Starshoop Trippers
I watched the Rifftrax Live show last night, the one where they did "Starship Troopers". I didn't understand the movie when it first came out, and now that I've watched it, I think I understand it less.
Someone on Twitter objected to the Rifftrax treatment, since "Troopers" was supposed to be a satire to begin with. I had a hard time believing this, but I looked it up after I got back from the theater, and it turns out that the movie is a satire of the book it was based on. The novel presents this pro-military, possibly fascist society, and apparently Robert Heinlein considered this scenario to be a nice place to live. The movie is constructed to make this attitude as campy as possible. All the characters play it straight and love the world they live in, but the audience is supposed to recognize this as a farce.
This hurts the movie a lot. I haven't read the book, so I thought the movie was a faithful adaptation of Heinlein's anti-war sentiments. Now that I know better, it turns out that the novel has been criticized for being little more than a political commentary disguised as a story. The characters are little more than a mouhpiece for the author, and the plot is pretty thin without Heinlein's editorializing. Peter Verhoeven comes along and makes the movie version, but he mocks Heinlein's opinions, which means stripping out the only compelling part of the book.
What you're left with is this wafer-thin plot about an interstellar war fought by ciphers. We never find out what the enemy aliens think or feel about the war, and all of the human characters unanimously agree that the "Bugs" are an existential threat to the human species. The only real twist in the movie is when the humans are defeated in a major battle, because they naively assumed the Bugs were unintelligent. Otherwise, we know nothing about the nature of the war or the relative strengths of the opposing sides. I'm fairly sure the humans are losing, just because they refuse to give the enemy any credit, and they rely on machine guns even though the Bugs can withstand dozens of direct hits at pointblank range.
I don't know if Heinlein's politics would have improved any of this, but the movie's only message is that this is all really stupid, which isn't enough to carry the film. Ancilliary characters are routinely dismembered or killed in gruesome fashion, but when the hero sustains an enormous gash in his leg behind enemy lines, he's miraculously rescued and has his leg regenerated completely. Meanwhile all the other wounded veterans are amputees or cyborgs. When Denise Richards' starship blows up, she only has a nasty cut over her eyebrow, which is absent in the next scene. I'm pretty sure these are intentional jabs at war movie cliches, but they look just as stupid as if they were committed unironically. Neil Patrick Harris wears what looks like an SS uniform, which is supposed to hammer home the Nazi comparison, but it doesn't get reflected in the plot. How is Neil Patric Harris' character like a Nazi? There's no moment of betrayal or catharsis, where a character suddenly realizes that their society has been corrupted. Neil doesn't act differently than he did at the beginning of the film. They do horrible things to the Bugs, but we have no context for this. As far as I can tell, the primary resemblence to the Nazis is the way they overestimate their advantage over the Bugs.
This all reminds me of the latest "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" episode. Anita Sarkesian addressed "ironic sexism", pointing out that a lot of video games will present sexist ideas as a "parody" of their prevalent use in other games. The problem is that a lot of these "parody games" are just repeating the trope, and using self-awareness of the trope to justify it as satire. "Starship Troopers" makes the same mistake. The movie assumes you recognize the tropes it's making fun of, but there's no other substance to it. They saw all these stupid elements in Heinlein's book and other science fiction/war stories, and found them so absurd that they... repeated them all over again.
Peter Veroeven also directed Robocop, and there are some similarities. Both movies present absurdist future worlds, where characters and the media take the absurdities for granted. Both use ultraviolence to parody violence in movies. Both use inane news broadcasts to provide exposition. The difference is that "Robocop" had a compelling story beneath the surface. It also had the advantage of satirizing more relevant situations. "Troopers" basically pokes fun at fascist elements from a decades-old novel. "Robocop" carries privatization to a horrifying extreme, which actually made sense to audiences living in the 1980's. The moral of "Robocop" is that OCP could claim to own the Detroit Police and Murphy's remains, but their cynical attempt to program a cyborg for justice would create the most noble lawman of all. The moral of "Troopers" is that it sucks and it knows it.
I kept expecting the movie to do something with that self-awareness, but no soap. There was an episode of Futurama that borrowed heavily from the themes of the movie, but it ended with an actual twist: Fry learns the aliens he's been fighting are the good guys, and he and his comrades have been the evil invaders all along. "Troopers" could have benefitted from something like this. Even if the characters failed to appreciate the situation, at least let the audience have that chilling feeling of a humanity beyond redemption. But no, the hero saves the girl, Neil Patrick Harris captures a strategically important Bug for experimentation, and that's it. I guess that's what passes for satire. But I'm pleased to report that the movie was still eminently riff-able, regardless.
Posted via m.livejournal.com.
Someone on Twitter objected to the Rifftrax treatment, since "Troopers" was supposed to be a satire to begin with. I had a hard time believing this, but I looked it up after I got back from the theater, and it turns out that the movie is a satire of the book it was based on. The novel presents this pro-military, possibly fascist society, and apparently Robert Heinlein considered this scenario to be a nice place to live. The movie is constructed to make this attitude as campy as possible. All the characters play it straight and love the world they live in, but the audience is supposed to recognize this as a farce.
This hurts the movie a lot. I haven't read the book, so I thought the movie was a faithful adaptation of Heinlein's anti-war sentiments. Now that I know better, it turns out that the novel has been criticized for being little more than a political commentary disguised as a story. The characters are little more than a mouhpiece for the author, and the plot is pretty thin without Heinlein's editorializing. Peter Verhoeven comes along and makes the movie version, but he mocks Heinlein's opinions, which means stripping out the only compelling part of the book.
What you're left with is this wafer-thin plot about an interstellar war fought by ciphers. We never find out what the enemy aliens think or feel about the war, and all of the human characters unanimously agree that the "Bugs" are an existential threat to the human species. The only real twist in the movie is when the humans are defeated in a major battle, because they naively assumed the Bugs were unintelligent. Otherwise, we know nothing about the nature of the war or the relative strengths of the opposing sides. I'm fairly sure the humans are losing, just because they refuse to give the enemy any credit, and they rely on machine guns even though the Bugs can withstand dozens of direct hits at pointblank range.
I don't know if Heinlein's politics would have improved any of this, but the movie's only message is that this is all really stupid, which isn't enough to carry the film. Ancilliary characters are routinely dismembered or killed in gruesome fashion, but when the hero sustains an enormous gash in his leg behind enemy lines, he's miraculously rescued and has his leg regenerated completely. Meanwhile all the other wounded veterans are amputees or cyborgs. When Denise Richards' starship blows up, she only has a nasty cut over her eyebrow, which is absent in the next scene. I'm pretty sure these are intentional jabs at war movie cliches, but they look just as stupid as if they were committed unironically. Neil Patrick Harris wears what looks like an SS uniform, which is supposed to hammer home the Nazi comparison, but it doesn't get reflected in the plot. How is Neil Patric Harris' character like a Nazi? There's no moment of betrayal or catharsis, where a character suddenly realizes that their society has been corrupted. Neil doesn't act differently than he did at the beginning of the film. They do horrible things to the Bugs, but we have no context for this. As far as I can tell, the primary resemblence to the Nazis is the way they overestimate their advantage over the Bugs.
This all reminds me of the latest "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" episode. Anita Sarkesian addressed "ironic sexism", pointing out that a lot of video games will present sexist ideas as a "parody" of their prevalent use in other games. The problem is that a lot of these "parody games" are just repeating the trope, and using self-awareness of the trope to justify it as satire. "Starship Troopers" makes the same mistake. The movie assumes you recognize the tropes it's making fun of, but there's no other substance to it. They saw all these stupid elements in Heinlein's book and other science fiction/war stories, and found them so absurd that they... repeated them all over again.
Peter Veroeven also directed Robocop, and there are some similarities. Both movies present absurdist future worlds, where characters and the media take the absurdities for granted. Both use ultraviolence to parody violence in movies. Both use inane news broadcasts to provide exposition. The difference is that "Robocop" had a compelling story beneath the surface. It also had the advantage of satirizing more relevant situations. "Troopers" basically pokes fun at fascist elements from a decades-old novel. "Robocop" carries privatization to a horrifying extreme, which actually made sense to audiences living in the 1980's. The moral of "Robocop" is that OCP could claim to own the Detroit Police and Murphy's remains, but their cynical attempt to program a cyborg for justice would create the most noble lawman of all. The moral of "Troopers" is that it sucks and it knows it.
I kept expecting the movie to do something with that self-awareness, but no soap. There was an episode of Futurama that borrowed heavily from the themes of the movie, but it ended with an actual twist: Fry learns the aliens he's been fighting are the good guys, and he and his comrades have been the evil invaders all along. "Troopers" could have benefitted from something like this. Even if the characters failed to appreciate the situation, at least let the audience have that chilling feeling of a humanity beyond redemption. But no, the hero saves the girl, Neil Patrick Harris captures a strategically important Bug for experimentation, and that's it. I guess that's what passes for satire. But I'm pleased to report that the movie was still eminently riff-able, regardless.
Posted via m.livejournal.com.