Is it really that mind-boggling? ST has always seemed to me to read whichever way you are already predisposed to. How does everybody dying make it an anti-war movie? I would be shocked if the kind of person who believes in the good of a war machine were surprised that lots of people die in war.
Maybe my memory is a bit hazy, but the bugs actually annihilate a city, right? What is the human response supposed to be? The extreme nature of the government and military only come across as insane if you’ve already been educated about fascism. Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures, which muddies the antifascist message in my opinion.
It’s a great movie, but anyone who thinks it’s going to change anyone’s mind from their preconceptions is fooling themselves.
“I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don’t.”
Paul Verhoeven, director of Starship Troopers
The movie makes it clear that:
The bugs were responding to human colonization
Humans fired the first shots
The government is lying to everyone claiming the bugs are mindless. They overjoyed shouts of the soldiers when they learn the opposite is true - is only because they learn that the bugs are terrified.
The endless over the top propaganda is supposed to be a pretty fuckin heavy clue that it’s a fascist state.
The movie point blank states towards the beginning that the Bugs were flinging out their pods/eggs/whatever into space looking to land on worlds to colonize
The movie gives all appearances and inferences that the Bugs attacked first. Not the humans. This makes further sense by point 1, and how far away the bugs home world actually is.
The only announcement made of a bug being afraid wasn’t all bugs. It was only the large “thinking” bug at the end of the movie, after it had its mouth cut off and it was strapped down and being experimented on in the lab. There was no inferences at all of any other bugs being made. So no, the government wasn’t depicted in the movie as lying about knowing of any bug intelligence. I didn’t know of any intelligent bugs, and by the end of the movie it was only known that the one type of rare smart bug captured was the only intelligent one, and that it was able to possibly psychically control the other dumb bugs.
The propaganda films say that the bugs are attacking by flinging asteroids from the other side of the milky way, do you know how long that would take?
Also we never see any bugs in space, just the plasma getting thrown, never see how they are supposedly throwing these asteroids.
There’s also no presentation that it isn’t true, and by whatever means, we do know for sure that the Bugs are attacking earth. Retaliation or not, so either way it’s people stuck having to fight in order to save humanity.
Is it really that mind-boggling? ST has always seemed to me to read whichever way you are already predisposed to. How does everybody dying make it an anti-war movie? I would be shocked if the kind of person who believes in the good of a war machine were surprised that lots of people die in war.
Maybe my memory is a bit hazy, but the bugs actually annihilate a city, right? What is the human response supposed to be? The extreme nature of the government and military only come across as insane if you’ve already been educated about fascism. Desperate times do indeed call for desperate measures, which muddies the antifascist message in my opinion.
It’s a great movie, but anyone who thinks it’s going to change anyone’s mind from their preconceptions is fooling themselves.
What am I missing?
The movie makes it clear that:
Most of your points aren’t true at all.
The movie point blank states towards the beginning that the Bugs were flinging out their pods/eggs/whatever into space looking to land on worlds to colonize
The movie gives all appearances and inferences that the Bugs attacked first. Not the humans. This makes further sense by point 1, and how far away the bugs home world actually is.
The only announcement made of a bug being afraid wasn’t all bugs. It was only the large “thinking” bug at the end of the movie, after it had its mouth cut off and it was strapped down and being experimented on in the lab. There was no inferences at all of any other bugs being made. So no, the government wasn’t depicted in the movie as lying about knowing of any bug intelligence. I didn’t know of any intelligent bugs, and by the end of the movie it was only known that the one type of rare smart bug captured was the only intelligent one, and that it was able to possibly psychically control the other dumb bugs.
The propaganda films say that the bugs are attacking by flinging asteroids from the other side of the milky way, do you know how long that would take? Also we never see any bugs in space, just the plasma getting thrown, never see how they are supposedly throwing these asteroids.
What’s your point? I’m not really sure why you sent this as a reply to me.
The point is that the footage we see is part of the in-universe propaganda, so we have no reason to assume it’s true.
Once again proving that even fictional propaganda is highly effective.
There’s also no presentation that it isn’t true, and by whatever means, we do know for sure that the Bugs are attacking earth. Retaliation or not, so either way it’s people stuck having to fight in order to save humanity.
If I recall correctly, most things that the bugs did was fake news, just propaganda to justify the war that sustain the failed government.
We must have based humanity off the movie.