"Get a good look, Costanza?"
Posted on 12/02/2014 7:02:56 AM PST by C19fan
When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, most American critics slammed it. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Jeff Vice, in the Deseret News, called it “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.” Roger Ebert, who had praised the “pointed social satire” of Verhoeven’s Robocop, found the film “one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.”
But those critics had missed the point. Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism. The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Mea culpa. Indeed you did.
Likewise “I, Robot” - bought the rights just to rename an existing script, rename a couple characters, and inject a definitive quote; result is absolutely nothing like the book.
Hmmm.....wonder what other movies fit the category of “based on the back cover of the novel”?
To be honest it was not even supposed to be StarShip Troopers..
I have read it was a movie by a diff title then changed just before production.
The book is 180deg from the flick in politics
it is about the individue vs the collective and the choice of individuals to defend what they belive
Especially since the very last sentence of the book shows us the main hero was not a blond blue eyed Argentinean.
____________
I don’t remember, what is the last sentence?
"Get a good look, Costanza?"
This movie came out back when Denise was still fresh-faced and innocent, and before she became a bitter, hateful, petty, worn out harpy.
Damn you Charlie Sheen!
Winning!!!
He mentions that his native language is Tagalog.
The Argentine thing might be because his Mother get's nuked by bugs in Buenos Aires while visiting friends/relatives.
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers was propaganda, about as satirical as Reefer Madness
“...what other movies fit the category of ‘based on the back cover of the novel’.”
Asimov’s “Nightfall,” for one.
Verhoeven completely missed (or deliberately misinterpreted) Heinlein’s original story.. Heinlein believed in, and wrote, stories based on ideas. The ideas in “Starship Troopers†were threefold: 1) technology would completely change the way individual soldiers fought in combat; the Mobile Infantry, each man an individual armored, flying unit with more firepower than a division today; 2) A libertarian, but militarized, world government: in the original story, everything was voluntary, but with full citizenship the reward for volunteering for the really dangerous jobs (like combat); Fascism was nowhere to be found; 3) a decidedly post-racialist, post-nationalist society; Rico (the protagonist) is a Filipino living in South America; the other charactors are a mix of races and nationalities.
> But those critics had missed the point. Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism. The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers.
The vapid critic misses the whole point, which is, the movie was a POS. There is no right-wing militarism, as Bob Dole pointed out, the 20th century was filled from beginning to end with Democrat Wars, and wars by notorious murdering politicians like Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Ho, all of whom were championed by the left. In the case of Hitler, when he attacked Stalin, WWII suddenly became a secular crusade against the very same political system that Stalin had built.
I’m not claiming Starship Troopers is a masterpiece by any means, but it does have it’s charms. The first thing is not to compare it to the book. Paul Verhoeven didn’t care in the least about what the book actually said. And, yes, the military tactics and equipment are just stupid. Those aren’t what the movie is about so just accept it and move on.
Completely by accident, I saw Paul Verhoeven’s Soldier of Orange just before I went to Starship Troopers. That movie follows the lives of a group of young Dutch during the Nazi occupation. If you don’t mind foreign-language movies, it’s a great show. Also, it’s got Rutger Hauer. Anyway, it really made sitting through Starship Troopers much more interesting having just seen his treatment of Nazi military fascism. Paul Verhoeven actually lived through the occupation as a small boy so that may have influenced his attitude about the whole thing just a little.
“The first thing is not to compare it to the book.”
Then why title the film and promote it as a movie based on the book?
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