I would just like to take this moment to suggest people find a comfortable place to sit with a stiff drink, spliff or whatever and listen to the first chapter of the audio book - and I mean really listen, actively visualize the story and everything being described, let yourself really emotionally connect with the events as much as possible - it’s a really powerful and well written bit of action sci-fi.
It’s on YouTube read by Christopher Hurt, first chapter is about 40 min, I’ve read a lot of sci-fi and it’s without a doubt in my mind the strongest and most thought provoking opening to a Sci fi. It gets you pulled into the characters, the world, and emotion without a break in the action - and for a book punished in 1959 the action is unbelievably believable, it’s hard to imagine better high energy action sci-fi combat – someone needs to make a real gritty anime of it.
Last I heard, there were some issues about who owns the IP and copyrights? I’m not overly familiar, but legal jungle combined with corporate politics may be scary enough to navigate that Miyazaki would rather be careful around making explicit statements
Why would he get in trouble? Sony only owns 15% of From. And who the hell would fire him? That’d be like firing Kojima. And we see how that turned out for Konami.
Neo Nazis didn’t get The Dead Kennedys (a very left-leaning hardcore punk band). It motivated them to write a song titled “Nazi punks fuck off” (the lyrics just repeat the song’s title aggressively) in an attempt to pass the message into their thick, mostly empty skulls.
I don’t understand why people wouldn’t take it at face value without any further context offered to them beforehand. It’s a campy action film that’s a lot of fun but with just the faintest dusting of authoritarianism that could be easily disregarded as just part of the ambience of the filmmaker’s decisions. It ends on a hopeful scene implying better understanding of the Bugs in order to reach victory.
You’ve got to read the book to get it, but even then that doesn’t really shift the film out of being a Big Action Shooter that’s fun to watch.
I think what made it an obvious parody was the over the top PSA/commercials they broadcasted, and the fact that citizens are treated as a privileged class. I think at one point someone mentions that they have to become a citizen in order to be legally allowed to have children and that’s why they joined the army. It’s so far abstracted from our own reality, that I even picked up on the fact that it was a parody watching it for the first time at 12 years old.
TBF but a parody of what? Sure it has a satirical look and exaggerates aspects of modern society, however we are trying to balance that against the book.
We could even say that the movie is taking shots at Heinlein’s own personal beliefs because arguably Heinlein’s personal politics paint him as a rabid anti-communist, pro-nuclear and -projection of force.
Personally I viewed the commercials and over the top stratified society based using a trope of a somewhat Roman or Spartan militaristic society, but it’s been a long, long time since I read the book to remember enough to actually compare Heinlein’s politics to the book and then the film to that book and modern society.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
The movie point blank states towards the beginning that the Bugs were flinging out their pods/eggs/whatever into space looking to land on worlds to colonize
The movie gives all appearances and inferences that the Bugs attacked first. Not the humans. This makes further sense by point 1, and how far away the bugs home world actually is.
The only announcement made of a bug being afraid wasn’t all bugs. It was only the large “thinking” bug at the end of the movie, after it had its mouth cut off and it was strapped down and being experimented on in the lab. There was no inferences at all of any other bugs being made. So no, the government wasn’t depicted in the movie as lying about knowing of any bug intelligence. I didn’t know of any intelligent bugs, and by the end of the movie it was only known that the one type of rare smart bug captured was the only intelligent one, and that it was able to possibly psychically control the other dumb bugs.
The propaganda films say that the bugs are attacking by flinging asteroids from the other side of the milky way, do you know how long that would take? Also we never see any bugs in space, just the plasma getting thrown, never see how they are supposedly throwing these asteroids.
There’s also no presentation that it isn’t true, and by whatever means, we do know for sure that the Bugs are attacking earth. Retaliation or not, so either way it’s people stuck having to fight in order to save humanity.
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.
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.
Reasonable question! It was a sub called “the_donald”. It started with a bunch of folks saying outrageous things that were satirizing Trump and his followers. Unfortunately it wasn’t outrageous enough because it was slowly taken over by true believers who spouted the same outrageous shit because they actually believed it.
I’ve seen this a few times, ca you explain this to me? Is it a way of talking about people that consider themselves capital G gamers without having them come in and ruin the conversation with whining or gamergate bs?
pcgamer.com
Aktywne