OFF: Starship Troopers (was Classic Rock)

[J Strobridge]

Veering wildly off topic:


Hardman DK writes:

> On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Andy Gilham wrote:
>
> > > > ObMovie - _Starship Troopers_!!!
> > >
> > > you jest(?)   For about 10 mins I thought there was going to be an
> > > intelligent film interwoven among the dross but I gave up that hope
> > > soon enough and my sympathy is entirely with the stick insects!
> >
> > No, I thought it was superb.
> [....]
>  Verhoeven himself isn't, I think, necessarily militaristic himself
> > - but the film does pose the question, can you be a pacifist when your life
> > is on the line?  And the Californisation of world culture is one of the
> > film's many little jokes.
>

[...... to save space]

> portrayed. At times he appeared to be poking fun at it, but at other times
> playing it straight. He should IMHO have either placed less emphasis on
> the fighting and made the politics more coherent, or he should have gone
> all-out for a total bubblegum movie. Unfortunately, he seems to have
> fallen somewhere in between.

Thank you.

As above!   This captures accurately my reservations.   For a while at
the start I felt that there was an intelligent movie trying to be made
but the characterisation became submerged beneath the action, the
pacifist character never emerged - at best he was a confused simpleton
drifting where the current action was strongest and his promotion was not
on any intrinsic military merits but solely because everyone else got
crunched.  No great leadership qualities here.  Added to the annnoying
habit of changing the timing of the pursuits so that the heroes could
get to do their heroic bits before the nasties arrived and the fact that
no-one got blown up by their own nuclear bombs it was a disappointment.

On the plus side the action sequences were VERY impressive and the
presentation of the film through a visual information screen was neat -
I liked that.

> It's also possibly the most violent movie I've ever seen!

Yes, tho' the new Bond movie I feel was even more so - a lot
of people died in that one!!

obontopic> can't think of anything - sorry!

jill

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J.D.Strobridge at ed.ac.uk                         eset08 at holyrood.ed.ac.uk
                                                ELIJSA at srv0.arts.ed.ac.uk
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