Dec 03, 2011 11:00
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I loved the book of Starship Troopers when I was a kid reading every bit of SF that I could get. But looked at soberly it glorifies the military with no real logical argument behind that; and has a very strong theme of destructophilic gratification. At least RAH had been in the miliary, so he could write about it with some echo of reality.
The movie is slick, camp and superficial, and often stupid. No military accuracy at all. Maybe that's the point; I can't tell.
There's a good movie in that book somewhere; Verhoeven's movie definitely isn't it. I've been watching Saving Private Ryan this weekend; something between that and Aliens, with a touch of BSG and Gundam would be better. It would still be full of jingoistic explosions but hey, everyone's got faults.
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tl;dr - if the only point the movie had was "satire of jingoism" then that's both a failure of ambition and a failure at the ambition.
I don't have particular hopes for a remake (I know nothing about it) but they could do a lot worse than to go right back to the source book.
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It wasn't true to the spirit of the novel, but as I don't agree with the spirit of the novel that was also fine by me.
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