bill Whittle on voerhoeven and starship troopers

billc

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From Bighollywood.com Bill Whittle discusses the failed attempt to make Heinleins starship troopers into a movie. He points out how the views of the director, about America being fascist, corrupted the movie. There is a link to Bill Whittle's movie site imbedded in the article.(http://www.declarationentertainment.com/) The link in the article didn't work for me, try the one in the brackets.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/d...of-hollywood-cant-be-trusted-to-get-it-right/

From the article:

In Heinlein’s vision of Republican government, by contrast, only those who serve their society – not only militarily, but through various forms of service that require personal sacrifice – for two years are given the right to be citizens, and only citizens can vote. No member of the population, regardless of color, creed, sex, or religion, can be turned away from service if they are willing, and every person has fundamental rights protected from lawmakers (what a novel concept!), but only citizens can vote.
Of course, to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, these beautiful ideas are, wait for it, FASCIST!
Says Verhoeven said in an interview with AV Club, “all this playing with fascism or fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American society…” He goes on to say, “If you were very nice to the movie, you would call it prophetic,” because of what he sees as the, “‘Let’s all go to war and let’s all die,” jingoism of the War on Terror. BushHitler, BushHitler!

So Heinlein’s political sci-fi classic is reduced to a cheep-shot at the author’s own beliefs. Verhoeven says he never even finished reading the novel.
 

Cryozombie

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I think he's being misquoted there. In Paul's own words:

When we were working on the [Robert] Heinlein book, we felt like we had something that was pretty militaristic, pretty right-wing, and you could even say had a tendency to be fascist. We felt we should counter that with irony and other means

There was an article in the Washington Post—the editorial, not the review—that said the movie was fascist, and the writing and directing were neo-Nazi, or whatever they wrote, that was extremely punishing to us, because that article was picked up, before the film came out, by the whole European press. The movie was introduced to the Europeans as a fascist movie, as a neo-Nazi movie. Which it was not, of course, it was the contrary of that.

He felt the book had elements that COULD BE CONSTRUED as Facist, and so he felt they should counter that in the film with Irony, and then the WP wrote an editorial about how Facist the movie was and everyone ran with that.
 

Bruno@MT

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Let me tell you that noone here thought the movie was about fascism or neo nazism.
It was being seen as hot people shooting bugs in space.
And the movie stank. Not because of any supposed political ulterior motives on the part of the producer, but just because the actors couldn't act and the script sucked.
 

Omar B

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Paul didn't even know ST was a book till halfway through filming, the movie's a completely different beast. It also has many of the themes that were not as fleshed out in Robocop in there. Police states, government control, etc, it was all there.
 

elder999

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Paul didn't even know ST was a book till halfway through filming, the movie's a completely different beast. It also has many of the themes that were not as fleshed out in Robocop in there. Police states, government control, etc, it was all there.


The whole media as propaganda thing was pretty clever ("Would you like to know more?") :lol:
 

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