[rescue] replacing an Ultra2

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 @ 13:06 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Sun, 29 Apr 2007 @ 13:34 +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson said:
> >> But if you understood the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's you could see
> >> the world view it portrayed. Military service in exchange for citizenship,
> >> public excutions (murder in the move, rape and murder in the book),
> >> and propaganda films on TV and in the movies, and so on.
> > 
> > I understand the world view in the book. The movie got a lot of the
> > visuals right, and I thought that was good.  
> 
> I thought the movie got rather few of the visuals they had a choice
> about right.  They replaced the powered armor with a bunch of stupid
> "super-helmets" because we wouldn't have been able to see the actor's
> faces in the armor (more likely, they didn't want to spend the money to
> develop the prop armor), the combat tactics used were just STUPID as was
> the complete lack of any kind of heavy-weapons support ....

Note: I was referring to political visuals, more on that later.

Agreed, they got all of the fighting wrong, and left one of the most
important and influential battles out.

> > But the story was butchered, with huge chunks just left out with no
> > explanation.
> 
> Half the problem with the story is that Paul Verhoeven (1) thought that
> Heinlein was a fascist, (2) thought Starship Troopers was a
> glorification of war, and (3) thought he was "cleverly" making it into
> an anti-war movie.

Yeah, a lot of people felt that way. Part of the reason is that people
are so damned stupid they have to classify everything as right or left.
Heinlein started out liberal, but quickly moved to the libertarian
"side" after meeting his second wife Ginny.

When I said they got the visuals right, what I meant was that they
were well done in terms of promoting the politics.

However, as you mention, the movie got the politics wrong, so I guess on
second thought those visuals were just well done, not correct.

> > I mean, I can't believe they left out back story to show the over
> > dramatic scene where the brain bug makes his B-movie kills. That
> > wasn't even remotely important, so make it take 5 seconds and be
> > done with it.
> 
> Simple explanation in five words:  "Director utterly clueless about story."

Yep.

I waited a large part of my life for two movies:

	Starship Troopers
	Lord of the Rings

I'm pretty happy with the second one, even with the compromises. The
director's compromises don't change the story, they just deal with the
temporal problems of a movie that complex. The DVD release version adds
another 4 hours or so.

Just for example, the elves showing up at Helm's Deep. In the book, they
struck in the north separately. However, the movie couldn't deal with
both battles. Too much complexity and too much required screen time.

The compromise was to bring the elves to Helm's Deep, which is not what
happened exactly, but is effectively what happened, so it didn't alter
the story.

That's an example of a director making intelligent compromise to fit the
medium, because he really did read the story and try his best.

LotR is another movie that almost didn't make it. He had to fight to get
it made all the way.

Starship Troopers... I'm still waiting and probably will be for some
time.





-- 
shannon          | If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
                 |         -- Mark Twain