I will defend "Starship Troopers" as a flawless and deep satire of fascist propaganda.
idk every once in a while I see somebody who didn't get it and thinks it was just a bad action movie. If anything's wrong with it it's that it's a hard movie to love because none of the characters are redeemable and most of the actors aren't in on the joke.
There's layers to both how you are meant to watch scenes and how to understand what the characters in the world of the movie are doing or thinking. Most of the actors aren't in on the joke because most of their characters are propagandized, uncritical, with no self-awareness.
But there are plenty of action sequences in the movie that are extremely well done - but they make you ask yourself why you care so much about seeing the characters survive.
The characters are vapid and the actors portray them badly throughout the movie because they don't have convincing motivations, but even if you're in on the joke and you're like "haha dumb space Nazis are getting blown up" the scene is still stressful to watch.
Is it just because Denise Richards is pretty and we don't like to think of pretty people getting hurt? Or because the scene is technically flawless, and specifically that it strings together so many visual disaster movie cliches that we just reflexively want the heroes to escape?
The ground combat scenes are "unsatisfying" because of how they subvert the war movie cliches as much as the space battle scenes - the ground battle scenes are "done badly" as much as the space battles are "done well."
The enemy is literally faceless, literally inhuman. There's no vicarious sadism in watching them suffer, and no vicarious thrill in watching the Space Marines pop away at them with their limp dicked little pea shooters.
Which again just turns the question back on the audience - even with all of the guns and soldiers and explosions, the combat scenes fall flat. What is it that we actually enjoy about war movies, and why?
Within the world of the movie, there's clues that none of the characters (except maybe NPH's Nazi mind control doctor) are actually aware of what they're being used for.
Was the disastrous battle of Klendathu a "mistake" or was it planned that way because fascist governments intentionally kill off their surplus population in wars?
Clues here - the drop ships make whistling sounds like bombs as they fall, because the ships and the soldiers inside are just expendable single-use munitions.
After the battle, Denise Richards is looking at the casualty lists and notes there are almost no wounded, only KIA, implying that the wounded were left behind to die.
There's like 2 different kinds of people who don't get this movie - the professional critics who thought Verhoeven forgot how to direct, and the youtube commenters who insist that the Federation isn't fascist because of reasons ("not racist" "akshully oligarchy")
"They let men and women fight together in mixed combat units. That's very socially progressive." (Like Israel) - "They're not racist, one of the Sky Marshals is a Black woman." (ignoring the unrelenting racism against the Arachnids)
The false flag attack on Buenos Aries - not only is it physically impossible that a meteor could travel halfway across the galaxy, but the government has an Official Explanation ready to go *with illustrations* minutes after the attack
This is the movie that anticipated the social media propaganda rabbit hole 20 years before it was a thing. You're getting force-fed information determined by an unseen mechanism but "would you like to know more?" tricks you into thinking you're affirmatively choosing to see it.
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I think Enron was like the first major example of a machine to dispossess and liquidate that was masquerading as a financial enterprise. It wasn't a failure - it's purpose was to dispossess workers by liquidating their pension funds and draining them away thru speculation.
After enough big pools of capital (mostly public sector union pensions in the US, and some scam infrastructure projects in the developing world) were tapped, the whole thing was blown up intentionally to make sure nobody would be getting any of their money back.
This strategy was then applied to mortgages, and if shitcoin pump and dumps have anything to teach us, it will soon be applied to national currencies as well.
If American soldiers in Vietnam were *all* the bloodthirsty genocidal babykillers that they're now accused of being (by "communists") then the war would have never ended. They would have kept fighting just for the love of killing.
They would have become freebooters and formed mercenary companies and re-invaded even after the official war ended, like the settlers did in Rhodesia.
The US military was defeated by two factors. It took the bravery and tenacity of the Vietnamese people to keep fighting and the bravery and dedication of American conscripts to refuse to fight.
Conflating "against vaccine mandates and checkpoints" with "antivax" is also just falling for the bourgeois framing of the issue.
And um, you can critique scientific ideas as "bourgeois" - if you're a Maoist you should know that and no serious """maoist""" party should let you post if you don't understand the fundamental thing that makes "maoism" different from "ML"
I shouldn't be surprised to see this kind of PSL of dipshittery from the "Gonzaloite" adjacent.
"Covid" is a regular viral illness that can be treated with repurposed generic drugs and we only got scared into thinking it was some super plague because first China, then NYC, killed 1000's thru medical malpractice, probably intentionally and in collaboration.
Also, Ivermectin really is a wonder drug and you're all missing out on a safe, cheap and effective cancer treatment to dunk on rednecks with your horse paste jokes.