Sean O'Hara

Where's this "morally wrong" requirement coming from? Satire is about subverting common societal conventions and forcing the audience to question them, with no requirement that the elements being held up for subversion being a moral one. In the case of ST, it does so by presenting Hispanic characters as Aryans, pointing to the way science fiction in the Campbellian mode still implicitly buys into the the superiority of Northern Europeans; by taking the nifty uniforms found in most military science fiction and making them explicitly Nazi-like; by taking the hordes of mindless enemies found in science fiction and fantasy (see Moorcock and Mieville's rants on Lord of the Rings if you need examples) and describing them in language that evokes the era of Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. If that's not satire, then neither is Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream.

story

My real question is why can't Captain Bipto simply just control his crew? Yes, he's separated from Blaznee, Giggywig, Ziplock, and Pez for most of the film, but leading up to that I can't help but think the whole situation could've been avoided if only he'd been more assertive in good leadership decisions.

Oh, well. I suppose that's suppose to be "character building."

TimeandTide

References to Doolittle's Raid, Swift's "Modest Proposal", Austen's "Northanger Abbey", Bugs Bunny, and Imperialism in a thread that started with a question about ventilation ducts in Aliens?

AWESOME.

I love this site.

mikehunt

because it wasn't a movie about alien invasion it was a movie about a man loosing his faith
I would have preferred a movie about alien invasion

whoopdido

Ok...that was pretty much my question a couple posts up. I asked if the bugs actually sent the asteroid. One poster said yes and you say no. Which one is it?

It's a stupid movie so I'll try not to overthink it too much, but if the bugs actually did NOT send the asteroid then it becomes an entirely different movie in my opinion and would be considered much more satirical.

If they didn't strike first then it's a movie about a fascist society that's killing bugs just because bugs are bad. Why are they bad? I don't know...they're just bad. We got hit by an asteroid? Oh shit the bugs must have done it. Let's kill em.

If they did, in fact, send the asteroid and strike first then it could be considered just like any other war movie. The bad bugs attacked the innocent humans for no reason and killed untold millions, so we're going to retaliate. Bugs = Nazis. The Nazis were bad and killed many innocent people so they needed to be stopped. The bugs were bad and killed many innocent people so they needed to be stopped.

I don't know what way works better, but I guess I always thought that the bugs did not send the asteroid and the humans just wanted to kill the bugs for no reason other than they were bugs.

Supermallet

From wikipedia:

In the DVD audio commentary for the film, Paul Verhoeven states the movie's message: "War makes fascists of us all." He evokes Nazi Germany - particularly through its use of fashion, iconography and propaganda - which he sees as a natural evolution of the post-World War 2 United States. "I've heard this film nicknamed All Quiet On the Final Frontier," he says, "which is actually not far from the truth."

RocShemp

The bugs didn't send the asteroid. At the beginning of the film, the media is constantly claiming that the bugs are indeed capable of (and have been) sending meteors to Earth. When the humans make it to the bug world, rather than asteroid sending defenses, they have planetside anti-aircraft batteries. If the bugs had long-rage asteroid guidance tech, they would have used it against the human feel and never given them a chance to land.

The short of it is that the bugs had something the human government wanted. It could have been rescources, a planet capable of being terraformed, etc. Whatever i was, it was worth not nuking the planet from orbit but instead mounting a large scale ground assault. In order the fill their required quota of recruits, they cooked up some anti-bug propaganda.

EDIT: This reminds me that I never got around to getting my BD replaced with a corrected copy. I wonder if I still can.

mikehunt

wasn't the Roger Young hit by an asteroid though? so the humans hit their own ship?

and no I'm not talking about when it gets

RocShemp

If I recall, there was passing reference at one point of the film that asteroids surround the bug planet. So, shitty pilot?

gmanca

That one asteroid though was not near the bug planet,

Spoilerized just in case.

RocShemp

Okay, this thread has inspired me to rewatch the movie.

DaveyJoe

It's on Netflix Instant Watch. I skimmed through it again for the first time in years the other night. It was a lot slower than I remembered.

RocShemp

Thanks for the heads up but I have the BD lying around in my collection. SO I'll give it a watch tomorrow.

Ky-Fi

So you think Verhoven was morally neutral on the ideology of fascism, and his satire wasn't intended as a cautionary tale?

I wasn't familiar with The Iron Dream, but it works just as well as your Swift example. From the wiki summary, it seams that the main fascist character, Jaggar, goes on to personally execute people, and to have mass populations of people euthanized, among other outrages. The author understood that if you're doing a satirical work about the dangers of fascism, your work is going to be pretty weak if you don't show that fascism, is, in fact, dangerous.

Then by that standard, I would say Verhoeven succeeds with his movie. But as I said above, the work ends up being a very tepid "satire" when it purports to tell us that we have to be careful about fascism, but it really doesn't tell us any reason WHY we should be wary of fascism.

Let's suppose that instead of fascism, Verhoeven's target was fundamentalist Christianity. Say some other crisis had the main characters convert to right-wing Christians, and adopt some futuristic pilgrim-type costumes. If the movie only shows them fighting a noble war, building churches, helping the poor, singing hymns, and in the end Caspar Van Diem and Denise Richards having a nice church wedding, and then showing them going through some futuristic city in a monumental, glorious, futuristic Christmas celebration----isn't that going to be a fairly weak satire on fundamentalist Christianity?

If fascism, as shown in Starship Troopers, only involves wearing sharp uniforms, flying cool spaceships, shooting super machine guns with my buddies at giant bugs, and banging Denise Richards every night, then sign me up!

Orwell didn't make Big Brother into an honest, benevolent dictatorship that respected everyone's rights and privacy.

DthRdrX

I thought this was an Aliens thread?

I always wondered about the colony being set up on LV-246. It is mentioned in the film that people have been there for over 20 years but they didn't find the alien spaceship until given Ripley's cordinates via the company. I always just figured that LV-246 was chosen by the company so that the people would stumble upon the aliens. Ash mentions in the first movie that the company wanted the Alien brought back.

The Nostromo found the alien ship asap due to a mysterious signal it was giving out. Did the signal just go out and the colonists couldn't find it any longer?

mikehunt

good question
it also didn't seem to be that far away from the colony, guess they didn't do much exploring in the 20 years they were there
I do like that in the special edition or what ever it's called the scenes are put back in that make it crystal clear that the company sent colonists out to the derelict ship

Supermallet

Would you go exploring on an alien planet that you're working hard on terraforming? The place is a total wasteland. It's not like you could just go out for a stroll comfortably.

DthRdrX

That wasn't my point.

Why did the company choose that planet? They wanted the Alien specimen. I don't think they cared one bit about the colony. In fact, as soon as they had the grid location from Ripley they made sure it got checked out by the colonists. They knew the dangers of the creature, as per Ash's information in ALIEN. Burke was sent to bring back a live host. If they cared about the colonists they would have issued a warning and sent the marines in asap.

The 'company orders-don't ask' conversation in the colonists extended scene hinted that it was not a rarity for the company to issue orders to go out exploring. The colonists didn't know what they were supposed to be looking for and the company didn;t know where the ship was. They knew it was there somewhere.

The only probable solution is that in the 50 years after ALIEN the signal given off by the alien spaceship must have stopped.

UAIOE

I always interpreted that in the years since the events of "Alien" that the company forgot about the aliens. I say it was dumb luck the colony was there.

I can't really see a company (or its shareholders) spending billions on various atmosphere processors in hopes they magically find the planet that has that ship. They would honestly be better off trying to find some alien homeworld.

I mean, the colony was there for 20 years and nobody found the giant ship until Ripley/her ships log said where it was and Burke sent someone there.