Movies & TV

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.

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."

There's a more full version of that on tankie.tube that I published.

https://tankie.tube/w/2vx4S1J3GCyVbgtMTFKnMc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For me Elysium was sooo full of plot holes and garbage shaky camera action sequences that couldn't be visually parsed, that I gave up on him as a director. Absolute rubbish. 2/10