"Starship Troopers" - Verhoeven is a mad genius!

"Alien 90210" is correct, but it works! In a bland, fascist, pretty future, of course all the people would be plastic. The bad acting becomes an element of the satire.

"Starship Troopers is good but it's really nothing more than ID4 for people who like their subtext in 40-point Arial Black"

ID4 had no subtext, as far as I could tell. And sure, Starship Troopers is broad satire mixed with broad entertainment, but the comparison is still unfiar. ID4 was brainless entertainment mixed with... um... Will Smith. Starship Troopers is a movie that's smart about everything it's doing, even when it's being stupid. (Which is also a good description of Robocop, which... come on. Great and also great.)

And I'd pick Futura Black for my money. If you have to say it big and loud, at least go with a classic. "Arial Black." Haha. A Microsoft font. Yes, I'm mocking you.

-- Paunchy Stratego (fluxion2...), November 28th, 2005.

you are SUCH a DICK.

Possibly the reason that it didn't do well in the US was that too amny people got the joke he was having at their expense.

...which is why Verhoeven is a genius and Bay is just a hack.

Verhoeven knows how low he's going and RELISHES it. He's like a scuba diver swimming in shit to uncover lost ruins.

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Which to finish my point means the movie works as a satire not about theoretical Fascism but about very real Manufactured Consent.

* The most brilliant scientific mind in the universe belongs to TWO MARTIANS (who combine to form a single, giant martian) - not a member of the human race, as Bill & Ted had assumed!

* The Grim Reaper sucks hard at inane family games like Clue and Twister!

* Hell is nothing like their album covers!

I think perhaps the most telling thing about Bill & Ted is the way they just shrug off the innumerable paradoxes created by all their traveling back and forth through time and from the afterlife into the world of the living, and then just out of the blue become heroes, nay, leaders and unifiers of the entire world, with presumably no real qualifications - it's exactly their completely aloof approach to reality that makes them the greatest candidates for the job! Bill & Ted ought to make people who see today's world as being dystopian think hard about why they feel that way all the time instead of kicking back with a Pepsi and some Megadeth.

Don't ask me why I know that this film exists

PS I clicked on this thread by accident.

for what it's worth, the screenwriter of "starship troopers" mentioned "kiss of the spider woman" at some point--i can't recall the exact context.

i taught this film a few months ago.

xp

gee, ally, thanks.

Why does ST get so much credit for doing what loads of other war films already do, but with bold WINKY WINKY stamped all over it? Especially since the source material is already 4000x more challenging and incisive than anything in the film?

i think the book was written pre-war. and he and bardeche were fascists, right? not playing with fascist imagery, actually being fascists.

Karl Rove: BELCH

DOOGIE HAUSER IN A FUCKING BLACK LEATHER SS COAT.

i've had this thought too. i haven't decided how i feel.

th: you're right, brassilach was executed as a collaborator. it's bardeche (his brother in law) who revised and extended the pre-war history of cinema. i got confused because it's those post-war revisions that are probably best known. weird for a book half-written by an executed fascist collaborator to have been a strong seller.

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I admit, that is a valid point being raised here.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/f/f3/180px-CabaretNeilPHarris.jpg

Perhaps part of the idea with Starship Troopers is something like ... well, our standard movie familiarity with fascism comes in the form of sneering cold-eyed Europeans doing horrible things to small children. Part of what Verhoeven might be playing with is how a fascist threat might look if it weren't coming from the outside -- how it would look if it came, as it now seems more likely to do, from the inside. Outside = cold-eyed Germans. Inside = wholesome well-muscled blondes trooping off to save the day in a glorious no-consequences enemy-isn't-human battle-for-humanity! (I mean, notice how much the high school at the beginning resembles an episode of Dobie Gillis, some kind of apple-pie 50s aw-shucks dream?) I think you're expected to have Molina's consciousness when watching this, the ability to completely fall for the over-the-top camp beauty while still seeing through it and understanding the hollowness. The subtext frees the movie to totally revel in the adventure camp way more than a "real" movie in this genre could get away with -- plus the subtext charges all of that revelry, since it's always meaning something more than it says, both in terms of your intellectual reaction to it and in terms of the film's meaning.

How much of this is about Verhoeven's intent is probably pointless to think about; I don't want to read interviews about it, or anything, and learn what he was "actually" shooting for.

the screenwriter is extremely sophisticated and articulate about all the points you've brought up, n. verhoeven on the other hand has a more rudimentary understanding of the different levels of meaning--i think he was more interested in making the bugs look really cool and scary. which sounds like a veiled insult, but it's not. i think something about verhoeven's earnest interest in sci-fi and skill with cartoonish visuals combines with the screenwriter's more writer-ly ambitions to form something more interesting than either would have come up with separately.*

*this seems somewhat borne out by verhoeven's films made without neumeier, and neumeier's films made without verhoeven.

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OTM.