Star Wars & Sc-Fi Talk

Stargate sg1 and Atlantis had some great space battles too especially near the end when they had a real budget.

The list has a strong bias to movies and American ones at that.
I really feel starship troopers was a bomb of a movie who's only selling points are SFX. It totally losses the original vision of the novel. I agree with most of the list though.

Babylon 5 also had some good battle scene.

Beat me to it Duncan, I was just thinking Severed Dreams from S3 of Bablyon 5 had a pretty epic space battle. Damn, I gotta watch that again now.

Also, some of the space and ground battles from Star Wars EpII attack of the Clones deserve to be mentioned I think. They easily beat silly Evocs doing loony toons esq battles every time in my book.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

The list has a strong bias to movies and American ones at that.
I really feel starship troopers was a bomb of a movie who's only selling points are SFX. It totally losses the original vision of the novel. I agree with most of the list though.

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That was actually the point, the director Paul Verhooven, who also directed the first Robocop movie, stated he hated the book, read the first couple of chapters and got really depressed. Verhooven is very left wing, very anti-war and anti-military due to his own childhood living in German occupied Holland during WWII. He's also a very good satirist who often makes fun of American culture which he feels is somewhat fascistic, and this is reflected in that the Terran Federation is basically Nazis in space.

But if you watch the movie, other then the look of the uniforms and eagle emblem, there is no trace of space Nazis, infact the propaganda was easily glazed over. Having read the whole of the book one could come off with more of the fascist flavor then the movie. The movie also made little technology sense and really had a weak plotline. The Syfy Chanel sequels had stronger plots. And the CGI animated spin off was more loyal to the book.

The Bug attack with the meteor was assumed to be a false flag operation, to allow the atrocity of destroying Rio to provoke stroke anti-alien sentiment in the Terran population. The Fascistic elements of the film was just in the behaviour of the characters and the commercials and propaganda in between scenes, showing how militarized society has become and its willingness to romanticize war and violence, to promote warriors to crush the subhuman insects.

Again think of this as a piece of satire that uses Starship Troopers and American military culture to satirize both, especially the third film that had Verhooven as a producer and his screenwriter partner Ed Numier, who also penned the screenplays for the first ST movie and the first Robocop movie, directed it, and it was clearly a parody of Vietnam era politics and modern day use of religion in justifying war and demonizing a non-violent peace movement.

All that said, even if i do enjoy it a lot, the hate that true fans of the book feel for these films is wholly justified, as i hate the new Star Trek movies for the same reasons.

Yet at no point was that false flag made. As far as any one knows if you watch the movie it was a bug action. The propaganda moments does show a highly controlled state but still not as rigid or as flavored as the Nazi propaganda. I mean that kind of propaganda could be used by any highly censored state even the US in WW2, Europe heck that would be a light day on PRC state media. Comparing the movie propaganda and state to NAZI Germany is like comparing the Spanish inquisition to Sunday confessional. And Paul Vanderhogan had nothing to do with the later movies.
really it just is to thin. If the director intended to make that political point he failed. The farscape Peacekeepers were far more Space Nazis like. Speaking of which add that to the list of good space battles. And bonus its not American its from New Zealand.

Player 0 said:

The Bug attack with the meteor was assumed to be a false flag operation, to allow the atrocity of destroying Rio to provoke stroke anti-alien sentiment in the Terran population. The Fascistic elements of the film was just in the behaviour of the characters and the commercials and propaganda in between scenes, showing how militarized society has become and its willingness to romanticize war and violence, to promote warriors to crush the subhuman insects.

Again think of this as a piece of satire that uses Starship Troopers and American military culture to satirize both, especially the third film that had Verhooven as a producer and his screenwriter partner Ed Numier, who also penned the screenplays for the first ST movie and the first Robocop movie, directed it, and it was clearly a parody of Vietnam era politics and modern day use of religion in justifying war and demonizing a non-violent peace movement.

All that said, even if i do enjoy it a lot, the hate that true fans of the book feel for these films is wholly justified, as i hate the new Star Trek movies for the same reasons.

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It is hard for movie studios nowadays to get a feel of the story to be the same as book because of budget and the cost of making movies these days. As a result, movie makers has to appeal to the mainstream audience ( in Sci fi fans that means dumbing down) to sale therefore the story line is recycled from previous or poorly done movies.

TerraN_EmpirE said:

Yet at no point was that false flag made. As far as any one knows if you watch the movie it was a bug action. The propaganda moments does show a highly controlled state but still not as rigid or as flavored as the Nazi propaganda. I mean that kind of propaganda could be used by any highly censored state even the US in WW2, Europe heck that would be a light day on PRC state media. Comparing the movie propaganda and state to NAZI Germany is like comparing the Spanish inquisition to Sunday confessional. And Paul Vanderhogan had nothing to do with the later movies.
really it just is to thin. If the director intended to make that political point he failed. The farscape Peacekeepers were far more Space Nazis like. Speaking of which add that to the list of good space battles. And bonus its not American its from New Zealand.

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False flag is probably the wrong word, but it was a lack of willingness to intercept the meteors even though they had a fleet of space craft capable of doing it, like the conspiracy theories that say FDR allowed the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbour and Chamberlain allowed Germany to attack Poland hoping it would cause a war with Russia, furthermore the bug attack was in response to an illegal mormon colony set up within their territory that was mentioned in the very first scene.

Also i think you're kind of missing the point, these aren't German nazis, and nazism isn't an exclusively German phenomenon, these are American nazis with a very American culture whose right wing nature in the 20th century was taken and exaggerated. After remember that whenever justifying the continuation of war at the start and the end of the movie its always survival of the Human RACE, that humans dominate the galaxy and not insects, never once is the idea of peace even entertained in any mainstream discussion, the war was seen as a war of extermination rather than defence, and that is a classic nazi/fascist political statement and again not entirely uncommon in American history and something Verhooven tried to point out, that America has just as much potential to be a fascist society since he's not using anything of German cultural heritage, its all American.