Wasn't the book completely unironic fascist propaganda? They're just openly bragging that they won't copy the anti-fascist movie because their creative vision is to make a straight movie adaptation of the fascist book?
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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So it seems. Allegedly the director of the 1997 film was so disgusted with the source material that he couldn't even finish reading it.
Verhoven might be the only good Dutchman. Iirc he intended the movie to be kind of an earnest effort of propaganda that would be produced by that society. The satire is less that the movie is cheesy or dark or insane or whatever, but that a fascist society would completely miss those notes and just think it fucking rocked. And then Americans saw the movie and thought it fucking rocked.
i remember one time roderic day tried pointing this out on twitter that it was poor satire because of course americans are just going to identify with the fascists and got dogpiled for it
I missed this. I like roderic but I sent him a whole essay about how starship troopers (the movie) is a satire of both liberalism and fascism but he wouldn’t publish it because he said it was incomplete.
It's a frustrating outcome and a misreading of the audience to expect anything else but I'd argue that it proves that the movie is a perfect satire.
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It's the obvious route for the film adaptation to take I guess, although I am 100% certain that instead of adapting the wacky 70s sci fi elements and playing them straight what they're going to end up doing is some awful compromise where the "plot" is closer to the book but they try to retain references to the film and it'll just end up being a mess that sucks and gets forgotten until it gets turned into video essay fodder.
Oh so the whole movie is going to open with "Look at my sweet ass power suit that I drop straight down into from lower orbit bro, wanna know how I got here?" Then the next 100 minutes is the scene where Rico, Dizzy and Carmen all talk to the teacher about what being a citizen means and why the liberal removed used to rule were the worst humans ever. This followed by 20 minutes of hum drum action that is basically "Roboman stomps big bugs."
It's not fascist at all! It's just a story about how the ideal society is a military dictatorship built around endless colonial expansion and war of extermination against a faceless, depersonified other!
Just make the Helldivers movie.
I fear his track record is pretty bad and that the magic in District 9 didn't actually come from Blomkamp but from other members of the team.
Chappie might be the worst movie I’ve ever paid to see.
ahhh mannn thank you for reminding me about chappie so i can hate it again. whole movie felt like your friend introducing you to their friend they think you'll like but you don't vibe. why couldn't the director see how insufferable the protagonists were? i was rooting for them to die the whole time
So it's going to be pro-nazi propaganda? Not surprising since Neill is a boer
Huh. That's news to me. That's so weird given District 9's overall message is like... The opposite of Boer ideology.
I liked district 9 and elysium a lot but both films have many lib brainworms. Look at district 9’s depiction of african refugees as insane cannibals obsessed with witchcraft, or the white savior narrative of elysium.
White South African with a dutch name who's family moved to Canada? I mean sure, District 9 has a message but fundamentally... there's those pesky brainworms that are forever present in even the most well meaning of libs.
Oh no, a serious version of the story
It's gonna be shit
Even aside from the fascism, it's just so...boring.
I don't know how you make a story about a space-faring human civilization with man portable nuclear weapons and powered armor 'boring' of all things, but he did.
Actually I do, it's because he made it some 'realistic' portrayal of military service so there's basically no action, and lots of time for flashbacks to fascistic school lectures.
A lot of sci-fi falls into the trap of being so enamored with the (often cool) setting that it forgets to be a good story.
Yeah, I tried to read it back in middle school because I couldn't go to see the movie (lousy R rating) and it's so boring
Gave up after 30 pages or so
Apparently, Verhoeven had a similar experience, except he also found it morally disgusting
But I was a little 12 year old shit head, so I didn't have myself put together well
It really is boring, I gave it a reread a couple years back just to have read it with an adult set of eyes, it is a slog and the fascism is more apparent.
Highly recommend Armor by John Steakley and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman if you want some conceptually similar books to SST that will actually leave you satisfied.
I'd say Steakley delivers more power armored bug stomping action while still contemplating on the effects of conflict on those who participate and their societies, and IIRC the bugs are not mindless and do get some characterization discovered by the POV humans eventually.
Haldeman also has great action and really goes further into the effect war has on removing soldiers from the life they knew before. He leans into FTL travel and time dilation and it's a clear metaphor for that theme. There is also a big narrative payoff for the adversary species being an advanced civilization. Haldeman wrote a sequel The Forever Peace which is interesting but skippable IMHO. He also wrote a short story A Separate War about power armored soldiers fighting in LatAm and disgruntled vets trying to do direct action to bring a stop to the war, it's cool but really getting away from the SST vibe at that point. It's available in a sci-fi anthology that I haven't honestly read the other stories in.
Armor is like if Starship Troopers weren't fascist and stupid.I'm so sad he wrote the piece of shit book Vampire$ instead of Armor 2 before he died
Armor by John Steakley
Seconded.
RIP John
The only action outside training I recall is the opening chapter where they are bounding over a technologically inferior civilization and absolutely leveling everything with flame throwers and tactical nukes, I don't know how a film audience will see this as anything other than Iraq/Afghanistan but cool that it's happening, or IDF bombing Gaza but presented as a good thing. And then at the end when they get to fight the bugs, which deviously send out their workers/ women & kid bugs as human shields - so if you are making a faithful adaptation you either have to show that as a good thing the humans kill them or directly say the humans are bad.
the opening chapter where they are bounding over a technologically inferior civilization and absolutely leveling everything with flame throwers and tactical nukes
I remember it devoting as much time to like an explanation of how making the nukes have a time delay and a speaker system that counts down in the native language was a genius strategic idea that made them way more effective as terror weapons since it meant their victims had time to be scared and knew what was about to happen, as it did to the actual action happening.
So much of the work is just Heinlein opining about the most galaxy brain shit, like the kind of stuff you'd expect from a kid raised on fashy anime except coming from an adult nerd in the 1950s.
i think the only thing i've read by him was stranger in a strange land and that starts off ok, though the libertarian stuff is stupid. and then as i remember, like halfway through the book it just suddenly jumps all the sharks and turns into a super weird sex cult jesus thing.
the mind boggles.
Yeah Heinlein was weird. His beliefs were extremely incoherent and changed drastically over his life, with the only real constant being a fundamentally right wing slant and him being a giant nerd who liked to speculate about sci fi shit a lot.
I still find it difficult to be too hard on him, though. He wrote once about how writing was a compulsive need, something he had to do or he'd get "physically ill", which kind of lines up with how every book without fail reached a point where you can see he stopped giving a shit about that story and just wanted to wrap it up to start something else. Also kind of lines up with the "Heinlein was an egg" theory. He was also less weird about female characters than most of his contemporaries, which is also strange given his politics. Another strange thing, given his politics, is that he learned Russian and visited the Soviet Union as a tourist with his wife. And when Philip K Dick was dying Heinlein apparently gave his family some large sum of money unprompted to help them out.
I remember that now that you mention it and thanks, I hate it. Notes of Israeli "roof knocking" wafting up from the cesspits of fascist fantasy.
Don't forget how the original writer made a high school lecture that was like a 5 minute scene in the movie 65% of his book
I keep meaning to check out the anime version(s) but I know it's going to be boring as fuck.
Blomkamp made one good movie then turned out to be a total hack afterwards. I feel like he's been attached to a shitload of properties since District 9 and nothing has ever panned out.
Even M. Night Shyamalan had a few very good movies (The Village and Signs, and at least everyone else loved The Sixth Sense) before turning into dogshit.
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Heinlein didn’t write good enough books to bother making movies out of them that aren’t satires.
Neil Blumpkin
Today I rewatched "District 9" and I listened to the commentary track which is just Blomkamp. I really enjoyed what he had to say. I grabbed this torrent: District 9 2009 1080p BluRay x265 10bit 8ch AAC - Tigole. When I'm downloading something - I always look for Tigole and/or QXR uploads. They often have DVD extras and/or commentary tracks.
I remember going into the theaters, being pulled in by my friends without knowing anything about this film. I was absolutely blown away, one of the best cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. I haven’t been to the theaters in years
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That was a ROLLER COASTER of a headline
I like Blomkamp and I enjoy his movies so I'm torn, on the one hand I want power armor pew pews and bug stomping (given he was fucked out of an aliens movie) but on the other the original cannot be topped and no doubt this one won't be a satire of fascism.
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