Starship Troopers getting a remake...sort of

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Starship Troopers the late 90s scifi-satire from Paul Verhoeven is getting a remake and Verhoeven is not happy about it. why? because the remake producers announced they will go directly to the Robert Heinlein 1958 novel instead of his film which barely resembled the original source. Verhoeven's main biff with the Heinlein novel is that he views it as fascist propaganda tale and he considers it more troubling during a Donald Trump presidency.

Well, Mr. Paul Verhoeven, your film was total crap except for the visual effects and the novel remains a scifi classic regardless of your liberal views about it. If the remake can retain 50% of the novel's plot, it will be head and shoulders superior to the human excrement that you unleashed to us that misfired badly with critics & audiences.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...oeven-reboot-donald-trump-20161116-story.html

 

I never thought I´d see the day when the words ´Paul´ ´Verhoeven´ and ´Liberal´ in the same sentence ::

 

If you ever bothered to read any interviews with this guy you'll know he is no freaking conservative.

 

I thought starship troopers was a pretty decent satire.

 

Oh thats right...because he made such politically correct and not-blatant-in-your-face Liberal-darling movies such as:
Robocop
Basic Instinct
Showgirls

:: Panch-Bot :

 

Never seen showgirls or basic instinct but starship troopers was a pretty straight ahead anti-war/anti imperialism film and robocop was in large part a dystopian satire about the commercialisation and corporate take over of everything....prisons and the police, media, cities, outer space, and obviously human bodies. Ive no idea but I could well believe the director (forget his name) was an honest to goodness proper leftist

 

I liked it for what it was. A throwaway action film with some anti war messages and terrible actors.

 

I loved starship troopers.

 

I remember hating Starship Troopers after it first came out. Seen it again somewhat recently and enjoyed the irony of it, that I never really digested the first time around.

Could be interpreted as a satire on Fascism, but I did not get any type of Anti-War vibes or anything of the sort, either time I watched it. Quite the opposite.

"Platoon" is an anti-war movie. This was not. Then again maybe I'm remembering it incorrectly or there was some sort of twist ending I never really bought into, to make it so.

 

Absolutely false.

MTF

 

It is a funny satire on facism which needs to be rewatched a few times to get all the jokes. Like most of Verhoven's better films.

MTF

 

This fellow gets it.

MTF

 

Go rewatch the parts with the news network updates on the war and on the kids stamping on cochroaches to 'help the war effort'. Watch them closely and listen to what is being said. They are an obvious pisstake of things like the Nazi propaganda machine and the eugenics progammes - they are beyond parody.

MTF

 

The bugs were a hammy metaphor for an enemy that's been totally dehumanised innit; and I thought the extreme cartoonish militarism of the society and the extreme cartoonish violence inflicted on the soldiers was that dehumanisation being visited back on the societies own citizens as a result. The two go together; the first a precondition of the second. I guess instrumentalism/dehumanisation is a common theme with robocop. But ive been known to talk even more shite than usual at 6am

 

Feebs drinks his tea with his pinkie sticking out.

 

I highly doubt it

 

As long as he isn't one those guys that dips buttered bread in it. Animals.

 

I'm told I do the pinky thing on pint glasses when I'm 'where am I?' drunk. Most irregular old bean, wot. Maybe my addled subconscious thinks 'right hut- you and your steamboat are on choppy seas here, lets try and look composed and sophisticated and hope nobody notices that your shirts tucked into your boxers and you're missing a shoe'.

 

It might be your guilty pleasure film. Got it!

 

I never had a particular love for this film, so maybe I didn't watch close enough, but was this ever actually revealed in the movie? Would have been a nice twist if it was, but a heavy-handed director like Verhoeven wouldn't just leave that part out and let us figure it out for ourselves.

I haven't read the Heinlein book, but would be curious if that was a theme pursued in it.

 

Nah the book was just a straight up militarist boys adventure story I think. But then Dr strangelove was (initially) based on a straight-up serious book too

 

Ok, then to me, the bugs were just about bugs, not some Kafkaesque metaphor.

Same as the 1970's Zombie movies that John Carpenter made was not some broad take on human consumerism and consumption. They were just about Zombies.

There were certainly elements of irony and satire in the film as relates to a fascist society, but if that is what they were going for, the filmmakers certainly didn't go far enough in making it clear if they were glorifying what was going on, or reviled by it.

 

allegorical themes aren't usually spelled out are they, a character isn't gonna break the fourth wall and give you a lecture on the directors interpretation of the materials themes.... I mean, maybe the director never had that interpretation anyway, it's just mine. But if I remember right from the robocop special features the guy has a PhD in astrophysics or something, if it occurred to me, I'm pretty sure it occurred to him. I don't think he's working on quite as mindless a level as it initially appears from the cartoonishness of the presentation. Tho maybe he is

 

Or maybe it's a big meta joke and there are no themes and he's just putting out consciously mindless films to bait tossers like me to project themes onto them which aren't there

 

Not saying the potential wasn't there. Could be he wanted to make the irony of the whole thing a little clearer to the audience (like he did with Robocop and Totall Recall) and he got cock-blocked by his producers into just making the action movie they contracted him to do, and what we got was a really weird Space Opera with obvious themes that never really get fleshed out for the audience.

Would have been sweet if they did do a sort of Kafkaesque transformation of the enemy in the eyes of the young soldiers they were sending out to fight them. Sort of part of their brain washing into super soldiers, but I imagine that would have been too far out of bounds from it's original source material.

 

The themes are definitely there but I think the 'hidden in plain sight' nature of it is overplayed. Had he been given some better actors (Casper Van Dien? Could have just hired Peter North) it had the potential to be a lot more.

As it is it's a fun film which dabbles with some heavy themes.

 

::

MTF

 

It's an obvious Verhoven film - you can spot it is his film a mile off. Like Robocop (also awesome, in fact more so), it takes a few watches to get past the cartoonish violence, the witty one-liners and the garish overacting to actually see what he is trying to get at. It's his usual tagets - consumer-capitalism, fascism, militarism etc.

The clue is in the little 'would you like to know more?' asides. You don't really notice them the first few times, but if you watch them carefully you can see that each and every one of them is a beyond-parody cheap shot at something or other. FFS - one of them literally involves the so-called 'games and theory' guy telling the viewer the mathematical effectiveness of various bullet placements on the bugs and another has children stamping their feet on coachroaches while their hysterical mother squeals in delight under a banner message of 'kids - do your part'.

Ridiculous. Deliberately so. 'Hidden in plain sight' is a bloody good description of it.

MTF

 

There is one scene where the death of 17,000,000 people in a meteor strike is reported by the news with a running totaliser rattling upwards as the corpse count increases, FFS.

MTF ::

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kdrjzE1SE58" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you can't see the parody in this then I'm not sure what you are seeing.

MTF