Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdb | Hacker News Reader

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> the knife throwing scene in the Starship Troopers adaptation

That was on purpose. Verhoeven allegedly didn't read the book (which I doubt) and set out to create a parody of it. The movie is ridiculous because it is supposed to be ridiculous, mocking the US military as dumb hicks (enlisted AND leadership), its culture and its purpose as "fascist" and pointless, in 1997, at the tail end of a relatively peaceful period with no major conflicts for the US.

I suspect the scene [2] is a reference to the book chapter where a soldier is executed for mutiny, which Heinlein uses to demonstrate why a wartime military has strict discipline and which Verhoeven openly mocks (indeed Zim's speech about why infantry is needed in the nuclear age [1] in the book answers the same question as the movie scene).

I have not watched the new Ghost in the Shell but I doubt the director set out to ridicule the original, so the spirit of your remark still stands.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Chapter_5

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNhYJgDdCu4

> mocking the US military

See, I have never agreed with this interpretation. I think Verhoeven is mocking society at large and how we celebrate appearances and shallowness rather than appreciate independence and quality of thought. There's plenty of vitriol for everyone and everything, of course, but to me the movie is driven by the idea that society is happy to be sheeped around by lies and propaganda. In contrast, the military is a place where stupidity (yours or someone else's) has consequences.

I remember listening to the movie commentary track on the DVD release. It really was quite hilarious, the interplay between Verhoeven -- making thunderingly clear his assertion "war makes fascists of us all" and making it very evident the film is an ironic political statement and a parody of WW2 propaganda, vs the film's soft-spoken screenplay writer (also co-writer of "Robocop") Edward Neumeier, who is sometimes desperately trying to walk back the director's vitriolic attacks on anyone dumb enough to like the film at face value. Most enjoyable, and Neumeier loses that battle.

Darn, I bought the DVD when it came out as a two-sided disc (!) with no commentary. And now I... er... how does one get DVD movie commentaries / featurettes in this day and age?

> Verhoeven allegedly didn't read the book (which I doubt) and set out to create a parody of it.

He didn't set out to create a parody of the book, he set out to create a parody of the message he interpreted the book to have without reading it (and accepting that he didn't read the book is the only interpretation of the facts that does not amount to calling Verhoeven an idiot -- well, in his interpretation of the book of the book, at least.)

> The movie is ridiculous because it is supposed to be ridiculous

The movie is ridiculous on many levels, only the most trivial of them apparently intentional. (It is probably not, for instance, intended to be ridiculous as a parody of, or even response to, the written work.)

As both an overall fan of Heinlein and of his Starship Troopers book, perhaps I'm in the minority in that I also liked the movie.

That said, I don't take it too seriously which arguably misses any intended satirical point. As you say, to the degree that I found the movie more amusing than serious satirical commentary on Heinlein it may well have failed in its purpose.

As I said above, it is definitely intentional. It has the same style as the original Robocop

Verhoeven had the idea for the story wanting to make a satire of the fascist side of American society. Later someone pointed out the plot similarities to Starship Troopers and so they optioned that and made some tweaks to the script to match. It's why there's no powered armour for example. Verhoeven only read the first two chapters of the book before condemning it as boring and right wing.

That's the same conclusion I came to when attempting to read Heinlein. Does it go deeper than that?

ST does go deeper than that. More broadly, the rest of Heinlein ranges so widely across the mainstream political spectrum that it would be easy to pick 20% of it to paint a picture of Heinlein as far-right, far-left, libertarian, or apolitical. It used to be widely held that this was a chronological shift in his attitudes from the 1930s to 1980s, but that seems not to be the case, now: he just chose which of his non-mainstream views to showcase in any given work.

I'm not sure you can really call the views espoused by any of Heinlein's viewpoint characters Heinlein's own views; there are a few common themes, but there are so many conflicts between them (or even within the same character) that, except where they directly line up with his nonfiction advocacy, it's probably better to take the view that Heinlein's work is often exploring alternate political approaches rather than acting as polemic for them.

It's also perhaps worth noting, in the context of ST, that the "service is optional, but required for citizenship" model was presented prior to the all-volunteer military at a time when each of the last several generations had been subject to at least one large-scale draft, and the US (and most of the rest of the world) had a system where service was tied to citizenship but (well, for men at least) mandatory on demand, universal in practice, and quite often deadly.

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