Starship Troopers 2 was CRAP!!!

[maria paula]

"The only thing funny about it in my opinion is catching it on TV (when the censors add badly drawn cgi clothes on the naked strippers)".
is it that true?? do censors do things like that??

[nobody]

Normally censors just cut the nude scenes out completely- but almost all of Showgirls was nude scenes, and if they cut them all it woud've been a 3 minute commercial length movie :) ...so they added clothing to the naked women.

[maria paula]

yes i did know that censors cut nude scenes in the states , but i didnt know that they drawn clothes on naked bodies, well........... actually, it sounds really weird

[odinn7]

Yes, very funny to watch the clothes that basically looked like they were drawn with crayon. The thing that makes this movie so funny (to me anyway) is that everyone in it looks like they are taking it seriously as though they are expecting awards for being in it. I'm sure they all thought that they were working on some kind of masterpiece and it just cracks me up. Especially Elizabeth Berkley...I'm sure she figured this would be her stepping stone to huge stardom...guffaw...snort...giggle...

[Fearless Freep]

I like STARSHIP TROOPERS

Gerry, I read your review and you make a common problem for people who like it against people who don't.  The Amercian audience can understand satire; any culture where Simpsons and South Park can thrive has no problem with satire.  The problem with ST is that Paul V's satire was not very good.  It didn't have subtlely and intelligence; it was simplistic and heavy handed.  Like I said, closer to pardoy, but it wasn't played for laughs.  The news bits reminded me of the news bits from Futurama, but not nearly as clever.

Now,  I don't have a problem with stupid sci-fi movies.  I have a problem with stupid sci-fi movies with big effects budgets and big ad budgets and big stars ;)

If you want to see Micheal Ironside playing himself in a future, sci-fi movie with less pretension and les sbudget, but more intellgence and a fair more subtely, check out Neon City  He gets more screen time and I find it fairly fun to watch

[Gerry]

Fearless Freep wrote:

> Gerry, I read your review and you make a common problem for
> people who like it against people who don't.  The Amercian
> audience can understand satire; any culture where Simpsons and
> South Park can thrive has no problem with satire.

You are correct of course in that I made a generalization.  Maybe I should have said: "American audiences simply aren't exposed to satire [in big-budget sci-fi action movies] very often."

[jmc]

I just viewed it as a dumb, fun action movie.   I'd take it over THE MATRIX any day.
I'm referring to the first film, though.   The sequel does sound crappy...sounds like they probably didn't have enough money to do anything like the first film.

[Bmeansgood]

The sequel is not that bad, it shouldn't be that painful for the average person that comes to this board.  I finished it and then went straight to the theatre to watch the Chronicles of Riddick.  Riddick had much better special effects, but it was ironic that they were both sequels that truly had little to do with the original movie.

The troopers' guns are the absolute worst part of the movie.  When I first saw them my jaw fell to the floor.  Imagine a trooper standing in front of a CGI Bug, holding a gun with a barrel that randomly blinks.  The Bug then starts to convulse and starts to fall apart.   There is no kick to the gun, no action whatsoever, just a randomly blinking light.  

One of the main characters reminded me of Richard Hatch from Survivor.  By the end of the movie I had convinced myself that this was the nudist's Survivor's big screen debut, but once I saw the credits I realized that it wasn't him.  

Damn, maybe the movie wasn't that good after all.

[Yaddo42]

I get the impression that the studio that owns "Showgirls" added the digital clothing to get the movie on regular TV, not the censors or standards & practices department themselves, who would probably tell them what can't be shown or what has to be changed. The studio would have to know that a film with as much nudity and "dirty" language as "Showgirls would have to be majorly edited or re-worked ahead of time. VH-1 showed it a lot for a while, trying to trade on its status as a minor "cult classic", I guess. The problem is the raw or explicit content that makes some films work (or just popular in some circles, since the film was mostly a critical and financial disappointment when first released) can hurt the same film when it is edited or reworked for networks and basic cable. I notice "Showgirls" hasn't been turning up on VH-1 nearly as much as "Footloose" or "Grease" over time, nor on other basic cable channels. And the edited for TV version of "Pulp Fiction" was usually described as goofy because of all the cuts and changes or just flat unwatchable. I remember a local station advertising for months when they were going to show it in syndication. I remember how flat the movie seemed in that form when they finally showed it (twice), and how much my fellow film buffs hated that version.

Back to "Starship Troopers", my opinions of it tend to be similar to Gerry's linked article. I like both the film and book, but for different reasons. I get the impression that Verhoven wanted to make the film precisely BECAUSE he didn't like the themes of the book. That's why the satire was over the top, and the propaganda was so overt, he wanted to invoke the style of the WWII newsreels and propaganda, which seemed rather ham-fisted in our media saturated age. Lines like "The moble infantry made me the man I am today," said with a straight face should be the tipoff. The recruiter says it with pride, and totally lacking in irony, even as our heroes look troubled by what may be in store for them.

[JohnL]

>yes i did know that censors cut nude scenes in the states , but i didnt know that
>they drawn clothes on naked bodies, well........... actually, it sounds really weird

It is. I haven't seen Showgirls on TV, but when SciFi airs Species II, and it shows Natasha Henstridge strapped to the chair with straps that cross over her chest, covering her breasts, they add an extra strap across her chest. You can tell it was added later because it sort of 'floats' in front of the picture. It doesn't move perfectly in sync with the picture. They also forgot to add it in the far-away shots and the shots on the monitors.

Our censors do a lot of strange things to hide nudity. In some episodes of the show Lexx, and one episode of the show First Wave using blurring to cover up some things that they felt couldn't be shown on TV (in one case it was a woman's backside in a thong). Another episode of First Wave showed the inside of a warehouse where they had nude bodies hanging in harnesses. The straps covered up all the major parts, but I guess they still felt it showed too much, so they zoomed in on the main characters to crop the bodies out of the closeups. This makes the picture look really grainy. The strange part is that in a later episode, a major guest star was shown hanging in the same kind of harness and there was no censorship at all.

So besides just cutting out the scene we have blurring, zooming and digitally added clothes. :-/

About Starship Troopers - Can someone who has read the book tell me if they explain this; How can humans be at war with a species that is apparently confined to a single planet? The bugs didn't seem technologically advanced at all, and they didn't seem like they had the capability to travel through space. So they would be confined to just that one planet and the humans could just avoid it.



Post Edited (06-23-04 05:05)

[Fearless Freep]

Can someone who has read the book tell me if they explain this; How can humans be at war with a species that is apparently confined to a single planet?

IIRC from the book, they weren't

and they didn't seem like they had the capability to travel through space.

Meteorites from Mars and Luna are not too technologically advanced but they manage to hit earth :)  Some spiders that don't have wings or anything can float on threads of webbing for quite a distance.  So...a lot can be done..

but from the book, the mechanics and motivations of the bugs weren't really explored in detail.  They simply were.  It was a setting used as a way of exploring other issues.  The bugs and  the suits and drops and all were a backdrop to keep the story interesting, ut the internal monologue and flashbacks were really the purpose of the story



Post Edited (06-23-04 11:31)

[raj]

I thought the satire in Demolition Man was pretty good, if underplayed a bit too much (little?)

[raj]

Yaddo42 wrote:

> Back to "Starship Troopers", my opinions of it tend to be
> similar to Gerry's linked article. I like both the film and
> book, but for different reasons. I get the impression that
> Verhoven wanted to make the film precisely BECAUSE he didn't
> like the themes of the book. That's why the satire was over the
> top, and the propaganda was so overt, he wanted to invoke the
> style of the WWII newsreels and propaganda, which seemed rather
> ham-fisted in our media saturated age.

So, you don't like an author's viewpoint/philosophy , so you use his book to basically slam him?   To me, that seems underhanded, especially when the author is dead.  I wonder if he presented it that way to the estate of Heinlein.

[Gerry]

Yaddo42 wrote:

> I get the impression that
> Verhoven wanted to make the film precisely BECAUSE he didn't
> like the themes of the book.

It's possible, but I don't think Verhoeven had ever even read the book before he made the movie (a cardinal sin in the minds of some fans).  His satire was directed at contemporary American society more than at Heinlein's book.  Unfortunately Heinlein's book just happens to champion many of the things about America that Verhoeven was criticising in the movie (which p**sed an awful lot of people off).

[Fearless Freep]

Unfortunately Heinlein's book just happens to champion many of the things about America that Verhoeven was criticising in the movie (which p**sed an awful lot of people off).

Which part?

Did it anger people that PaulV was criticizing was Heinlen was advocating?  Well, in that case, Paul deserved it because anyone who remakes someone elses work and then trurns it back on them, as was mentioned, especially after they are dead, deserves to be vocally flayed for what they did because it's just a tacky thing to do.  Heck, I'm a Christian and I don't particularly care for his point of view in "Strangher in a Strange Land" but I can respect it for the creatve work it is and I wouldn't do a remake of it into another medium to try to change the message to one I happen to like.  That would be a cheap shot

Did it tick people off because Paul V was critiszing America?  I highly doubt it for that sake alone.  A *lot* of movies criticize aspects of America, a lot of very successful movies, and itr doesn't seem to stop them from being commercially successful or well liked.

The problem is not in the message but in the delivery.  Like in a lot of movies; the story's been told and the difference between a good movie and a bad movie is in the execution.  Similar here, it's not a matter of what he was trying to do but how good (or not) the execution was.  Call it satire as an excuse but that doesn't make it a 'good but minsunderstood' movie unless the satire actually *works* and in this case the satire was handled so ham-fistedly that it didn't really work.  Saying it had to be dumbed down for a particular audience is not really a justification because a) that means you are insulting your audience in an attempt to tell them something you think is important and b) you're not very good at communicating (because of the marks of a good communicator, a good teacher, is how much the audience, the students 'get it')

In the end, ST was just a cheesy sci-fi action movie was delusions of grandeur and should not be enjoyed as any more than a cheesy sci-fi action movie because no appeals to satire and political commentary can excuse that it really did not live up to it's own pretensions.  It's a stupid movie with a high budget and good special effects and it can be enjoyed as just that, but it should have the courage to admit that, fundamentally, it's a stupid movie