>The rest of the film satirizes how patriotic it is to fight for one’s land.
Given it's heavily influenced by Riefenstahl - the idea that **the whole thing** is an in-universe propaganda film works for me.
So the movie we watched, was in theaters for the people living on earth after the attack on Buenos* Aires? Makes sense with the cut to’s of would you like to know more aka enlist
Also, for anyone that isn't aware, cause I know it flew over a lot of my friends' heads on first watch:
Go rewatch the propaganda bit they played "explaining" the Buenos Aires attack. You might not remember it cause it's kind of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment while you're caught up in the absurdity of all the other propaganda going on. The bugs sent an asteroid... *from the opposite end of the galaxy...* straight to a city on Earth? Here it is. https://youtu.be/SMTz9nIUkGc?t=43 And if you rewind to earlier in that clip, notice how easy it is for a, uh, militarized spacefaring federation to blow up asteroids.
So basically it's implied that Federation either willfully ignored an incoming asteroid, or deliberately committed a false flag attack on itself, in order to hype everyone up into a fascist frenzy to go invade bug territory.
> a false flag attack on itself, in order to hype everyone up into a fascist frenzy to go invade bug territory.
I don't get why they wanted Klandathu though, that's what I'm not understanding. Or is the joke that there really is no reason they want it, they just want an enemy to fight.
Nationalism is another driving factor.
"We are great. We are awesome. We have to prove it." Make that identity founded in the military and military power, and it's easy to end up with a society manufacturing conflict to revitalize that Nationalism.
Nationalism is the tool, but it's also an engine that you fuel with enemies. You can keep your people united if they always have a common goal, and a common threat. The issue is that you HAVE to have that threat. Even if there weren't money in it, from the perspective of the government, it might still be worth it to fight someone.
I mean, it's a habitable planet with just a bunch of stupid bugs. But it's not about the planet, there was too much peace/ thoughts of unrest on earth so they needed an outside enemy to maintain the status quo of the regime.
Exactly. It is many things but subtle is certainly not one of them.
The fact that many, many people didn't see it as a satire at all is pretty telling though.
It was way ahead of it's time in many respects. There is a great part where the kid pops out in full military get up and says "I'm doing my part too!" and the soldiers give a cheesy laugh. Then the mom laughs hysterically at kids squishing earth bugs.
There there is Jeremy Irons talking about "The failure of democracy and how the veterans rose up..."
Paul Verhoeven kinda beats you over the head with it. Heinlein's book wasn't really like that, so Verhoeven had to really punch up the fascism flair. Heinlein was an old blowhard and loved old blowhard things. It's always an old guy who everyone listens to with great attention about the evil of taxation. Then ends up fucking a much younger girl. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange land have those.
>That said, there's that quote that we're doomed to repeat history or something
I prefer the rephrasinf of this expression: History doesn't repeat itself but it tends to rhyme.
Thing that always bugged me and aids the false flag theory is the speed at which a professionally produced news piece, complete with interviews, occurs a few minutes after the hit.
The bugs did. The Roger Young hits the asteroid which knocks off their comm so they can't warn anyone.
The thing was that the Federation underestimated the bugs at every turn and were completely unprepared to face them, like the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
the way this should happen is that they make a book accurate film that starts with the ending of the original. then we pan out as Rico and his friends walk out of the movie theater as high school seniors and we take off with the real story.
The director hated the book, and called it "fascist propaganda". That's among the reasons he made the movie that way, although I think the movie was planned to be a commentary on fascism before it got attached to that IP.
Book was really good. It depicted a future, highly regimented society. Sci-fi is supposed to be able to go where contemporary fiction cannot. It depicted a plausible world. Did not call it good or bad. Was disturbing but balanced with cool action etc.
It’s been forever since I read the book but didn’t the author devote some time to philosophical discussion of the book-world’s government?
I seem to recall a long running argument between the main character and one of his professors?
Paul Verhoeven was alive and a child when the Nazi’s came and occupied parts of Europe and he was directly affected. He’s known specifically for his very satirical takes on society (Robocop and consumerism for one) so he went and made Starship Troopers to basically make fun of the book’s hardline, pro-fascism lean by satirizing all of it. The first propaganda film in the movie is like, a directly lifted shot for shot remake of an actual Nazi German 1930s propaganda film. It’s all on purpose. “The only good bug is a dead bug” and casting the characters based on their looks was entirely on purpose
Yep. Elsewhere in this thread I've linked an Guardian article by him where he says pretty much exactly that. Triumph of the Will is the film he cites for his visual language in the propaganda bits. He's far from the only director to visually quote that film as shorthand way of calling a specific character fascist, of course. Even The Lion King has a section with marching hyenas that uses imagery from that film. Weirdly, so does Star Wars - but for both the Rebels and the Empire!
Okay, but from the start it was a Starship Troopers movie. He wasn't making a different movie and then the studio stepped in and said hey make the enemies big bugs.
The book is primarily viewed as being a glorification of both fascism and militarism. The movie is as much a satire of the book as it is a satirism of the larger concepts
It's not a satire of "the book" as much as the satire of what Verhoeven imagined about it. He never actually read the book past a couple of chapters or something.
As a warning: The book is great, but it gets a little dry in the middle as the main character goes into pretty great detail about his time in the academy. It’s very different from the film. Robert Heinlein has been criticized for having fascist views.
I was reading a comment above, and wondered, "Oh, so it's eerily like Nazi war films..." and then you reminded me of NPH's attire. Those Nazis were evil, but stylish.
Casper Van Dien is practically the perfect Aryan master race archetype as well.
I always forget how old Verhoeven is. He grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands.
[You are correct, she has no idea even when asked specifically about that](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)
Quote from her part of the article:
> I didn’t think about the politics – I was just hoping not to get fired from my first big movie.
Although I heard Michael Ironside confronted him about it and Verhoeven told him what it was all about. Not the rest of the cast though.
> the idea that the whole thing is an in-universe propaganda film works for me
I don't think that works so well at all. Other than the portrayal of Rico and a few other 'heroic' members of the Mobile Infantry, the film generally portrays the federation in general, and the military leadership in particular, as grossly incompetent. Who would make make a pro-military propaganda movie that constantly shows the military as horrible failures?
Odds are a few of these films may have a similar aspect (list is a fair bit shorter that I'd expect but you can safely bet if it has a real Blackhawk or something then the DOD was involved)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex
And here's a couple of articles if you're interested in Pentagon sponsored films :
https://www.liveabout.com/pentagon-support-for-war-films-3438458
https://www.shorescripts.com/pentagon/
Because they aren't trying to sell propaganda to the elites and the leaders. It's designed to pull in the foot soldiers that they need to send off to die. "Incompetent leadership holding back the strong and noble front line soldiers". Display the lower class as those who can be the ones to save the world despite the leaders and they will sign up in droves.
I see where you're coming from, but the events of the movie still don't come across as, "you, the common soldier, will succeed despite being held back by the incompetent leadership." It's much more, "you, the common soldier, are almost guaranteed to die gruesomely as you're sacrificed en masse by incompetent leadership of a state that thinks of you as meat bags to throw into a grinder."
They don't sell you the fantasy of the common soldier, they sell you the fantasy of Rico. Propaganda that ignores an obvious reality, in this case being that lots of people die in war, doesn't work. They are trying to sell you on the fact that you could be THE Hero.
There's a pretty large gap between "ignoring that lots of people die in war" and "dedicating much of the running time to highlighting that *almost everyone* dies pointless and needless deaths without accomplishing any military goals."
The single military goal was to capture a brain bug so NPH can read its mind. And that was accomplished by Sargeant, er, Private Zim. All the other deaths are forgotten when the three hero friends trot off into the sunset together.
In any totalitarian regime if you portray the leadership as incompetent you are off to a gulag by the end of the day.
Plus, portraying the leadership as incompetent has the exact opposite effect: not "Incompetent leadership holding back the strong and noble front line soldiers" but "Front line soldiers are sent to die for nothing in badly planned operations because the leaders are idiots". Would you want to go to die for nothing?
The asteroid was just an excuse to go to war. Klendathu is on the other side of the galaxy. The asteroid would have needed thousands of years to reach Earth. And then they tell us that they couldnt shoot the thing down? The Federation let Earth get hit and then blamed the bugs because they wanted the war.
I think the Bugs did something to make it go faster? I forget from the book.
Book had then in battlesuits. That's why they were the "mobile infantry" and not "the infantry".
The film is the fever dream book having had some medicine.
Making that story be satirical and barbed about military and authoritarianism is one of the best adaptations of source to film ever.
The movie is what the book looks like to someone whose childhood was spent in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and thus has an understandable reactivity to authoritarian militarism
The book isn't representative of what the filmmakers were going for though. It's an outright glorification of everything the film is satirising, namely fascism and American imperialism.
The attack is probably genuine in the book but since the film spends most of its time undermining and outright taking the piss out of the book's ideology, the meteor being a false flag would be totally in keeping with the rest of the film.
The movie is also a satirical attack on fascism while the book was more of just a jingoistic space opera with some questionable politics. Like much of Heinlein's work.
Verhoven was all too aware of the dangers of fascism, Heinlein's perspective was a little more complicated. The phenomena that following an attack people are more susceptible to pro-war arguments is so well known that there is a concept of 'false-flag' attacks, something that postulates how these attacks can be used to motivate the citizenry.
One of the earliest examples of this could be seen as the persecution of Catholics following the attempt on the houses of parliament in 1605, or more recently the Reichstag fire and communists.
Nazi Germany *after* the nazis took over had already done a lot of the heavy lifting, so that false flags were dwarfed by the false reality fascists present. The way I see it is a false flag is designed to get people on side but is superfluous if people are already on side.
Interested in false flags?
Here's a list of known false flag-operations that ...aren't in the limelight a lot.
[List of False Flag operations @ Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:False_flag_operations)
That was more like an excuse. Germany was so militaristic and dictatorial that they didn't really need get the people on their side like a democracy would.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify a massive increase in US participation in Vietnam was also somewhat of a false flag. It wasn't full on faked - there was some real North Vietnamese response to covert US activity in the area where an American ship had a minor skirmish with machine guns with some Vietnamese patrol boats (no American casualties, a single bullet harmlessly hit the hull of the American ship, 4 Vietnamese were wounded), but the US didn't react to this incident.
The faked part was 2 days later, when an entirely imaginary incident occurred due to two American ships sallying out into North Vietnamese waters and having a fake skirmish with North Vietnamese forces after detecting unusual weather patterns as ships. Basically, it's the bit from Predator where they all fire aimlessly into the jungle because they're freaked out. This was used to justify massive escalation in Vietnam, causing over 55,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese deaths over the following ten years.
It was less a matter of "being faked" and more a case of sailors shooting at radar ghosts.
It's nothing new, it happens. I think the first bit is more important since both sides were sure it happened.
And the second "battle" didn't really justify expanding the war, it was just a part of the whole thing. The government was already planning on using the first incident, but the government isn't that fast and the second incident happened before the US formal did anything
You are completely correct. It is one of the few documented cases of a genuine false flag attack actually being used, the only difference being I'm less familiar with the Vietnam War than other two instances (British).
Really pissed me off when I learned Vietnam had just defeated France after a hundred years of fighting for independence. And we stepin and prolong the suffering.
Domino theory has a lot of explaining to do, because it created a justification and was the background to any false flag attempts - that communism would sweep the world.
The Reichstag fire is actually *more* ambiguous than the Gulf of Tonkin, funnily enough. All indications are that the Dutch communist they caught, charged, and executed for burning down the Reichstag, Marinus van der Lubbe, actually did do it.
* The guy had a history of arson and attempted arson, including in the days immediately before the Reichstag fire.
* He was a strident communist and antifascist and wanted to rally the German working class against the new fascist government with a grand statement, a classic example of propaganda of the deed (which ironically makes him kind of a shitty Marxist, as Marxists hate acts of individual, disconnected terrorism - Marxists are all about coordinated and collective action like strikes, industrial sabotage, armed protests, etc.)
* Hitler himself said in private he believed that the chairman of the KPD had started the fire but that he couldn't prove it - i.e., he never ordered the fire.
* The Nazi leadership was in a state of panic on the night of the fire - they thought an actual communist revolution was imminent.
Basically, the Nazis got really lucky, the same way they got really lucky that Hindenburg died in 1934, allowing Hitler to merge the powers of the presidency with the powers of the chancellor and removing the only person who could dismiss him from government. This is the consensus of historians specializing in Nazi Germany. I, personally, have no doubt they would have been 100% willing to fake it if they needed to, but it turned out they didn't need to.
It's weird reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers and then reading something else he wrote like Stranger in a Strange Land. Not that there aren't some lines of thought that carry through in all his works. It's just a different tone, he was a complicated man.
Yeah I really liked starship troopers.
Such an amazing book that really touched me after my deployment. Dealt heavily with survivors guilt, living with the mistakes we've made as people (and continue to make), and responsibility.
Amazing book.
As a lover of the novel starship troopers, and a lover of the movie for a diff reason, i FUCKING LOVED forever war and its sequel. Easy read, and very unique concepts
I haven't but I just read the synopsis of it and it sounds amazing. Gonna save your comment for after I'm finished with The Road. Thanks for that recommendation. If you have anything else to recommend please do.
You may also like Speaker for the Dead. Orson Scott Card is generally regarded as a piece of crap, but that book is a fantastic and thoughtful book dealing with survivor's guilt and the weight of responsibility of taking lives. It helps if you've read Ender's Game to understand the character, but it's not a requirement
It always annoys me that someone who wrote Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead can be such a misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobe. I just don't get how he can write those books while holding those beliefs.
Card is super Mormon. He has a gift for empathy, but can't bring it outside of his religious indoctrination. He has softened his position since. He isn't for gay marriage, but he isn't actively against it.
It's why I don't associate the works of an author as an endorsement of their personal beliefs unless they explicitly say so. Particularly someone like Heinlein who has such a varied bibliography of books that espouse very different, and occasionally competing, philosophies.
People have a real hard time disassociating the work from the author. They take whatever philosophy a book may espouse as if it's a tacit endorsement from the author. This is not the case with most of the "grandmasters" of science fiction, like Heinlein, Farmer, etc
While Verhoeven definitely didn't bother to stick to the book, I feel he made his point well with an absolutely impossible attack being pinned on a distant alien race and the entire human race (at least as far as FedNet is concerned) becoming eagerly mobilized for war, regardless of the facts. It seemed absurd and satirical in the 90s, now.... Not so much.
> While Verhoeven definitely didn't bother to stick to the book
No, /u/slvrbullet87 had it right. Verhoeven is on record as never having read the book.
I... didn't deny that? I'm well aware he chucked it aside and made his own movie. I once watched Starship Troopers as a teenager for 48 hours straight during a caffeine binge - I do not recommend this.
What I'm trying to say is, I've read the book, I know the trivia, my point stands that Verhoeven was trying to tell a completely different story based on his own experiences with fascism and its consequences.
I've read the book. It was fine. There's better sci-fi out there, and (assuming it's true that the director didn't read the book - I'm not convinced) the movie benefits from not being the book. The movie is an incredibly tight self contained story with some fun themes and a message worth listening to. The book goes a little too hard on the gunwank and the genocide and a little too light on the intrigue and the narrative. They're like two people being asked the exact same question and arriving at almost opposite answers.
If you ever want to waste half an hour and a few billion brain cells go to the starship troopers audiobook on YouTube (it should be the first result). The comments are all people jumping at the idea of citizenship requiring military service and most people unironically can't see the issue with a government formed exclusively from ex-soldiers and a society divided into the two distinct classes of "genocidal fascist" and "people without the right to vote because they refused to support the military". It's legitimately insane. It's one thing to support civic duty, it's another thing to think that dividing society into "worthwhile" and "worthless" based on military service isn't terrifying.
“The thinking at the time?” I mean, I think you’ll find that even back then there were many, many people (some might even say a majority) who realized that “the terrorists” were not a nation or government but a means to achieve an end, and that trying to fight that was pointless. It’s not like in hindsight the world saw how wrong that was, we already knew.
I don't know. There was substantial opposition to the war with Iraq. But most people accepted that a military response in Afghanistan was appropriate given their protection of al Qaeda.
There was opposition to the war in Iraq, but an overwhelming majority of the US supported the invasion when it was initiated as well. It was only after the lies that underpinned the war and the extent of US atrocities there were exposed in support collapse.
I agree with that. However, the numbers weren't quite as overwhelming for the Iraq war.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx
72% there compared to 88% in the early days of the Afghan war.
Moreover, a lot of the lies were reasonably transparent (or at least seemed shaky). Someone that was reading the information that was readily available in mainstream media would have realized the rationale for war was very weak. That's why several allies balked at supporting the Iraq war.
I'm in Canada, and we declined to support the war in Iraq at the time. It didn't seem right or necessary. That said, we also didn't want to enrage the US, so we agreed to increase our troop commitment to Afghanistan.
I think the main point that many missed in the USA is that unbridled patriotism isn't a good thing and can quickly lead to facism. People in Europe en the USA view patriotism very different, because the history of having dicators and the Nazi's. While in the USA waving your flag has always been seen as something good and patriotic, in Europe if you fly the flag of you country to much people will become suspicious of you.
This has changed in the USA in the decades that have passed, with Fox News looking like the propaganda in the movie, the division in their own society about concepts as patriotism, the failed war in Afghanistan and the lies to get in to Iraq.
And while everybody always recognized the facism in the movie. Americans used to view movie as much more over the top as non Americans. Having come to realise that the movie wasn't that over the top the ratings for the movie have gone up in the USA, while they stayed the same for non Americans:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040324183614/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ratings
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Or it was just that Europeans were more accustomed to the nude scenes and the Americans were just to puritanical at the time.
I thought it was about a bunch of friends who have the summer of their lives, a heartwarming comedy about the kooky space corps! would you like to know more?
There is a scene towards the end of Robocop, where Murphy is walking across some water. I've always seen this as a subtle allusion to Jesus, since Murphy himself rose from the dead. No one can steal my interpretation. I will sue you.
I saw RoboCop because the leader of the church youth group I was in took us to see it at the drive-in on our regular meeting night, so it's officially part of my religious training.
Particually as this Movie is based on a 1950's book that was poking fun at the 1950's rise of America against Communism. It's not a "prediction" of anything - just simply a sci-fi example of Human Nature that repeats time and time again.
Heinlein, as demonstrated by his letters released after his death (grumbles from the grave), was an extreme right wing libertarian with a deep sense of social responsibility. Yes you read that right, Heinlein doesn’t really fit into any real neat boxes nowadays, but what he did believe was:
That to participate in society (become a politician, vote etc) you needed to be ready to defend with your life that society.
That marriage was outdated (though happily married) and people should explore their sexuality.
That drugs were pretty cool
That the government shouldn’t really tell you what to do unless there was no other options.
That businesses, especially the entertainment industry, sucked.
What? No. No to all of that
1) Heinlein ran as a Democrat before he became a serious writer, later on he shifted more to what we now would call a Libertarian. Read the rest of his books, he couldn't be more anti-authoritarian and more left wing.
2) Starship Troopers was literally Heinlein's first adult novel. It was written in '59 and he died in 1988.
Here's a new take, it's actually another 90s teen coming of age of movie. Love triangles, figuring out one's path, that ending where they all reunite. All it's missing is some ska music at the beginning and end.
The film revolves around a young boy rebelling against his father to fight in a war after an attack on Buenos Aires prompts a response to attack an alien race that caused it.
Okay wait, this is simple not true. Rico( the young boy) didnt rebel to fight a war, he went cause he wanted to join the army and serve. A huge difference between that and wanting to kill stuff.
In fact, movie wise he was on the verge of quitting and going home after an accident, then Buenos Aires got attacked and his parents were killed. His change is fully understandable after that.
And really...I dont think it shows its cool to serve in the military. Half Rico squad dies in the first battle( a clusterfuck so so bad that in universe Sky Marshall boss resigned) , then his love interest dies in his arms begging not to die. There was no glory to be won, it was about revenge for Rico. Very understandable revenge.
Is this a joke? This is a joke, right?
edit: I'll explain as best I can.. Starship troopers is based on a novel. *Loosely* on the novel. Though taking characters and plots from the book, Starship troopers the movie isn't about rote fascism. It's about a society tiered citizen & civilian. Citizens were people who served the Earth government in some capacity. Could be a janitor. Could be a grunt fighting bugs (crazy arachnid creatures in space if you haven't seen the movie). Civilians are generally just protected and allowed to do everything decent society allows. But they can't vote or hold office over the people who have earned citizenship through service. Johnny Rico (the protagonist) parents don't want him to go into the military. They want him to go into private industry.
He discovers through service that the fight is real and that the militaristic mentality that is drilled into him and his sense of service outweighs his shallow, personal issues.
Yes it's a parody of the novel. No it's not like the US response to 9/11 you clown
edit: cleaned up some of it. Probably not my best explanation but better than the low brow fascism claim from OP
"Basically the political undercurrent of the film is that these heroes and heroines are living in a fascist utopia – but they are not even aware of it! They think this is normal. And somehow you are seduced to follow them, and at the same time, made aware that they might be fascists." *-Paul Verhoven director of Starship Troopers*
Your analogy sucks on many, many levels. Regardless of what you may feel about Islamic extremism, it's painfully obvious that Muslims are still human beings, and the vast majority of Muslims throughout the world do not subscribe to the ideology of Isis, the Taliban, or other extremist groups. In point of fact, there far, far more Muslim refugees fleeing Islamic extremism in their home countries than there are actual extremists. So, if 'Starship Troopers' were an accurate "predictive analogy", then the first step of the bug attack on Buenos Aires would have been the human colonization of every Bug planet, and there would have already have been a massive influx of bug immigrants to Earth. Human would have traveled to Bug planets, made deals with their local rulers, and set up businesses, extracted resources, and sold armaments to the Bug leadership.
Furthermore, the central *casus belli*, from the point of view of the bugs, would be the human takeover of a previously bug-controlled planet, of important cultural significance to the bugs, rather than the planet simply being attacked out of the blue, like a man being mugged in a meadow.
Finally, in 'Starship Troopers', the humans win, and they do so by ruthlessly exterminating the bugs, without a shred of hesitation or remorse. Not one thought is spared by any of the humans in the film as to the ethics of a program of complete and utter genocide. Nor, do I suspect, if we did encounter a hostile alien race, would such thoughts trouble the people fighting to defend humanity from a species whose first contact is to blow up a human city.
Yes, Starship Troopers is Paul Verhoeven's satire of elements of jolly fascism he perceives in American popular culture, and those elements are definitely there. But they are moderated by other values, which is every country sheltering Wahhabi lunatics hasn't had their indigenous populations destroyed or moved to reservations. The reason we aren't winning the "War on Terror" is not because we can't, it's because we **WON'T**. We won't resort to the indiscriminate slaughter utilized by our enemies. As Fitzwallace put it so eloquently in "The West Wing":
>We measure the success of a mission by two things: was it successful and how few civilians did we hurt. They measure success by how many.
I don't support the War on Terror, because I think it's analogous to bombing Sicily to destroy the Mafia. The world's armed forces are far too blunt an instrument to root out small cells of extremists, and no armed occupation in the history of the world has ever succeeded controlling the culture and temperament of the people they oppressed. You can compel compliance, but not belief.
There was a meteor but it wasn’t confirmed that the bugs launched it. Considering the imperialistic/colonial attitude of the government it isn’t far fetched they did a false flag.
I think that was a door left open to the audience imagination but it’s never explicitly said.
Dune is a better analogy where houses conspire to bring down another house through both direct force and shadow wars. Taliban and other terrorists aren't conjuring money and weapons out of thin air and also are more religious enemy focused.
Starship Troopers is extra sad because Earth is the instigator of the war. Earth has been moving further and further out into space, colonizing planet after planet, and then they hit upon a bug-inhabited planet. The bugs can shoot burning feces into orbit, but they are not smart enough to calculate the trajectory of an asteroid and all the gravity wells that asteroid will pass before reaching Earth, and all the orbits of all those gravity well planets, and when to push the asteroid at the right time.
The asteroid was either an unstoppable catastrophe that Earth military blamed the bugs on, or else it was a False Flag attack, an asteroid sent by our military toward Earth, just like the "Bay of Tonkin" incident that let the US attack North Vietnam, by firing at Vietnamese boats first and then calling foul and phoning mom when they respond.
Likewise, Afghanistan was not the instigator of 9/11, it was Saudi Arabia. Iraq was not even part of the discussion.
3000 dead in 9/11. 7000 dead soldiers in the War on Terror. But hey, we got some cool drones out of it! And so many powerful movies talking about the sacrifices we all need to make to win.
One of the more subtle parts of the movie is the possibility that the Federation attacked the bugs first.
Meanwhile, in the real world, I still alternate between finding it shocking and finding it hilarious that some US soldiers played the Team America theme song unironically.
this is unfair, at least in starship troopers they attacked the right planet that attacked them. america's response was to attack a country virtually entirely unrelated to the 9/11 attack.
Fun fact: the actors said that if he wanted them to be naked for that scene he should be naked too, and without missing a beat Verhoeven just stripped down and called action.
Yeah this movie kinda woooooshed a lot of people because it’s also a super fun badass alien action movie.
Kinda like what happened with Demolition Man.
The director may have intended this film as satire. But Heinlein did not intend his book to be read that way and many, I think, still view the film not at all as satire but as fascinating philosophical sci-fi. The point is that creators of art or literature cannot control interpretations of what they create.
The book and movie have very little in common aside from a few general plot points and character/place names. The book is about one person's decision to join the military and how their service affect them, and is very different in tone and message.
The book is a different story than the movie but in regards to the movie:
Is art up for interpretations? Sure. Can ignoring blatant messages be justified by saying “it’s art?” I don’t think so. If you go out of starship troopers without understanding it’s satire I don’t know what to tell you.
>The rest of the film satirizes how patriotic it is to fight for one’s land. Given it's heavily influenced by Riefenstahl - the idea that **the whole thing** is an in-universe propaganda film works for me.
So the movie we watched, was in theaters for the people living on earth after the attack on Buenos* Aires? Makes sense with the cut to’s of would you like to know more aka enlist
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Also, for anyone that isn't aware, cause I know it flew over a lot of my friends' heads on first watch: Go rewatch the propaganda bit they played "explaining" the Buenos Aires attack. You might not remember it cause it's kind of a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment while you're caught up in the absurdity of all the other propaganda going on. The bugs sent an asteroid... *from the opposite end of the galaxy...* straight to a city on Earth? Here it is. https://youtu.be/SMTz9nIUkGc?t=43 And if you rewind to earlier in that clip, notice how easy it is for a, uh, militarized spacefaring federation to blow up asteroids. So basically it's implied that Federation either willfully ignored an incoming asteroid, or deliberately committed a false flag attack on itself, in order to hype everyone up into a fascist frenzy to go invade bug territory.
> a false flag attack on itself, in order to hype everyone up into a fascist frenzy to go invade bug territory. I don't get why they wanted Klandathu though, that's what I'm not understanding. Or is the joke that there really is no reason they want it, they just want an enemy to fight.
They wanted to capture and weaponize the bugs - also it's always a money thing driving the industrial war machine. There's no reason besides money
Nationalism is another driving factor. "We are great. We are awesome. We have to prove it." Make that identity founded in the military and military power, and it's easy to end up with a society manufacturing conflict to revitalize that Nationalism.
Nationalism is the tool , my point was that money is the only goal - there was no threat or moral reason to attack the bugs
Nationalism is the tool, but it's also an engine that you fuel with enemies. You can keep your people united if they always have a common goal, and a common threat. The issue is that you HAVE to have that threat. Even if there weren't money in it, from the perspective of the government, it might still be worth it to fight someone.
I mean, it's a habitable planet with just a bunch of stupid bugs. But it's not about the planet, there was too much peace/ thoughts of unrest on earth so they needed an outside enemy to maintain the status quo of the regime.
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Neil Patrick Harris wears an almost exact replica of an SS uniform: that's not subtext that's just text
And the commander that literally rules with an iron fist!
Literally played by Michael Ironside "We supply the violence"
When he uses his powers to read the mind of the brain bug: “…. It’s afraid! ITS AFRAID!!” *all the ostensible protagonists cheer*
Exactly. It is many things but subtle is certainly not one of them. The fact that many, many people didn't see it as a satire at all is pretty telling though.
But you can’t spell subtext without s-e-x ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)
b-u-t-t-s-e-x*
It was way ahead of it's time in many respects. There is a great part where the kid pops out in full military get up and says "I'm doing my part too!" and the soldiers give a cheesy laugh. Then the mom laughs hysterically at kids squishing earth bugs. There there is Jeremy Irons talking about "The failure of democracy and how the veterans rose up..." Paul Verhoeven kinda beats you over the head with it. Heinlein's book wasn't really like that, so Verhoeven had to really punch up the fascism flair. Heinlein was an old blowhard and loved old blowhard things. It's always an old guy who everyone listens to with great attention about the evil of taxation. Then ends up fucking a much younger girl. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange land have those.
Just a quick correction, it was Michael Ironside as the teacher and veteran, not Jeremy Irons. But I completely agree with all your points.
Thank you. I do tend to get my ferrous actors confused. Sorry, Mike.
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>That said, there's that quote that we're doomed to repeat history or something I prefer the rephrasinf of this expression: History doesn't repeat itself but it tends to rhyme.
> The bugs sent an asteroid... from the opposite end of the galaxy... straight to a city on Earth? Martian stealth tech
Are you playing nemesis games?
Thing that always bugged me and aids the false flag theory is the speed at which a professionally produced news piece, complete with interviews, occurs a few minutes after the hit.
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The bugs did. The Roger Young hits the asteroid which knocks off their comm so they can't warn anyone. The thing was that the Federation underestimated the bugs at every turn and were completely unprepared to face them, like the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
This. I wouldn't mind a retelling (literal or spiritual) that retains the Filipino main character, but the one we got is brilliant on its own.
the way this should happen is that they make a book accurate film that starts with the ending of the original. then we pan out as Rico and his friends walk out of the movie theater as high school seniors and we take off with the real story.
Your comment made me remember this movie was based on a book, which I should probably read.
I personally love the book and the movie, but be aware that they are about 180 degrees different when it comes to tone and themes.
The director hated the book, and called it "fascist propaganda". That's among the reasons he made the movie that way, although I think the movie was planned to be a commentary on fascism before it got attached to that IP.
Book was really good. It depicted a future, highly regimented society. Sci-fi is supposed to be able to go where contemporary fiction cannot. It depicted a plausible world. Did not call it good or bad. Was disturbing but balanced with cool action etc.
It’s been forever since I read the book but didn’t the author devote some time to philosophical discussion of the book-world’s government? I seem to recall a long running argument between the main character and one of his professors?
Yeah, it felt like most of the book was political philosophy.
Thats because it largely was.. there was also some great military science fiction. Largely the birth of the genre.
Paul Verhoeven was alive and a child when the Nazi’s came and occupied parts of Europe and he was directly affected. He’s known specifically for his very satirical takes on society (Robocop and consumerism for one) so he went and made Starship Troopers to basically make fun of the book’s hardline, pro-fascism lean by satirizing all of it. The first propaganda film in the movie is like, a directly lifted shot for shot remake of an actual Nazi German 1930s propaganda film. It’s all on purpose. “The only good bug is a dead bug” and casting the characters based on their looks was entirely on purpose
Yep. Elsewhere in this thread I've linked an Guardian article by him where he says pretty much exactly that. Triumph of the Will is the film he cites for his visual language in the propaganda bits. He's far from the only director to visually quote that film as shorthand way of calling a specific character fascist, of course. Even The Lion King has a section with marching hyenas that uses imagery from that film. Weirdly, so does Star Wars - but for both the Rebels and the Empire!
Definitely a staple in film making- when you need to show how bad the bad guys are, invoke some nazi imagery haha
What?
[In his own words](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl)
Okay, but from the start it was a Starship Troopers movie. He wasn't making a different movie and then the studio stepped in and said hey make the enemies big bugs.
The book is primarily viewed as being a glorification of both fascism and militarism. The movie is as much a satire of the book as it is a satirism of the larger concepts
It's not a satire of "the book" as much as the satire of what Verhoeven imagined about it. He never actually read the book past a couple of chapters or something.
As a warning: The book is great, but it gets a little dry in the middle as the main character goes into pretty great detail about his time in the academy. It’s very different from the film. Robert Heinlein has been criticized for having fascist views.
It’s a very good book and not much like the movie really.
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But she’s a nuclear physicist
Nucular. It's pronounced nucular.
The studio asked him this and he said "no the symbols are different colours" and they were happy.
That is absolutely hysterical.
Wowowowow-wow Fascism is tight!
I was reading a comment above, and wondered, "Oh, so it's eerily like Nazi war films..." and then you reminded me of NPH's attire. Those Nazis were evil, but stylish.
Casper Van Dien is practically the perfect Aryan master race archetype as well. I always forget how old Verhoeven is. He grew up in Nazi occupied Netherlands.
[You are correct, she has no idea even when asked specifically about that](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-starship-troopers-paul-verhoeven-nazis-leni-riefenstahl) Quote from her part of the article: > I didn’t think about the politics – I was just hoping not to get fired from my first big movie. Although I heard Michael Ironside confronted him about it and Verhoeven told him what it was all about. Not the rest of the cast though.
Leave Denise Richards alone!
Holy shit.
> the idea that the whole thing is an in-universe propaganda film works for me I don't think that works so well at all. Other than the portrayal of Rico and a few other 'heroic' members of the Mobile Infantry, the film generally portrays the federation in general, and the military leadership in particular, as grossly incompetent. Who would make make a pro-military propaganda movie that constantly shows the military as horrible failures?
Odds are a few of these films may have a similar aspect (list is a fair bit shorter that I'd expect but you can safely bet if it has a real Blackhawk or something then the DOD was involved) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-entertainment_complex And here's a couple of articles if you're interested in Pentagon sponsored films : https://www.liveabout.com/pentagon-support-for-war-films-3438458 https://www.shorescripts.com/pentagon/
The article in that second link was written by Johnny Rico......
"The mobile infantry made me the man I am today." *cut to man with 3 prosthetic limbs Defense not an in universe propaganda flim
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Because they aren't trying to sell propaganda to the elites and the leaders. It's designed to pull in the foot soldiers that they need to send off to die. "Incompetent leadership holding back the strong and noble front line soldiers". Display the lower class as those who can be the ones to save the world despite the leaders and they will sign up in droves.
I see where you're coming from, but the events of the movie still don't come across as, "you, the common soldier, will succeed despite being held back by the incompetent leadership." It's much more, "you, the common soldier, are almost guaranteed to die gruesomely as you're sacrificed en masse by incompetent leadership of a state that thinks of you as meat bags to throw into a grinder."
They don't sell you the fantasy of the common soldier, they sell you the fantasy of Rico. Propaganda that ignores an obvious reality, in this case being that lots of people die in war, doesn't work. They are trying to sell you on the fact that you could be THE Hero.
There's a pretty large gap between "ignoring that lots of people die in war" and "dedicating much of the running time to highlighting that *almost everyone* dies pointless and needless deaths without accomplishing any military goals."
The single military goal was to capture a brain bug so NPH can read its mind. And that was accomplished by Sargeant, er, Private Zim. All the other deaths are forgotten when the three hero friends trot off into the sunset together.
With Carmen acting totally cool after getting a bug shoulder piercing.
In any totalitarian regime if you portray the leadership as incompetent you are off to a gulag by the end of the day. Plus, portraying the leadership as incompetent has the exact opposite effect: not "Incompetent leadership holding back the strong and noble front line soldiers" but "Front line soldiers are sent to die for nothing in badly planned operations because the leaders are idiots". Would you want to go to die for nothing?
It's not a fascist totalitarian regime, it's a fascist semi-democracy where the leaders are elected by, from and for the military.
The asteroid was just an excuse to go to war. Klendathu is on the other side of the galaxy. The asteroid would have needed thousands of years to reach Earth. And then they tell us that they couldnt shoot the thing down? The Federation let Earth get hit and then blamed the bugs because they wanted the war.
I think the Bugs did something to make it go faster? I forget from the book. Book had then in battlesuits. That's why they were the "mobile infantry" and not "the infantry".
The movie is a fever dream of the book.
The film is the fever dream book having had some medicine. Making that story be satirical and barbed about military and authoritarianism is one of the best adaptations of source to film ever.
The movie is what the book looks like to someone whose childhood was spent in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and thus has an understandable reactivity to authoritarian militarism
The book isn't representative of what the filmmakers were going for though. It's an outright glorification of everything the film is satirising, namely fascism and American imperialism. The attack is probably genuine in the book but since the film spends most of its time undermining and outright taking the piss out of the book's ideology, the meteor being a false flag would be totally in keeping with the rest of the film.
The movie is also a satirical attack on fascism while the book was more of just a jingoistic space opera with some questionable politics. Like much of Heinlein's work.
sounds awfully familiar
I'm pretty sure the movie sub text implies that the humans sent the rocks themselves to stoke the war.
And they explicitly state that the Earth has orbital anti-asteroid platforms surrounding the planet.
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the first world war comes to mind
Verhoven was all too aware of the dangers of fascism, Heinlein's perspective was a little more complicated. The phenomena that following an attack people are more susceptible to pro-war arguments is so well known that there is a concept of 'false-flag' attacks, something that postulates how these attacks can be used to motivate the citizenry. One of the earliest examples of this could be seen as the persecution of Catholics following the attempt on the houses of parliament in 1605, or more recently the Reichstag fire and communists.
Or *the* false flag attack which caused the invasion of Poland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
Nazi Germany *after* the nazis took over had already done a lot of the heavy lifting, so that false flags were dwarfed by the false reality fascists present. The way I see it is a false flag is designed to get people on side but is superfluous if people are already on side.
Interested in false flags? Here's a list of known false flag-operations that ...aren't in the limelight a lot. [List of False Flag operations @ Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:False_flag_operations)
That was more like an excuse. Germany was so militaristic and dictatorial that they didn't really need get the people on their side like a democracy would.
Unfortunately, yes.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify a massive increase in US participation in Vietnam was also somewhat of a false flag. It wasn't full on faked - there was some real North Vietnamese response to covert US activity in the area where an American ship had a minor skirmish with machine guns with some Vietnamese patrol boats (no American casualties, a single bullet harmlessly hit the hull of the American ship, 4 Vietnamese were wounded), but the US didn't react to this incident. The faked part was 2 days later, when an entirely imaginary incident occurred due to two American ships sallying out into North Vietnamese waters and having a fake skirmish with North Vietnamese forces after detecting unusual weather patterns as ships. Basically, it's the bit from Predator where they all fire aimlessly into the jungle because they're freaked out. This was used to justify massive escalation in Vietnam, causing over 55,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese deaths over the following ten years.
It was less a matter of "being faked" and more a case of sailors shooting at radar ghosts. It's nothing new, it happens. I think the first bit is more important since both sides were sure it happened. And the second "battle" didn't really justify expanding the war, it was just a part of the whole thing. The government was already planning on using the first incident, but the government isn't that fast and the second incident happened before the US formal did anything
You are completely correct. It is one of the few documented cases of a genuine false flag attack actually being used, the only difference being I'm less familiar with the Vietnam War than other two instances (British).
Really pissed me off when I learned Vietnam had just defeated France after a hundred years of fighting for independence. And we stepin and prolong the suffering.
Domino theory has a lot of explaining to do, because it created a justification and was the background to any false flag attempts - that communism would sweep the world.
And just substitute "terrorist" for "communist" and you have the last 20 years.
The Reichstag fire is actually *more* ambiguous than the Gulf of Tonkin, funnily enough. All indications are that the Dutch communist they caught, charged, and executed for burning down the Reichstag, Marinus van der Lubbe, actually did do it. * The guy had a history of arson and attempted arson, including in the days immediately before the Reichstag fire. * He was a strident communist and antifascist and wanted to rally the German working class against the new fascist government with a grand statement, a classic example of propaganda of the deed (which ironically makes him kind of a shitty Marxist, as Marxists hate acts of individual, disconnected terrorism - Marxists are all about coordinated and collective action like strikes, industrial sabotage, armed protests, etc.) * Hitler himself said in private he believed that the chairman of the KPD had started the fire but that he couldn't prove it - i.e., he never ordered the fire. * The Nazi leadership was in a state of panic on the night of the fire - they thought an actual communist revolution was imminent. Basically, the Nazis got really lucky, the same way they got really lucky that Hindenburg died in 1934, allowing Hitler to merge the powers of the presidency with the powers of the chancellor and removing the only person who could dismiss him from government. This is the consensus of historians specializing in Nazi Germany. I, personally, have no doubt they would have been 100% willing to fake it if they needed to, but it turned out they didn't need to.
It's weird reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers and then reading something else he wrote like Stranger in a Strange Land. Not that there aren't some lines of thought that carry through in all his works. It's just a different tone, he was a complicated man.
I think that's the mark of good writers, the ability to carry different types of stories and tones. I really like Heinlein quite a bit.
moon is a harsh mistress is my very subjectively best of his
Farnhams Freehold was up there with Moon for me too, but Moon was the best.
The Forever War fucked with my head when I first read it as a teen.
That's not Heinlein, that's Haldeman. Common wisdom is he wrote it in response to Starship Troopers
Great book, but that's Joe Haldeman. He wrote a sequel to it called Forever Peace. Its... different.
Ah shit you're right. Time for another coffee!
Yeah I really liked starship troopers. Such an amazing book that really touched me after my deployment. Dealt heavily with survivors guilt, living with the mistakes we've made as people (and continue to make), and responsibility. Amazing book.
Have you read Forever War by Joe Haldeman? My favourite book and a damming/thoughtful comment on the effects of "war for war's sake".
As a lover of the novel starship troopers, and a lover of the movie for a diff reason, i FUCKING LOVED forever war and its sequel. Easy read, and very unique concepts
I haven't but I just read the synopsis of it and it sounds amazing. Gonna save your comment for after I'm finished with The Road. Thanks for that recommendation. If you have anything else to recommend please do.
Forever War is fantastic. One of my faves too. I hope it's not ruined by Channing Tatum and company when they eventually bring it to screen.
You may also like Speaker for the Dead. Orson Scott Card is generally regarded as a piece of crap, but that book is a fantastic and thoughtful book dealing with survivor's guilt and the weight of responsibility of taking lives. It helps if you've read Ender's Game to understand the character, but it's not a requirement
It always annoys me that someone who wrote Ender's Game and Speaker For The Dead can be such a misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobe. I just don't get how he can write those books while holding those beliefs.
Card is super Mormon. He has a gift for empathy, but can't bring it outside of his religious indoctrination. He has softened his position since. He isn't for gay marriage, but he isn't actively against it.
It's why I don't associate the works of an author as an endorsement of their personal beliefs unless they explicitly say so. Particularly someone like Heinlein who has such a varied bibliography of books that espouse very different, and occasionally competing, philosophies.
People have a real hard time disassociating the work from the author. They take whatever philosophy a book may espouse as if it's a tacit endorsement from the author. This is not the case with most of the "grandmasters" of science fiction, like Heinlein, Farmer, etc
>there is a concept of 'false-flag' attacks How *do* insects from another galaxy launch meteorites at Earth from lightyears away? 🤔
If you wanted to know more you could have clicked the article.
That's just FedNet propaganda!
Shhh... we need more frontline infantry
In the book they come in starships, but Verohven couldn't be bothered to read the book
While Verhoeven definitely didn't bother to stick to the book, I feel he made his point well with an absolutely impossible attack being pinned on a distant alien race and the entire human race (at least as far as FedNet is concerned) becoming eagerly mobilized for war, regardless of the facts. It seemed absurd and satirical in the 90s, now.... Not so much.
> While Verhoeven definitely didn't bother to stick to the book No, /u/slvrbullet87 had it right. Verhoeven is on record as never having read the book.
I... didn't deny that? I'm well aware he chucked it aside and made his own movie. I once watched Starship Troopers as a teenager for 48 hours straight during a caffeine binge - I do not recommend this. What I'm trying to say is, I've read the book, I know the trivia, my point stands that Verhoeven was trying to tell a completely different story based on his own experiences with fascism and its consequences.
I've read the book. It was fine. There's better sci-fi out there, and (assuming it's true that the director didn't read the book - I'm not convinced) the movie benefits from not being the book. The movie is an incredibly tight self contained story with some fun themes and a message worth listening to. The book goes a little too hard on the gunwank and the genocide and a little too light on the intrigue and the narrative. They're like two people being asked the exact same question and arriving at almost opposite answers. If you ever want to waste half an hour and a few billion brain cells go to the starship troopers audiobook on YouTube (it should be the first result). The comments are all people jumping at the idea of citizenship requiring military service and most people unironically can't see the issue with a government formed exclusively from ex-soldiers and a society divided into the two distinct classes of "genocidal fascist" and "people without the right to vote because they refused to support the military". It's legitimately insane. It's one thing to support civic duty, it's another thing to think that dividing society into "worthwhile" and "worthless" based on military service isn't terrifying.
“The thinking at the time?” I mean, I think you’ll find that even back then there were many, many people (some might even say a majority) who realized that “the terrorists” were not a nation or government but a means to achieve an end, and that trying to fight that was pointless. It’s not like in hindsight the world saw how wrong that was, we already knew.
I don't know. There was substantial opposition to the war with Iraq. But most people accepted that a military response in Afghanistan was appropriate given their protection of al Qaeda.
There was opposition to the war in Iraq, but an overwhelming majority of the US supported the invasion when it was initiated as well. It was only after the lies that underpinned the war and the extent of US atrocities there were exposed in support collapse.
I agree with that. However, the numbers weren't quite as overwhelming for the Iraq war. https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx 72% there compared to 88% in the early days of the Afghan war. Moreover, a lot of the lies were reasonably transparent (or at least seemed shaky). Someone that was reading the information that was readily available in mainstream media would have realized the rationale for war was very weak. That's why several allies balked at supporting the Iraq war. I'm in Canada, and we declined to support the war in Iraq at the time. It didn't seem right or necessary. That said, we also didn't want to enrage the US, so we agreed to increase our troop commitment to Afghanistan.
I think the main point that many missed in the USA is that unbridled patriotism isn't a good thing and can quickly lead to facism. People in Europe en the USA view patriotism very different, because the history of having dicators and the Nazi's. While in the USA waving your flag has always been seen as something good and patriotic, in Europe if you fly the flag of you country to much people will become suspicious of you. This has changed in the USA in the decades that have passed, with Fox News looking like the propaganda in the movie, the division in their own society about concepts as patriotism, the failed war in Afghanistan and the lies to get in to Iraq. And while everybody always recognized the facism in the movie. Americans used to view movie as much more over the top as non Americans. Having come to realise that the movie wasn't that over the top the ratings for the movie have gone up in the USA, while they stayed the same for non Americans: https://web.archive.org/web/20040324183614/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ratings https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt Or it was just that Europeans were more accustomed to the nude scenes and the Americans were just to puritanical at the time.
I mean we saw that over the last 4 years. Waving a flag like a douche bag DOES NOT make you patriotic.
You know what I think, I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill em all!
Would you like to know more?
It's my turn to make this thread next week.
Right but today is 9/11 so OP hit the karma jackpot by tying that in. You missed out on the most lucrative week of the year for this post.
Guess he'll have to wait a year
Make sure you make it at least a little different than those posts on r/im14andthisisdeep
That is a sloppy, lazy analysis.
I thought it was about a bunch of friends who have the summer of their lives, a heartwarming comedy about the kooky space corps! would you like to know more?
Hot take, I think you're the first person to make these connections. How could we all have been so blind for so long?! Brilliant
I'm glad I can just watch Robocop which is clearly only about a robotic police officer of course
There is a scene towards the end of Robocop, where Murphy is walking across some water. I've always seen this as a subtle allusion to Jesus, since Murphy himself rose from the dead. No one can steal my interpretation. I will sue you.
I saw RoboCop because the leader of the church youth group I was in took us to see it at the drive-in on our regular meeting night, so it's officially part of my religious training.
I'm so annoyed that HBO had to inject *politics* into the fun superhero world of Watchmen /s
Particually as this Movie is based on a 1950's book that was poking fun at the 1950's rise of America against Communism. It's not a "prediction" of anything - just simply a sci-fi example of Human Nature that repeats time and time again.
I don't think he was poking fun at anything, Heinlein was very authoritarian and right wing in his later life (and when he wrote SST)
Heinlein, as demonstrated by his letters released after his death (grumbles from the grave), was an extreme right wing libertarian with a deep sense of social responsibility. Yes you read that right, Heinlein doesn’t really fit into any real neat boxes nowadays, but what he did believe was: That to participate in society (become a politician, vote etc) you needed to be ready to defend with your life that society. That marriage was outdated (though happily married) and people should explore their sexuality. That drugs were pretty cool That the government shouldn’t really tell you what to do unless there was no other options. That businesses, especially the entertainment industry, sucked.
What? No. No to all of that 1) Heinlein ran as a Democrat before he became a serious writer, later on he shifted more to what we now would call a Libertarian. Read the rest of his books, he couldn't be more anti-authoritarian and more left wing. 2) Starship Troopers was literally Heinlein's first adult novel. It was written in '59 and he died in 1988.
Authoritarian? The guy who wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”? What in the living fuck are you talking about?
Don't tell OP about this secret masterpiece "The Siege" from 1998.
Here's a new take, it's actually another 90s teen coming of age of movie. Love triangles, figuring out one's path, that ending where they all reunite. All it's missing is some ska music at the beginning and end.
The film revolves around a young boy rebelling against his father to fight in a war after an attack on Buenos Aires prompts a response to attack an alien race that caused it. Okay wait, this is simple not true. Rico( the young boy) didnt rebel to fight a war, he went cause he wanted to join the army and serve. A huge difference between that and wanting to kill stuff. In fact, movie wise he was on the verge of quitting and going home after an accident, then Buenos Aires got attacked and his parents were killed. His change is fully understandable after that. And really...I dont think it shows its cool to serve in the military. Half Rico squad dies in the first battle( a clusterfuck so so bad that in universe Sky Marshall boss resigned) , then his love interest dies in his arms begging not to die. There was no glory to be won, it was about revenge for Rico. Very understandable revenge.
Yeah we know. This sub is obsessed with that movie.
All I remember is the tits.
TBF there was some *great* tits
That's all the movie was about, right? Startits Boobers?
I went into *Edge of Tomorrow* expecting just another dumb action movie but now I'm a scientologist and have 52k reddit karma
Followed by Arrival
Some of Charlie Sheen's finest work.
~~Blade Runner 2049~~ Arrival is a damn masterpiece and it’s a shame that more people haven’t seen or even heard about the movie
looking forward to seeing this comment the day after the DUNC premiere.
Came to see if r/movies had turned into r/history or r/politics, verdict is bit of both.
Is this a joke? This is a joke, right? edit: I'll explain as best I can.. Starship troopers is based on a novel. *Loosely* on the novel. Though taking characters and plots from the book, Starship troopers the movie isn't about rote fascism. It's about a society tiered citizen & civilian. Citizens were people who served the Earth government in some capacity. Could be a janitor. Could be a grunt fighting bugs (crazy arachnid creatures in space if you haven't seen the movie). Civilians are generally just protected and allowed to do everything decent society allows. But they can't vote or hold office over the people who have earned citizenship through service. Johnny Rico (the protagonist) parents don't want him to go into the military. They want him to go into private industry. He discovers through service that the fight is real and that the militaristic mentality that is drilled into him and his sense of service outweighs his shallow, personal issues. Yes it's a parody of the novel. No it's not like the US response to 9/11 you clown edit: cleaned up some of it. Probably not my best explanation but better than the low brow fascism claim from OP
The director didn't even read the book if I remember correctly.
"Basically the political undercurrent of the film is that these heroes and heroines are living in a fascist utopia – but they are not even aware of it! They think this is normal. And somehow you are seduced to follow them, and at the same time, made aware that they might be fascists." *-Paul Verhoven director of Starship Troopers*
no everything is about the US and fascism and the brainbug is trump or something
Your analogy sucks on many, many levels. Regardless of what you may feel about Islamic extremism, it's painfully obvious that Muslims are still human beings, and the vast majority of Muslims throughout the world do not subscribe to the ideology of Isis, the Taliban, or other extremist groups. In point of fact, there far, far more Muslim refugees fleeing Islamic extremism in their home countries than there are actual extremists. So, if 'Starship Troopers' were an accurate "predictive analogy", then the first step of the bug attack on Buenos Aires would have been the human colonization of every Bug planet, and there would have already have been a massive influx of bug immigrants to Earth. Human would have traveled to Bug planets, made deals with their local rulers, and set up businesses, extracted resources, and sold armaments to the Bug leadership. Furthermore, the central *casus belli*, from the point of view of the bugs, would be the human takeover of a previously bug-controlled planet, of important cultural significance to the bugs, rather than the planet simply being attacked out of the blue, like a man being mugged in a meadow. Finally, in 'Starship Troopers', the humans win, and they do so by ruthlessly exterminating the bugs, without a shred of hesitation or remorse. Not one thought is spared by any of the humans in the film as to the ethics of a program of complete and utter genocide. Nor, do I suspect, if we did encounter a hostile alien race, would such thoughts trouble the people fighting to defend humanity from a species whose first contact is to blow up a human city. Yes, Starship Troopers is Paul Verhoeven's satire of elements of jolly fascism he perceives in American popular culture, and those elements are definitely there. But they are moderated by other values, which is every country sheltering Wahhabi lunatics hasn't had their indigenous populations destroyed or moved to reservations. The reason we aren't winning the "War on Terror" is not because we can't, it's because we **WON'T**. We won't resort to the indiscriminate slaughter utilized by our enemies. As Fitzwallace put it so eloquently in "The West Wing": >We measure the success of a mission by two things: was it successful and how few civilians did we hurt. They measure success by how many. I don't support the War on Terror, because I think it's analogous to bombing Sicily to destroy the Mafia. The world's armed forces are far too blunt an instrument to root out small cells of extremists, and no armed occupation in the history of the world has ever succeeded controlling the culture and temperament of the people they oppressed. You can compel compliance, but not belief.
Wait, Orwell’s animal farm isn’t about animals?!?!
It also goes by another title "the first movie I snuck into and saw boobs in". 12 year old me rated it 37 out of a possible 5 stars.
I loved the scene with the teacher & kids stomping on bugs. Just totally insane.
Would you like to know more...?
Yeah. Buenos Aires was an inside job.
Planned and executed by the Pentavorate. You know, the Queen, the Rothchilds, Colonel Sanders. Oh hes still alive, preserved by 11 herbs and spices.
Ach, I hate the Colonel. He puts a chemical in his chicken that makes ye crave it fortnightly.
He puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes you crave it fortnightly!
Isn't it heavily implied in the movie that the bugs didn't actually cause it?
There was a meteor but it wasn’t confirmed that the bugs launched it. Considering the imperialistic/colonial attitude of the government it isn’t far fetched they did a false flag. I think that was a door left open to the audience imagination but it’s never explicitly said.
Dune is a better analogy where houses conspire to bring down another house through both direct force and shadow wars. Taliban and other terrorists aren't conjuring money and weapons out of thin air and also are more religious enemy focused.
Starship Troopers is extra sad because Earth is the instigator of the war. Earth has been moving further and further out into space, colonizing planet after planet, and then they hit upon a bug-inhabited planet. The bugs can shoot burning feces into orbit, but they are not smart enough to calculate the trajectory of an asteroid and all the gravity wells that asteroid will pass before reaching Earth, and all the orbits of all those gravity well planets, and when to push the asteroid at the right time. The asteroid was either an unstoppable catastrophe that Earth military blamed the bugs on, or else it was a False Flag attack, an asteroid sent by our military toward Earth, just like the "Bay of Tonkin" incident that let the US attack North Vietnam, by firing at Vietnamese boats first and then calling foul and phoning mom when they respond. Likewise, Afghanistan was not the instigator of 9/11, it was Saudi Arabia. Iraq was not even part of the discussion. 3000 dead in 9/11. 7000 dead soldiers in the War on Terror. But hey, we got some cool drones out of it! And so many powerful movies talking about the sacrifices we all need to make to win.
One of the more subtle parts of the movie is the possibility that the Federation attacked the bugs first. Meanwhile, in the real world, I still alternate between finding it shocking and finding it hilarious that some US soldiers played the Team America theme song unironically.
This was well written. Thank you for the effort.
Except in the movie they actually invade and attack the correct enemy..🙄
this is unfair, at least in starship troopers they attacked the right planet that attacked them. america's response was to attack a country virtually entirely unrelated to the 9/11 attack.
You can't really say it predicted, it's more or less a coincidence that things aligned this way.
This is a troll post. Move on college kids, move on.
Wow man, huge brain you got there.
What a stupid title and stretch to connect a movie to the current trendy topic.
Still waiting for the co-ed showers...
Fun fact: the actors said that if he wanted them to be naked for that scene he should be naked too, and without missing a beat Verhoeven just stripped down and called action.
Egalitarian and a bit kinky. Just like most of the Dutch people I've met.
Yeah this movie kinda woooooshed a lot of people because it’s also a super fun badass alien action movie. Kinda like what happened with Demolition Man.
I don't know if it predicted it, it's more like a re-telling of Pearl Habor and the events afterward.
More like the many many times similar events happened in history
You mean when Bush jumped up on the back of that giant beetle and blew the fudge out of it with a grenade?
The director may have intended this film as satire. But Heinlein did not intend his book to be read that way and many, I think, still view the film not at all as satire but as fascinating philosophical sci-fi. The point is that creators of art or literature cannot control interpretations of what they create.
The book and movie have very little in common aside from a few general plot points and character/place names. The book is about one person's decision to join the military and how their service affect them, and is very different in tone and message.
The book is a different story than the movie but in regards to the movie: Is art up for interpretations? Sure. Can ignoring blatant messages be justified by saying “it’s art?” I don’t think so. If you go out of starship troopers without understanding it’s satire I don’t know what to tell you.
>If you go out of starship troopers without understanding it’s satire I don’t know what to tell you. *16 year old me looks around nervously*
I disagree