This movie should never have been made!! They cant do this to Starship Troopers!!
I sorta thought the same about the first one
I just heard an echo..echo...echo... it sounded like, Troll...troll..troll.
however I'll give ya the benefit of the doubt and just say that in the future try to posta topic that is more than 1 sentence and has some reasons why you dont like the movie.
> I just heard an echo..echo...echo... it sounded like,
> Troll...troll..troll.
>
> however I'll give ya the benefit of the doubt and just say that
> in the future try to posta topic that is more than 1 sentence
> and has some reasons why you dont like the movie.
>
Is a explanation really necessary? The first Starship Troopers was uber cool. There were legions of bugs that actually looked like they were there, and not just inserted in. There was tons of blood and gore which adds an extra coat of coolness to every battle scene. Plus there were those hilarius menu thingys. "Would you like to know more?"
While ST2 was a completely differnt movie. I was expecting the awsome bug blasting fest type feel from the first movie, but what do I get? A stupid "suspenseful" alien movie... If it were part of the Aliens series the stuff in this movie might have been a little more acceptable, but this is Starship Troopers we are talking about here. The sequel to the awsome movie that I fell in love with years ago is total crap!!!
Plus, what the hell is up with all the stupid fog?, And in the second scene of the movie when the troopers are fighting off a bunch of bugs it seems like no one even notices that they are being attacked half the time. They are all just chattering away while firing a few shots here or there. In the first movie that would never fly. Doesnt anyone remember how many shots it took to kill a bug in the first movie?, A hell of alot thats how many!!
Satisfied?Dunners wrote:
I didn't care for the original Starship Troopers movie. I thought it was campy sci-fi meets Beverly Hills 90210. I doubt the second movie, no matter how different it is from the first, could possibly be good enough to completely erase the first movie from my mind.
I hated the first one so very much. Oh how how I hated it .
I loved the book as a young teen, and to see it so badly butchered really hurt,. Overall, I think making a movie purposely campy is a mistake almost always.
-Ed
The first one was so bad (why must they do this to Heinlein?) I saw no reason to even acknowledge the existence of the second.
What was so crappy about it?
Well, everyone's entitled to an opinion here; I tend to go easier on "Omega Doom" and "Nemesis" then most :)
Why I disliked "ST"
1) I read the book
2) Replaced the cool armored gorilla suits and heavy weaponry with exposed infantry with small machine guns.
3) The strong political commentary on facism in the book was replaced by over-the-top pardoy that was just shy of Leslie Nielson doing the news bits
4) Combat tactics reduced to a bunch of people running up and shooting; as a species, we are doomed.
5) "Coming of age in the world" replaced with "Buggy Hills 90210" sappy sopa opera
...
What Freep said.
well, what can u expect from somebody who dared to direct one of the worse movie ever made "showgilrs".
anyway the only two cool things about the film was that michael ironside, always playing the same role in each film he does, and Jake Busey were in there,and whats the only cool thing about Jake Busey?............... his father.
Hey, how can you call Showgirls one of the worst movies ever made? That was one of the funniest comedies I have ever seen!
indeed, but i had much more fun with "coyote ugly", im still wondering what kind of effort John Goodman had to do to be able to contain his guffaw while he was acting in such nonsense film.
I like STARSHIP TROOPERS a lot, but have yet to see the sequel.
If you want to read as I wax rhapsodic on ST, go here:
I thought Showgirls was boring actually. 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). It's funny to see them try and pass that garbage off as "normal." But even that stops being funny after 5 or 10 minutes.
"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??
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.
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
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...
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 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104981/) He gets more screen time and I find it fairly fun to watch
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."
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.
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.
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.
>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)
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)
I thought the satire in Demolition Man was pretty good, if underplayed a bit too much (little?)
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.
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).
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
I think the biggest mistake the producers/Verhoeven et al made was in calling it STARSHIP TROOPERS. If they had called it the BIG BAD BUG BATTLE, we might not even be having this conversation.
As to whether the satire works or not, that's a matter of opinion. It happens to work for me. :)
And I do agree it is a cheesy sci-fi action movie with delusions of grandeur (but that also works for me).
SOLDIER with Kurt Russell is another cheesy sci-fi action movie with delusions of grandeur that also largely works for me.
Gerry wrote:
> I think the biggest mistake the producers/Verhoeven et al made
> was in calling it STARSHIP TROOPERS. If they had called it the
> BIG BAD BUG BATTLE, we might not even be having this
> conversation.
Correcto. And I'd be able to enjoy the movie on that level. But when I see a Heinlein title, I want a Heinlein story, with all that that implies.
This was a good point with the change of title. Calling it "We Killed Lots of Bugs" would make it a fine, if poor, movie. But assigning it a pedigree that goes to the heart of classic SciFi was the mistake, maybe.
-Ed
But assigning it a pedigree that goes to the heart of classic SciFi was the mistake, maybe.
I doubt it, because the reference back to the book was the only thing that even gave the attempted politcal satire anything to hang off of. Without that reference it would've *really* fallen flat
Why is this post still alive? ST was entertaining, but stupid and an insult to the source of the story, so of course the low budget direct to video sequel is Crap.
trek_geezer wrote:
> Why is this post still alive?
This is a badmovies discussion forum, of course it's still alive, and it will probably return from the dead again and again to try to eat your brains.
> ST was entertaining, but stupid
> and an insult to the source of the story, so of course the low
> budget direct to video sequel is Crap.
See above. :)
I just saw ST2... it wasn't particularly good but at the same time, it wasn't incredibly awful either. I was doing other stuff while I watched it so I don't feel I need my 90 minutes back or anything either...
The production values are quite diabolical - the blinking lights on the guns... that was just stupid and yes, there is just about every cliche for a war film. Bumbling Lieutant, tough sargeant, person who likes killing things, the coward but really these descriptions are as much information as the film really gives you.
People have said the plot is lifted from Aliens but I'd say this was far more along the lines of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and perhaps a direct parallel to The Faculty... albeit a lot worse. It's pretty obvious what is going to happen (if you didn't already know, you'll probably have it worked out within about 20 minutes tops) and at no point is there any suspense or "who can you trust?" as you get in "The Thing".
The ending was very superficial... so much so that it felt like the moral at the end of the original He-Man series. Ah, the immense irony that the hero who was branded a criminal for doing the right thing and hating the system was used by the very system itself to perpetuate what he had killed to prevent.
Yeah, Starship Troopers 2 was crap. It's that simple. You could see what was going to happen very early on.
I remember that there was this CG Starship Troopers: Roughnecks cartoon series that used to come on the WB really early in the morning a few years ago. It seemed like they just took one of the episodes from that and made it into a movie (but crappier than the cartoon because it was actually pretty good).
I somehow made it through this movie, it was really bad at times. The crappy guns was really stupid, and I found it hard to believe that the sea of bugs didn't overrun them in the very beginning of the movie. There was no way that their very few crappy guns would have held them off for that long.
Trash.
Yeah, the guns really did just look like plastic pieces of s**t - at least in the original film, you got the impression that the guns were able of putting a bug down. All those guns did was make it seem like the film was in set in a rave (which would probably have been a vast improvement).
I think people have already pointed out that they pretty much ripped the plot off the Tophet campaign - only worse. I think that you can actually justify them not over-running the troopers at the start, it's because the bugs wanted them in there so they could infest them. The *real* question is why they didn't infest Sheppard at the start - other than the fact that would have meant the film was a lot shorter.
I think I might actually check the books out - is the armour they use in the CG cartoon anything like what they have in the books?
The armor is full body power suits with rocket launchers, flame throwers, and mini a-bomb launcher. Maybe even other surprises that I can't remember. It really shaped my imagination as a pre-teen. The movie guys were woefully under equipped by comparison.
By the way, if you want decent Power Armor scifi, try "Armor" by John Steckley (I think). It is much the same idea as the MI fighting suits.
-Ed