passing my media literacy test after watching Starship Troopers.
IF the humans started the conflict then it's pretty much an Israel/Palestine situation.
The movie really doesn't make it clear who's the aggressor and maybe that's on purpose. The only thing the audience sees is the bugs hurling rocks at earth trying to kill everybody. In hindsight, the only reason they could even know to do that is because a brain bug figured it out where earth was as a result of an invasion.
I think a small amount of dialogue about human expansion into the galaxy would have made that more clear. If you don't put that together it's just a big dumb movie about killing bugs.
@RustyCrab I think the bizarre take that "the bugs are good" or "the troopers are bad" that freaks make, doesn't even follow from the movie. The guy who made it was trying to poke fun at the book, but most of it is mainly targeting the idea of military guys being in charge.
He seems to mainly paint them as stupid stereotypical "jarheads" rather than evil or "the bad guys". So the movie mainly has them doing stuff that is incredibly dumb like having all their ships in the same spot getting destroyed or all going down to the surface to fight the bugs blind without collecting information about their actual strengths and weaknesses.
So I see it more as an attempt to paint "military=low iq" and "they should instead listen to the enlightened philosophers, politicians, bureaucrats, and artists like me!" It falls flat for anyone who doesn't subscribe to the same biases (about military people being inherently stupid) as the movie maker because you won't ascribe the dumb decisions to being the inherent result of the whole system unless you believe the same already.
@mischievoustomato I literally had to rewind later to catch it. I was asking myself who started it and was like "wait did they start a colony?" And scrubbed back through the news clips and found that.
@ajax@mischievoustomato it pisses me off. That line was so important and its SUPER throwaway. Like damn nigga I dont know about brain bugs and shit at the start of the movie. I have to allocate space for remembering what's important. I'm not a tape recorder thats gonna capture every little line. That was mixed it with a bunch of other lines that didn't matter at all.
@RustyCrab wasn't the guy who made the movie politically opposed to the themes of the book that it's based on? I still haven't read the book but I've heard that it's good (and nothing like the movie)
@RustyCrab Grade: D-
Comments: didn't understand the material, the book is actually about why fascism is good. The bugs are communists, communist rules can't work with humans (or: communism is dehumanizing) so in the logic of the author, humans need fascism.
@RustyCrab oh lol I forgot that was a thing for a second... The thing about super anti-war people like in hollywood is they don't NEED the war to be unjustified to decry it as horrible. The have this intuition that fighting is inherently bad, always unjustified, even in self-defense. What you're supposed to do when someone actually just wants to kill you is just never considered (unless it's a WWII movie, but WWII is easier for people like this to psychologically parse, the fighting on our side is remembered as "unselfish" because we were fighting for the "oppressed"-- the jews). I think that intuition is why Verhoven unirionically said the book was fascist propaganda and didn't even finish reading it.
@RustyCrab In the book it's never made clear who started the war because it's not meant to pass judgement or assign blame for the conflict, heinlein seems to interpret war as inevitable, and the book is more concerned with contrasing the different societies in the conflict.
@ajax there is still the question of how the bugs would know where to attack if humans didn't invade. The movie makes it unclear as well but I dont think theres any other reasonable conclusion.
@RustyCrab@ajax@splitshockvirus actually a scifi where there's some method to throw dumb rocks at FTL speeds could actually be a pretty interesting angle if the consequences were explored
@roboneko@RustyCrab@splitshockvirus Yeah I'm more interested in the socio(don't know the rest of this word) theories behind the narrative which is what the author was most interested in. The hwole bug meteor attack would make at least a little more sense if they sent bugs to launch an asteroid that was already in the solar system at earth but that's a minor gripe in the log run.
@splitshockvirus@ajax
>I think the :glow_in_the_dark:
orchestrated the meteor, bugs can't throw rocks across the galaxy.
That thought crossed my mind but the movie gives absolutely zero basis for that. Like why? Troop morale? Thats an expensive way to do it.
@splitshockvirus@ajax as for bugs not being able to fling rocks across the galaxy. I dont know, its implied they're pretty intelligent and they DO hit other planets on purpose
@rosey@splitshockvirus@ajax you mean like the bugs on the meteor are course correcting? Maybe since some of them can shoot stuff out of their behinds with force and telepathy is a thing
@RustyCrab@splitshockvirus@ajax yeah something like that
look for a comet flying nearby, spit a ton of eggs onto it, the eggs grow into an invasion force while it hurtles through space
@roboneko@RustyCrab@rosey@splitshockvirus I remember something about that being how they spread, I don't remember if it was from the book or the movie but the main way they colonize new planets is exactly that way.
@roboneko@RustyCrab@splitshockvirus Also it's hinted slightly in the movie (so slightly I wonder if it's just an illusion I projected on it) the ruling party needed a way to bleed off some excess population so they just sent them into the meat grinder.
@splitshockvirus@RustyCrab Yeah I had that feeling as well when I watched the movie. In the book the bugs are basically like the Zerg, their technology is biological, they advance by selective breeding or controlled evolution or something. It was never a surprise to the humans in the books that the bugs weren't just bugs.
I think they actually had some peaceful relations with the bugs historically, and another human-like alien race, the skinnies, are actually allied with the bugs. They have a lot of different plausible ways they could have found out.
IIRC the conflict started because the humans and bugs tried to colonize the same planet. I have vague memories to that effect.
@RustyCrab@splitshockvirus for the most part, yes. The movie didn't even include the most influential concept that the book introduced to all science fiction: power armor.
In the book, ALL the soldiers are equipped with like 12 foot tall power armor that has kiloton nukes as a handheld weapon.
@RustyCrab@splitshockvirus Both the movie and the book are awesome don't get me wrong but they're just like... two VERY different artists' commentary on the same basic material.
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