowe, 1998]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgb/message/1309
From: "Ben Austwick" <benaustwick@h...>
Date: Sat Nov 18, 2000 7:11 am
Subject: Re: [jgb] some more info on ST
The deeper we get into this, the more I realise just how different the film
and the book are. I'll say my piece here, but I must agree with you Umberto,
I'll have to read the book before I can debate any further...And yeah, we
are getting too far from JGB!
But here's my argument anyway:
Umberto said -
As for the irony in the film, imho it doesn't work that well. Unless you
>have read RAH's novel and remember it quite well, the way Nick Lowe
>and David Pringle do. For most of the people in the audience it was
>just another shoot-'em-all. If there was irony, it was too subtle for most
>of them; imho the film compares badly to really ironic, cliche'-blasting
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you here. I think Starship Troopers is
one of the few (if only) films that deals with fascism's central premise of
populism and sacrifice for the "greater good". Other works which deal with
fascism tend to concentrate on anti-semitism or other racism.
It is important to remember that fascism was originally about popular will,
and sacrifice for a nation state. Verhoevan in Starship Troopers puts this
across in the cheesy opening US high school sequence, and later in the
unbelievably wholesome solidarity between the troops. These are people who
belive in the rightiousness of their society to a frightening extent.
Verhoevan himself said he was dismayed that so few people saw what he was
trying to do.
I would argue that the film (don't know about the book) is less about
"armours", and more about the systematic attempt to destroy an alien race
without attempting to understand it...An allegory on fascism. More Swiftian
than ironic, I think.
--
http://thingy.apana.org.au/~fun/ http://www.rocknerd.org/
It's nice being under doctor's orders to go out, drink like a fish and chat up
sxxy deth chyx. Well. He didn't put it *exactly* like that.
Simon Spiegel
points it doesn't mean that it isn't critical. The interesting thing
about most utopian concepts is that they're are fascitic at their very
core. This already starts with Platon's "Politeia" and this goes through
the whole history of Utopian literature, even Utopias that come from a
humanistic background have these tendencies. The world of ST has some
nice sides, but everyone living in it is plain stupid. No one is really
thinking anymore. I think ST is much more intelligent than people
generally think.
simi
Franklin Harris wrote:
ccw
I've never read a decently done critical review of Heinlein. It's
always a case of either hero-worship, or utter foam-at-the-mouth
loathing.
It's sad. I'd like to get to the facts in the case, like I can with
Twain, Dickens, or Shakespeare.
Mabye after RAH is 150 years dead?
> Heinlein's impish central notion
> was that citizen franchise should be restricted to military veterans on the
> grounds that "a soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the
> body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life.
> A civilian does not." Neumeier has not only worked hard to turn this line
> into something deliverable by a human actor, but makes it the climax of
> Rico's progress: "A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human
> race their personal responsibility!"
Heinlein was a naval officer. He did in fact make the safety of the
United States his personal responsibility.
Why does it continue to surprise civilians that he could suggest the
possibility of a society organized along such lines?
> Sadly, even Neumeier pulls up short of
> doing anything with the novel's staringest idea, Heinlein's insistence that
> History and Moral Philosophy (sic) is an exact science capable of formal
> mathematical verification ("Are a thousand unreleased prisoners sufficient
> reason to start or resume a war? ... Bring to class tomorrow a written
> proof, in symbolic logic, of your answer"), and that if you do the
> game-theoretical sums you come to the formal mathematical certainty that
> there is one true civics and Robert Heinlein is its prophet.
We decided 22 years ago that 52 hostages is not sufficient cause to
start a war. We decided 3 months ago that the loss of 3000 lives *is*
sufficient cause. The equation is now nicely bracketed.
Tell me, if we *do* ever come up with a calculus of civics, wouldn't
it be preferable to finding out what we believe *after* the charred
bodies are dug out of the rubble?
> Some things,
> presumably, are just beyond parody.
I isn't laughing, boss.
--
ccw
Doug
> For those interested, below is Nick Lowe's review of the movie Starship
> Troopers from Interzone #129, March 1998. He touches on the matter of
> the body-armour, and he gives as good a reading of the film as any I've
> seen (but then, Nick is the best film critic around, as J. G. Ballard himself
> has said -- yep, JGB is a Nick Lowe fan, as he keeps reminding me almost
> every time he renews his Interzone subscription).
Starship Troopers Review snipped.
Reading this cockamamie review made me laugh out loud a number of
times. It's clear Lowe didn't watch the same film the rest of us saw.
Or, if he did, he misremembers it so badly that he imagines things
happening which didn't, and he glosses over occurrences in the film in
order to fit his preconceived notions. For instance, he says, "In the
far corner, we have mindless, cultureless socialist insects whose only
drive is to colonize the universe with their hideous spawn." One
wonders if Lowe walked out of the film halfway and imagined how it
must have ended, for the unspooling of Troopers puts a lie to his
assertion.
Gerard speaks of Verhoeven's lament that viewers didn't "get" the
film, yet he ignores the fact that Lowe circles the ideas in
Heinlein's book without ever "getting" them. Lowe even says, "The big
difference between 1959 and now is that the millennial West has
finally created itself a world without war: not, unfortunately, in the
sense that there's any less war in the world, but in the sense that
citizens of the filmgoing nations are absolved of any contact with or
sense of responsibility for it," and he concludes, "In its way and its
day, the novel already understood this." Of course it did! That's
the point! Heinlein saw it coming and wrote an entire book about it!
I am unsurprised that Neumeier, Verhoeven and Lowe didn't get it.
It's as if these guys were put into an Electrified Wrongheaded Machine
and had the dial set all the way up to Extreme Wrongheadedness.
Verhoeven and Neumeier misinterpreted the book, whether intentionally
or not. They mistook defense of liberty for fascism and libertarian
"pay as you go" ideals for socialism. One can disagree with
Heinlein's ideas (I mostly do) but these guys don't understand them
enough to disagree. And as I've asked before, why go to all the
trouble of filming a book that you disagree with?
Doug
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The Bishop
Right on, Doug. The insipid Lowe review was a prime example of how
preconceptions can corrupt your whole thought process. It's obvious he
hates America, and retro-fits his observations to fit his pre-fab
ideas. Personally, I think only allowing military veterans to vote is
not a bankrupt idea. Of course, there should be alternatives
(community service instead of military service, medical exemptions,
etc.), but I think reinforcement of the idea of a social contract is
something everyone needs once in a while. And that's all Heinlein was
saying--that the extent to which you take part in society should be
determined by your willingness to support that society's very
existence. Today, 30% voter turnout is considered a stampede to the
polls (and 25% of those 30% are right of center, because they aren't
stupid enough not to vote, which explains a lot), but those same "I
won't take part in the corrupt system" insiders who know so much would
be up in arms if you took away their RIGHT to it, or made them work
for it. I don't think it's a coincidence that voting is free. In
college, my theater professor switched from free performances to $3.00
admission, and the crowds DOUBLED. People won't line up for something
ANYONE can have.
Doug
> Right on, Doug. The insipid Lowe review was a prime example of how
> preconceptions can corrupt your whole thought process. It's obvious he
> hates America, and retro-fits his observations to fit his pre-fab
> ideas. Personally, I think only allowing military veterans to vote is
> not a bankrupt idea. Of course, there should be alternatives
> (community service instead of military service, medical exemptions,
> etc.), but I think reinforcement of the idea of a social contract is
> something everyone needs once in a while. And that's all Heinlein was
> saying--that the extent to which you take part in society should be
> determined by your willingness to support that society's very
> existence. Today, 30% voter turnout is considered a stampede to the
> polls (and 25% of those 30% are right of center, because they aren't
> stupid enough not to vote, which explains a lot), but those same "I
> won't take part in the corrupt system" insiders who know so much would
> be up in arms if you took away their RIGHT to it, or made them work
> for it. I don't think it's a coincidence that voting is free. In
> college, my theater professor switched from free performances to $3.00
> admission, and the crowds DOUBLED. People won't line up for something
> ANYONE can have.
Heinlein once said that the draft should be abolished, on the grounds
that if a country isn't worth volunteering for the armed forces about
then it isn't a country worth having. I think he has something there.
Lee DeRaud
>f...@thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard) wrote
>>
>> For those interested, below is Nick Lowe's review of the movie Starship
>> Troopers from Interzone #129, March 1998. He touches on the matter of
>> the body-armour, and he gives as good a reading of the film as any I've
>> seen (but then, Nick is the best film critic around, as J. G. Ballard himself
>> has said -- yep, JGB is a Nick Lowe fan, as he keeps reminding me almost
>> every time he renews his Interzone subscription).
>
>
>Starship Troopers Review snipped.
>
>Reading this cockamamie review made me laugh out loud a number of
>times. It's clear Lowe didn't watch the same film the rest of us saw.
> Or, if he did, he misremembers it so badly that he imagines things
>happening which didn't, and he glosses over occurrences in the film in
>order to fit his preconceived notions. For instance, he says, "In the
>far corner, we have mindless, cultureless socialist insects whose only
>drive is to colonize the universe with their hideous spawn." One
>wonders if Lowe walked out of the film halfway and imagined how it
>must have ended, for the unspooling of Troopers puts a lie to his
>assertion.
Leaving aside the merits of Lowe's review, the question that continues
to occur to me is: If the book had never existed, what would you think
of the movie? (Note that the same question applies to a *bunch* of
prior movies...Logan's Run is one that comes to mind.)
Yeah, it's pretty bad, but certainly no worse than a lot of 'guilty
pleasure' movies that *aren't* mentally attached-at-the-hip to much-
loved books...
Lee
Richard L Hamer
Lee DeRaud wrote:
> Leaving aside the merits of Lowe's review, the question that continues
> to occur to me is: If the book had never existed, what would you think
> of the movie? (Note that the same question applies to a *bunch* of
> prior movies...Logan's Run is one that comes to mind.)
>
Even as a mindless film the movie does not work. There are dozens of movies that do
not follow the "source" material very well, War of the Worlds, When Worlds Collide,
Day of the Trifids, Lost World etc. but those movies work in their own rights. Part
of the problem is that the Movie Starship Troopers is just to mindless, the
scenarios the characters are put in the dialog they use, all of it just does not
make any sense.
>
> Yeah, it's pretty bad, but certainly no worse than a lot of 'guilty
> pleasure' movies that *aren't* mentally attached-at-the-hip to much-
> loved books...
>
It is worst because the director/productor/etc take the movie serious. The great
thing about those guilty pleasure movies is that they like the viewer do not take
them serious.
Doug
> Leaving aside the merits of Lowe's review, the question that continues
> to occur to me is: If the book had never existed, what would you think
> of the movie? (Note that the same question applies to a *bunch* of
> prior movies...Logan's Run is one that comes to mind.)
I would have the same opinion of it that I have of Waterworld, Event
Horizon, Independence Day, Alien 3, Red Planet, Total Recall and so
on... which is to say, "not good." These movies are just
unrelentingly dumb.
> Yeah, it's pretty bad, but certainly no worse than a lot of 'guilty
> pleasure' movies that *aren't* mentally attached-at-the-hip to much-
> loved books...
Try as I might, I can't think of an example.
Ian Galbraith
[snip]
:Leaving aside the merits of Lowe's review, the question that continues
:to occur to me is: If the book had never existed, what would you think
:of the movie? (Note that the same question applies to a *bunch* of
:prior movies...Logan's Run is one that comes to mind.)
:Yeah, it's pretty bad, but certainly no worse than a lot of 'guilty
:pleasure' movies that *aren't* mentally attached-at-the-hip to much-
:loved books...
I would say it is. Its actively insulting, basically giving movie
audiences the finger.
--
Ian Galbraith
Email: igalb...@ozonline.com.au ICQ#: 7849631
"Being cool requires no work. Mostly it requires detachment.
You can be cool and not care about being cool. Being hip
requires both style and effort. You can't be hip without
working at it." - The A.I. War by Daniel Keys Moran
Bob
Lee DeRaud wrote:
If the book never existed? I think the film STARSHIP TROOPERS ranks just between
BATTLEFIELD EARTH and WING COMMANDER. Whichever of BE or WC you think is better is
your choice. As a stand alone film it is a true piece of shit.
Bob
Roger Christie
Lee DeRaud
Based on the responses I've got to this post, this is obviously a
religious issue for a lot of people...
Lee
Bob
Lee DeRaud wrote:
Not religious. Ethical and moral, yes.
Read the Heinlein book. Verhoeven raped it.
Bob
Roger Christie
Its both for me. If I had never read the book, this movie would still rank
as one of the very worst I've seen. Ever. Period. Since I /did/ read the
book, that raises the issue at least several orders of magnitude.
Bob
Roger Christie wrote:
I like the way you think, Roger.
Bob
sanman
in various respects, I would say that the Starship Troopers TV series
was really great on most counts.
Their switch to a long drawn out story arc with much more plot depth
really made a difference to me. They provide a much richer story
universe, and much greater character depth.
Also, for "power armor" afficionados, they certainly did not
disappoint in their depiction of futuristic mechanized firepower.
Speaking of firepower, there is certainly no lack of that, or of
action in general, throughout the series.
I really liked not only the depiction of the human SICON forces with
their dazzling array of technology, but also the interesting way the
bugs were depicted in the series, in accordance with the style set by
the movie. And yet the series actually managed to go even further,
giving us all sorts of new creepy crawlies.
To be fair, the Starship Troopers movie was a satirical parody of
futuristic space militarism, not unlike Verhoeven's famous parody of
future society in Robocop. But the TV series takes the war more
seriously, or at least more adventurously, with less of the pointed
barbs of the movie. Verhoeven was clearly responding to his critics,
and even made sure to include power armor.
This sort of reminds me how Tolkien's first book, The Hobbit was also
very anti-war in its message, given that it was written following WW1.
But Tolkien's follow-up series, Lord of the Rings, was clearly more
embracing of war as a battle between good and evil, and played up the
idea of heroism and courage.
Again, the character depth and complexity of their relationships was
more gratifying this time around. The Alpha Team (aka Raczak's
Roughnecks) start out as a bunch of individual grunts, but then
gradually grow together into a tightly-knit group with fleshed-out
personalities. I liked that aspect a lot. The witty one-liners were
always fast and furious, too.
Anybody know why they cancelled that series, anyway? I'd imagine that
it must have had pretty high production costs, given its dependence on
all that CG. But the style and imagination of the series was great.