I really liked Starship Troopers as a kid. Pretty sure I said it was my favorite movie for a time. Last year or so, I had the chance to watch it again with some friends, and I was excited because now I could watch it with my Adult Knowledge that it's actually a satire of fascism. I was honestly bored out of my mind, and I wanted to turn it off halfway through.
Because it's not really a typical satire, right? It's an example of a movie that a fascist society would make. This kind of necessarily means that the movie needs to be trite and shallow. Neither the characters nor plot is compelling. Because of this, the action sequences fall flat to me, too.
I watched robocop the day before, and I actually liked it way more than when I was younger. I can also enjoy other satire of fascism like Warhammer 40k which I think is ridiculous enough to be fun.
I don't know, it sucks for the people who genuinely uphold it as a fascist piece of art because... Damn, it's really childish and boring when taken at face value.
Anyone with me on this? I honestly found it disappointing.
I was old enough to have seen it in cinemas when it came out. I didn't, because the promo stuff made it look like generic sci fi garbage. All the chuds in my class loved it and I thought; yeah, not for me.
This was in a fairly backwater town in like '97, so the discourse around it didn't go much further than that and I forgot about it for about 10 years.
Eventually one of the punks I lived with at the time gave me his sketchy bootleg VCD collection to go thru and there was a copy in there. I threw it on to see what all the fuss was about back in the day. I thought it was utter garbage until part way into the second disk and I realised that was on purpose.
So yeah, mission accomplished, Verhoeven.
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