Caltrops - Mass Effect





	[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="Civis romanus sum "]If you'd seen Robocop before seeing Starship Troopers, then I don't see how it's physically possible to end up missing the subtext of the latter. If you didn't really give the tiniest fuck about either film then fair enough[/quote] Things I knew when I saw Starship Troopers the first time, in pieces: -It was based on a book that people seemed to name drop far too much -It apparently had disappointed those people. -It ran on TNT a lot. Stored in a completely different part of my brain was the knowledge that Robocop was a movie with one of the best intros in history that had formed an otherwise indistinct impression in my young mind when I saw it way back when, and that Total Recall was fucking awesome. None of those were really linked by the word "Verhoeven" in any substantial way until I asked a friend what he was doing right now and he replied with "watching the special features on Starship Troopers". Now, granted, that guy watched the special features on every movie, but still, I had to know why a movie with such <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19971107/REVIEWS/711070305/1023">blah</a> <a href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/1997/11/07starship.html">reviews</a> merited the extra time. He explained, and then connected the dots for me. I watched it again, and finally paid attention to the details in those reviews that should have clued me in. "Lacks the courage of the book's fascist conclusions." WHAT? "The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless." "No humane insight" And so on. [quote] , but if you actually see either as praiseworthy then I'm totally baffled as to how you managed it. And leaving aside Robocop's own merit, what did Starship Troopers add to the formula? [/quote] Does Robocop have merit or not? You seem unsure, but unwilling to discuss it. Robocop is a movie about the time in which it was made through its psychotic vision of the future. It is directly satirical at times, but its entire tone is much closer to that of Total Recall. Starship Troopers is about its own time as well, taking Heinlein's mid century attack on the legitimacy of being a civilian and subverting it to create a pure satire not only on a political level, but on the meta-level, taking on the concept of the blockbuster action film and disassembling it piece by piece. That he manages to do this while being actually funny and showing a few tits is the sort of touch that a lot of sci fi could use. A lot of the devices and stylistic choices made in both movies are superficially similar, but the memorable scenes are that way for different reasons in each. The police state vs the society of total war. Similar, yet different, and both enjoyable in their own right. To bring this all back around to the origin of the discussion: none of that has anything in common with Halo's boring, self conscious blender of cliches for the sake of appearing "deep". Using ST as a point of comparison for that (especially when expanding from there into being upset about the tactical merits of sci fi movies) is criminal. You can dislike ST all you want, but Halo's a whole different category of problematic. [/quote]