Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but still finds it mind-boggling some take it at face value
Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but still finds it mind-boggling some take it at face value
"Quentin Tarantino talked to me for five hours about why Starship Troopers is one of the best movies ever made."
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Is it really that mind-boggling? ST has always seemed to me to read whichever way you are already predisposed to. How does everybody dying make it an anti-war movie? I would be shocked if the kind of person who believes in the good of a war machine were surprised that lots of people die in war.
Maybe my memory is a bit hazy, but the bugs actually annihilate a city, right? What is the human response supposed to be? The extreme nature of the government and military only come across as insane if you've already been educated about fascism. Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures, which muddies the antifascist message in my opinion.
It's a great movie, but anyone who thinks it's going to change anyone's mind from their preconceptions is fooling themselves.
What am I missing?
"I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't."
- Paul Verhoeven, director of Starship Troopers
The movie makes it clear that:
- The bugs were responding to human colonization
- Humans fired the first shots
- The government is lying to everyone claiming the bugs are mindless. They overjoyed shouts of the soldiers when they learn the opposite is true - is only because they learn that the bugs are terrified.
- The endless over the top propaganda is supposed to be a pretty fuckin heavy clue that it's a fascist state.
One of the hallmarks of fascism is that the enemy are simultaneously too strong - so we must militarise - and too weak, because we are the superior race and destined to prevail.
4 in particular I think is more open to interpretation based on ones existing biases than people seem to think. Being over the top doesn't necessarily have to be mockery and authorial intent is peanuts to a random personwatching a movie.
The other points IIRC are individual moments rather than recurring themes. It's not surprising to me that significant numbers of people overlook them.
4 in particular I think is more open to interpretation based on ones existing biases than people seem to think
I mean yeah, people with fascist views obviously wouldn't see fascist propaganda as being ironic.
None of your points except maybe number 4 is true.
It's the same reason people thought Stephen Colbert was a champion of conservatism until he moved to the tonight show.
Maybe my memory is a bit hazy, but the bugs actually annihilate a city, right?
The bugs were alleged to send an asteroid from another solar system and hit Earth. Logically, the bugs would have to know hundreds of years that they were going to get in a war with the Humans, know how to shoot an asteroid across the galaxy, and know exactly Earth was going to be for the asteroid to hit.
Is it surprising that people might miss that, though? Especially if they don't already agree with the antifascist message.
I missed it and wasn't brought to my attention years later that the movie was satire on fascism. I always took it as a dumb action movie.
Not an unreasonable interpretation!
The bugs don't launch the asteroids ballistically, they are launched superluminally as can be seen by the gravity singularity that Denise Richards detects when they (almost) avoid the asteroid.
If I recall correctly, most things that the bugs did was fake news, just propaganda to justify the war that sustain the failed government.
Lies !! The bug obviously launched that asteroid ! You're a traitor spreading lies it's all that i see !
We must have based humanity off the movie.
"its afraid... Its afraid!!" cheering
Anyone who misses the satire is a dolt, but I do agree satire is ineffective in changing minds. It's a preaching to the choir sort of genre.