Starship Troopers (reboot)
- Thread starter Goatface
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
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Furry
🌭🍔🇺🇦✌️SLAVA UKRAINI!✌️🇺🇦🍔🌭
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The series would have to be changed. Even with a lot of cgi, conveying the concept of weaving would just be an effort of futility in a tv setting. That deep part of the book would essentially have to be boiled down to sparklies flying around and the producer saying deal with it bitches. Attempting to make it like the book would only make their audience enter a catatonic state.
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Void
BAU BAU
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Yeah, I watched that yesterday when it popped up on my feed, and I'm sorta disappointed with it. I mean, I get it, and they probably aren't wrong about what the director intended, but it felt too much like they mainly made it for another "woke" slam on the right. When it is literally what the left is asking for, when you get right down to it. If they had just left out the comments linking it to current events and their woke spin on them, it would have been fine, because they weren't wrong in general.
See, for all the people that don't want politics to filter into these kinds of discussions...how am I supposed to watch that video and NOT see politics? I would have been much more happy if they just focused on the blatant ridiculousness of the movie ("Your enemy can't pull the trigger if he doesn't have a hand!" or whatever the line was), and mentioned the obvious political slant from a neutral position.
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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If anyone's got the DVD lying around listen to the commentary track with the director. He believes that joining the military makes you a fascist. That's what the film is about. It's not really even a satire, at least not along the lines that people think.
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Yeah it's pretty retarded. Painfully ironic considering the book is supposed to basically be ww2 Pacific theater set in space.
Szlia
Member
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My understanding is that the point of the novel was not "missed", but purposefully avoided. That makes it a very unfaithful adaptation, but also a great movie.
It's nice that it kinda seems rehabilitated in the US somehow. Two decades ago, when the film was discussed on message boards like this one, almost all the american posters hated it (mainly because they took it at face value) and almost all european posters loved it (mainly because they saw the dark humor / spoof / satire in it). I am not sure exactly why. Maybe a greater familiarity with the source material in the US influenced the reading grid while european viewers had no preconceived notion of what the film was about ? Another factor might be that the satire-o-meter is beeping when there is too big a gap between the norm and what is presented and that gap was much greater for europeans than for americans exposed daily to CNN or a burgeoning Fox News.
There might also simply be cultural differences at work, like a different relationship to armed forces and to war and also different depictions of those in fiction (I am not familiar with the topic, but I can't think off the top of my head of a european war movie that is not anti-war at its core). The evolution of the reception of the film in the US might also be related with the fact the themes of the movie ring differently now than a few years after the first gulf war. And of course there are big cultural differences when it comes to comedy. Hints at that lie in language. In french for instance there are very common expressions like "degrés de lecture", "au premier degré", "au second degré" (literal translations would be "reading degrees", "on first degree", "on second degree") to describe the differences between what is said and what is meant. There are somewhat equivalent expressions in english like "at face value" (that I used earlier) or "with a grain of salt", but it's not the same...
That being said, I remember some french film critics at the time that also took it at face value and trashed it as just another dumb american sci-fi war movie. Their reading grid was probably also skewed before setting foot in the theater, but in a different way : since they expected the movie to be dumb, it escaped them that it could be playing dumb.
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it’s in the works, Amazon I believe. Billy Zane was in a short not long ago actually. The owner of the IP was trying to maintain the rights and put something out quick but I guess Amazon picked it up since then.
Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
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hah, i posted that 7 years ago. Robert Jordan gets no love.
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iannis
Musty Nester
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Have you read the book? It's basically not even an adaptation. Mostly what they share is the name. It's a good name. "Starship Troopers". I mean it's a great name.
The book is a diary of a jump trooper. It's not a man's descent into fascism, it's a man struggling with the realities of the situation he's forced into. Phoenix is right, it's a very thinly disguised self insert about the pacific theater in ww2. The movie isn't even pretending to share source material. It's only loosely sharing the setting. Very loosely.
That's not to slam on the movie. It's a good movie in it's own right. Who doesn't like Starship Troopers? When I watched it in the theater I didn't think about it even a little bit. But after having watched a bunch of RLM and actually thinking about some critical analysis of both the script and the industry surrounding the script... I think someone had the rights to the title/book, decided that the title itself had some, but not very much, value... and made a movie. If the director/author read the book and then wrote the script it is the most bizzare fanfic rebuttal of the book. Truly bizzare. But if the director/author already had a story in mind and found a way to parlay that into a movie opportunity... and someone said "put bugs in it and we'll use this title" that just seems to make a lot more sense to me. And maybe i'm wrong, but that just makes more sense. Because otherwise the dude seriously, seriously, missed the entire point of the book.
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I honestly don't believe they could make this movie and it both be honest to the book, and even VAGUELY marketable to make money. Mostly the same way I feel about Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
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