This reminds me how oddly interesting the starship troopers movie was.
The whole movie was played like a propaganda thing, they took the JOINING THE MILITARY AND TAKING PART IN THE INCREDIBLE GRINDER THAT IS THIS WAR IN WHICH TENS OF THOUSANDS DIE IN EVERY DAY IS THE BEST THING EVER and ran with it, completely straight. In no part of the movie do we get hints of real attempts at social critique or getting some moral point across, its just alien murder + college student friends movie. In the end, the characters become military officer badasses and its all shown as the best thing ever.
All those people that died? Nobody cares, aliens are dead.
Children holding guns in military ads? Nobody cares, aliens are dead.
Main character became exactly what his jingoistic sargeant was? Nobody cares, aliens are dead.
Its the kind of movie that you can watch again as an adult and apreciate how nutty it all is.
A shame, too, because it's on the whole much less interesting than the novel. That's how pretty much all of Heinlein's work was, interesting to consider even if you didn't necessarily buy what he was selling (free love and pseudolibertarianism, mostly). Certainly the Arachnids as described in Starship Troopers were more intriguing than the Zerg/Nid knockoffs from the films (and heaven help you if you watch the second or third). Not to mention MI being in power armor described (IIRC) as like a "hydrocephaletic gorilla" with pocket nukes and bombs that taunted the enemy in their own language. Pretty much no slugthrowers at all, either, just lots of flamethrowers and explosives.
Not to mention that, AFAIK, Heinlein bears prime responsibility for inventing the idea of drop-pods right alongside power-armored space marines. The whole thing is basically the starting point for a good chunk of the standard mil-SF fare that we assume as standard these days. It's a crying shame that the film gave us dudes in plastic costume carapace armor with generic grey brick rifles and bugs shaped like giant staple removers.
That, and dumbing down the training incidents. Went from one guy getting flogged for hitting a DI, another being hanged for going AWOL and murdering a kid, and Rico getting flogged for fucking up the handling of a simulated nuke(!) to "whoops Rico let a guy onto the live fire course with a loose helmet strap" (never mind that they were doing a live fire course with shitty partial armor-an inch lower and the helmet being off wouldn't have mattered anyways-or that in the novel one of the things they went out of the way to avoid was trainee deaths instead of embracing grimderp).
Enough of that ranting though.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14938319 times)