
Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever - ValentineC
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/-em-starship-troopers-em-one-of-the-most-misunderstood-movies-ever/281236/
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rahoulb
I don't get why people wouldn't see it.

At the beginning it has a speech about the failure of democracy, how violence
is the only legitimate force in the universe. Government by an elite, with
restricted rights for civilians (want children? become a citizen), a
propaganda network, a perpetual state of war; including belittling the enemy
("I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive") and belittling anyone who
wants to live differently (mormon extremists).

What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they
are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty
accurate as well.

~~~
maaku
> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they
> are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems
> pretty accurate as well.

That's the "problem" \- the film assumed the viewer had enough brain to see
the satire instead of spelling it out. Apparently that wasn't true of most
reviewers at the time. (I saw it when it came out and loved it. Much more than
the book which was depressingly fascist apologetic.)

~~~
e40
_I saw it when it came out and loved it. Much more than the book which was
depressingly fascist apologetic._

Maybe people were projecting the book onto the movie?

~~~
jlgreco
I suspect they were projecting the book onto the movie so strongly that it
actually drown out the movie. That or they were just upset that the movie
didn't feature the wildly unfilmable powered suits.

------
ktd
This movie isn't misunderstood or clever at all. It was originally exactly as
dumb as people think it is (working title: "Bug Hunt On Outpost Nine), but the
studio realized they could get the license to Starship Troopers for free.

Verhoeven didn't even read Starship Troopers-- he skimmed a few chapters,
decided it was depressing and that Heinlein was a fascist, and made the movie
a parody of the book, and a lazy parody at that.

When people call this movie dumb, they're completely right, albeit not for the
reasons they may think.

~~~
jlgreco
I've read the book, and seen the movie. Let me tell you, I can't say that
anything more than a skimming of that book is necessary. It's about as one
dimensional as sci-fi gets. Worse even than Scott Cards work, and I don't say
that lightly. Both _Enders Game_ and _Starship Troopers_ replace that tedious
work of actually figuring out what sort of character development you want to
be in your story with _" young naive guy matures as he learns the value of
war."_

The movie, for all of its _self-aware_ cheese, has much more to offer.

------
fit2rule
When I saw it, the thing that shocked me the most was that the people around
me just didn't get it. I came out of the theatre (Manns Chinese in Hollywood)
dumb-founded at the snippets of conversation I heard that revealed that,
honestly, kids just didn't get that the target of the satire was _them_.

I wasn't prepared for the enlightenment that this movie gave me. I came to
realize that we were living in the exact world that the movie depicts -
teenage morons controlled by masters of jingo'ism, sending their sons and
daughters off to fight in totally senseless, pointless wars.

It was shocking to me that, while I was able to see that it was a political
statement masquerading as sci-fi, the kids only saw it as 'dumb sci-fi'. What
was going on, I wondered to myself, that there are people who really just do
not get it?

That question was answered a few years afterwards, on 9/11\. I'll never forget
the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an 18-year old I met in the days afterwards, who
was preparing his life to sign up and go to war. It reminded me precisely of
that movie, and that frankly scared the hell out of me.

I'm glad that this is getting some attention now, but I fear its too late. Too
many kids grew up thinking that war was good for them and good for society,
and it was the only option they had for employment, after all, so why not ..

~~~
fab13n
Young _homo sapiens_ males have a natural instinct for war, which can be
expressed or not depending on circumstances. Going to war is the historical
high risk + high reward option: you might be killed, but if you survive, you
have a good shot at becoming richer, more powerful, and having offspring (both
by becoming a desirable husband/son-in-law, and through the pervasive rapes in
which victors indulged after a won battle). Founding a startup is a modern
incarnation of that instinct, appealing mostly to the same young males
demographic, albeit skewed toward those with very favored socio-economical
backgrounds.

So, the less hope people have to thrive the "regular" safe way, e.g. because
of durable economical crisis and loss of upward social mobility, the more
likely they are to respond well to jingoism.

As a side-note, polygyny and jingoism are strongly correlated. Indeed for each
man with several spouses, there are unwilling bachelors. They're willing to
take the high-risk road and fight battles to become patriarchs; as a bonus,
war casualties increase the female/male ratio.

I recommend reading _The Red Queen_ if you're interested by all aspects of
mating strategies and risk acceptance, not limited to human beings nor even
whole organisms
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evolution_of_Human_Nature)).

~~~
fit2rule
I think these sorts of glib 'truisms' are used to justify an awful lot of bad
behaviour. Just ask the feminists if they think its an acceptable
justification for young male misogyny .. its not going to help anyone if we
justify continued transgression against our species with "natural law requires
this 'natural' behaviour".

~~~
fab13n
Beware not to get confused between explanation and justification. Whenever a
social issue is worth struggling for, that's precisely because of the mismatch
between how things are and how they ought to be, it's essential to have a fair
assessment of things as they are.

Those who suffer from mental confusion between how things are and how they
ought to be, tend at best to be ineffective, and often to discredit the cause
they wish to defend. As you hinted, some variants of feminism are confronted
with such issues.

Another kind of confusion to avoid is between "natural" and "legitimate".
"Natural" means "spontaneous", it's almost the exact opposite of "civilized".
Describing something as natural is certainly not justifying it. Some forms of
populisms abuse the natural/legitimate confusion to manipulate masses, but
that's no reasoning, let alone sound reasoning.

------
saidajigumi
Another unsung layer to this movie is just how well it ties into key
influences on Heinlein prior to his writing the novel. The novel itself is
heavily influenced by WWII wartime military and popular culture, and roots its
social thought experiments in that context. The movie turns this into visual
leverage, weaving together elements from WWII era propaganda films and
Hollywood's subsequent decades of iconography of that era.

------
gilgoomesh
I'd like to like Starship Troopers more but I can't.

Starship Troopers had a couple smart things to say but said it through a shit
movie. Turgid dialog, horrible acting, repugnant characters and general
cheesiness. I know the writers wanted to say all these people are idiots but
society doesn't go astray because everyone is an idiot – you have to show how
smart characters are caught in situations that constrain them to be idiots or
at least a have few characters that realise the ridiculousness but are
overridden or sidelined. You can't just write a bad movie and blame the
characters for being stupid.

My standard rule is that to properly satirise or ridicule something, a story
must simultaneously be a good example of target being parodied as well as
having a strong parody element.

Starship Troopers tries to parody the military machine but it fails because
its a terrible military action movie. To be a good parody of the military (and
the political and social machine around it), it must also be a good military
action film – both levels must work for the film to be good.

I like to give Galaxy Quest as a good example of a film that's both excellent
parody and an exemplar of the genre being parodied. It absolutely pillories
Star Trek, bad sci-fi writing, unbelievable monsters, magic science, red-
shirts, ridiculous sets with no purpose and humanoid aliens-of-the-week but at
the same time it has likeable characters, excellent acting, a properly scary
villain and has a real sense of "earning" the ultimate victory at the end.

Starship Troopers has none of this and tries to use cheesiness and parody as
an excuse for failing to make the movie better. Sorry, I have to evaluate a
film based on more than its satirical message.

~~~
justin66
> My standard rule is that to properly satirise or ridicule something, a story
> must simultaneously be a good example of target being parodied as well as
> having a strong parody element.

The obvious counterexample that leaps to mind is Catch-22, which isn't a good
war novel at all but is a brilliant antiwar satire.

~~~
pavlov
I agree. The grandparent's rule seems to exclude many of the classics of
satire.

Consider Voltaire's _Candide_. Taken at face value, its genre is somewhere
between "young man's growth story" and "colony-era adventure novel". Is it a
good example of high-quality writing in those genres? Certainly not.

------
pothibo
I watched Starship Troopers a few months back. One of the thing I loved the
most about the movie is those TV segment where it just broadcast propaganda
and always ends with: "Do you want to know more?"

It remotely felt like when I read 1984 for some reason. Couldn't entirely tell
why.

~~~
potatolicious
If you liked Starship Troopers, watch their straight-to-video sequels. Low
production value, kitschy special effects, but written by the same guy.

They're terrible movies really, but a nice dose of the ultra-blatant satire.

------
beloch
Odds are that, if you read the book first, you'll probably hate the movie.
They really are totally different. Personally, I don't believe fidelity to the
source is necessary for an adaptation to be successful. Plenty of films have
been made that are slaves to the source and are terrible as a result! Great
films are often made from bad books, so why can't great films just be
different from the great books they're based on?

I do think there's room for a more faithful adaptation of the book, but that
doesn't change the fact that Verhoeven's film is brilliant and hilarious. If
you go in expecting it to be faithful to the book (or you're a bit of a hawk
yourself to begin with), I can see why you might interpret it as a serious,
but _bad_ flick. Great films aren't always intended for all audiences however!

If Verhoeven can be faulted, it's for making "Hollow Man". Now _that_ flick
sucked!

~~~
gojomo
Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having
seen it discussed fondly.

I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of
martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and
inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-
market sci-fi action flick, I thought.

But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both
respect _and_ criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the
jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting,
and necessary.

Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though
Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as
interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring
more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.

~~~
wobbleblob
Verhoeven said in an interview that he never read the source material, only
the screenplay. (sorry, no source online)

Fair enough - he was making a movie, not a book report for Heinlein fans.

~~~
gojomo
Verhoeven may have said that. Whether it's true is another matter; he could
have been trolling the book's fans.

For a project that supposedly started as another entirely unrelated movie, by
a director who hadn't read the book, it managed to fit in a _lot_ of the
book's particular rhetoric and plot points.

------
richforrester
After reading this, watch Robocop again. Same director, same critique on
society.

Really adds another layer to it.

~~~
enraged_camel
My memories are hazy, but Robocop felt very different. It did not criticize
the establishment (i.e. the police) very much. In fact, the main character was
a cop who got fatally wounded by "the bad guys" and then was resurrected as a
badass robot and delivered sweet payback.

Most of the satirical elements in Robocop were directed at corporations.

~~~
jontas
Watch it again.. the bad guys are not some random street thugs, it is OCP, a
mega corporation that produces the robots and is essentially a government
organization (since that world is a "corporatocracy").

~~~
potatolicious
More specifically, "the bad guys" and OCP were actually in cahoots. The CEO of
OCP has the main villain kill a junior OCP executive after the executive
humiliates the CEO.

There is also a subplot where OCP is deliberately working with street gangs to
drive up the crime rate and gather public support for demolishing the entirety
of old Detroit and building the corporate-owned "Delta City" in its place.

The movie does criticize the establishment, it just stops short of criticizing
the actual street cops.

Side note: I'm actually looking forward to the remake. I had strong fears that
the reboot would be strictly all-action and contain none of the social
commentary. While it looks like the movies will lose its satirical elements,
the cynicism will remain. I watched another movie by Jose Padilha recently and
I'm hopeful.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>The movie does criticize the establishment, it just stops short of
criticizing the actual street cops.

That is what I meant. Contrast that to Starship Troopers, where the military
(the organization the main characters are a part of) is spared no criticism.

~~~
fricken4
The central characters in Robocop were treated empathetically, the scathing
social satire and black comedy were not central to the main storyline of
heroes and villians, so there was still an engaging film even for those
viewers lacking the social awareness needed to appreciate irony.

In Starship Troopers, every character was disposable, hence the gigantic
'whoosh'.

I recommend 'Hollow Man', Verhoeven's last, and largely forgotten Hollywood
film, released in 2000. It's even more subversive, and the subversive message
is even more subtle. So subtle in fact that I doubt even the film's producers
were aware of what was going on. It's either a terrible B-grade hollywood sci-
fi thriller, or brilliant black comedy, depending on whether or not you latch
on to the subtext.

~~~
Amadou
Another movie in the same vein is "Battleship." It "woooshed" a lot of people,
but there are some controvertible clues that it was more than just an
"America, fuck yeah!" movie. Most notably the song during the end credits
which is Creedence's "Fortunate Son." I'm sure some people won't even be
convinced by that fact, but then Reagan used Springsteen's "Born in the USA"
during his campaign in 1984, so I guess some people just aren't wired for
satire.

For me, the best thing about "Battleship" is how the director convinced the US
military to donate the use of all that hardware to a movie with such an anti-
military message. The DoD doesn't do that sort of thing lightly, they require
script approval and have a strict policy that they won't help with a movie
that is at all critical. Slipping that right under their noses like that was a
real coup.

------
wyck
When this first came out, the adverts on TV showed a movie full of action and
dripping in coolness, I went to the first day of opening and the audience was
dumbstruck about 15 minutes in, it was so 90210-esque. The social satire was
brilliant in my opinion.

------
saurik
"Why Everyone Gets Robocop But Nobody Gets Starship Troopers"

[http://www.overthinkingit.com/2009/11/26/starship-
troopers-f...](http://www.overthinkingit.com/2009/11/26/starship-troopers-
fascism/)

------
BjoernKW
I don't get it. Very much at the beginning of the movie a paraplegic army
recruiter proudly proclaims: "Mobile infantry made me the man I am today."

How can anyone take that at face value?

~~~
justin66
As satire the brilliant part about that, and a few of the other really
shocking things like the drill sergeant beating up a new recruit to establish
himself as head of the pack, or the whipping, is that it's lifted fairly
directly from the book.

A subset of the fans of the book get mad because the violence and fascism
seemed so much cooler in their heads. Other fans recognize that Heinlein's
books were to some degree experimental (it's science fiction!) and enjoy the
joke. I've always been surprised at how many people who knew the book didn't
get it, but that's life.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The problem I had with the movie is that it took a well thought out book and
reduced it to hollywood stereotype.

For example, later on in the book and the movie, a recruit asks why they learn
to throw knives when guns make them obsolete. In the book, the sergeant gives
an explanation of tradition and admits that knife throwing is a fairly useless
skill for mobile gundam suit pilots. In the movie, the sergeant just throws
the knife at the cadet's hand. Towards the end of the book it's revealed that
drill sergeants are carefully screened not to be sadistic jerks, but to
actually be decent people who are carefully calculating the best way to train
their cadets.

The book was well thought out. The movie was just stereotype and mockery.

~~~
lucian1900
The book showed its fascist world in a somewhat flattering light, or at least
explaining it as necessary. The film rightly mocked that attitude by showing
just how close the US already is.

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danso
I love, _love_ this film. I remember being a bit disappointed by it when it
first came out because of how different it was from the book. But after Sept.
11, one of the cheap cable channels, either TBS or TNN, put it on constant
rotation...I don't know if _they_ were in on the joke! but after the fifth or
so viewing of it, and while the whole War on Terror was emotionally raw...I
finally saw the brilliance in SS

Verhoven's other work is brilliant too, but SS is one of my most treasured
DVDs

------
mynameishere
So, you take a famous sci-fi novel, completely change it, then use it's good
name to make money and push your own politics. What exactly is misunderstood?
You love money, you have a particular agenda, and you fuck over something else
to achieve your personal goals. Other people are upset about this. Again: What
is misunderstood?

~~~
rurounijones
Quite, if you wanted to make a satire then start with a blank slate.

Do not take a known work (of which the audience will have their pre-
conceptions if they read it) then eviscerate it for your own satirical needs
then act surprised when said audience gets pissed off for the butchery.

~~~
kbd
Isn't the point that it's satirizing its own source material?

~~~
jlgreco
In the broad sense, it is satirizing a sort of militaristic/jingoistic
mentality. Specifically it does this by satirizing one particular
manifestation of this mentality, its source material.

~~~
rurounijones
That is the problem though, it doesn't satirize the source material.

It satirizes a strawman of the source material since it cuts out or alters
almost every part of the book that does not support the movie's satirical
objective.

I think that is what pissed a lot of people off who read the book.

If they wanted to satirize jingoistic mentality they could have done it
without butchering the book by starting with a new IP (but then they couldn't
have taken advantage of the "Starship Trooper" title.)

------
abolibibelot
I love Verhoeven and the long running joke he played at the expense of
Hollywood (mostly with Starship Troopers, Robocop, Basic Instinct and
Showgirls - Flesh + Blood is great but not as sarcastic as his later american
movies).

Starship Trooper, the novel, is hilarious on its own, with its hawkishness and
interesting political views (it's less creepy than Ender's Game in that aspect
though). But Heinlein is a much better writer than Card and Stranger in a
Strange land makes up for the juvenile tripe he wrote earlier. I guess Vietnam
had to happen for some people to reflect on the Rah-rah-rah kind of military
Sci-Fi.

(I know there's a cult of Heinlein on HN - I've always wondered if there was
an intersection with the Cult of Rand and the Cult of Card)

Edit: as a thought experiment, it would be interesting (as in "depressing") to
imagine the exact opposite: an adaptation of Old Man's War by the current
Hollywood industry.

~~~
lmm
I've never understood the praise for Old Man's War; I read it, and it felt
like a Heinlein tribute act, with no creativity or originality, and saying
nothing that Heinlein and his contemporaries hadn't already said. Did I miss
the point?

~~~
abolibibelot
Old Man's War is an ironical counterpoint to Starship Troopers (something that
becomes more blatant in the later novels). It's a bit like Hadelman's Forever
War mixed with slapstick. It's no masterpiece, but the humor makes it a great
read.

~~~
lmm
I mean, I read it all the way through, but yeah, there didn't seem to be
anything that wasn't in The Forever War. Did it really top the Locus poll just
because of slapstick humour? _shakes head_

------
hindsightbias
As someone who saw a lot of satire in flicks Robocop and Red Dawn in the 80's,
it bugged me when people took Troopers at face value years later.

I mean, did Neil Patrick Harris have to do a German accent or what? Did the
Gestapo coat not make it obvious?

------
jdnier
A comment to the article paraphrases Verhoeven's DVD commentary track as "yes,
this was a satire, and I'm baffled that people don't get that".

------
error54
I'm surprised the author never even mentions the book by Robert Heinlein.
Granted the movie tells a different story than the book but they share the
similarity in that on the surface they both preach of the virtues and nobility
of war but upon closer inspection, we see that they're telling a different
story entirely.

~~~
bradleyjg
I don't know about that. Heinlein seems pretty keen on his notion of
citizenship through military service, albeit perhaps as a means of preventing
"unnecessary" wars rather than enabling them. Either way, it's a pretty
terrible political philosophy.

That aspect of serious advocacy is completely absent from the movie.

~~~
ubernostrum
The problem with Heinlein's corpus is there are so many characters who _can_
be read as author avatars representing his views that it's hard to tell if any
of them _should_ be read that way.

~~~
dragonwriter
I actually think that _all_ of them should be, but in a nuanced way -- that
is, they all represent points of view that Heinlein wanted the reader to
_think about_ , but not necessarily points of view that Heinlein _held_ , or
wanted the reader to _adopt_.

------
jthomp
"Roger Ebert, who had praised the “pointed social satire” of Verhoeven’s
Robocop, found the film “one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at
11-year-old science-fiction fans.”

I was about that age when it came out. Still one of my favorite movies, sci-
fi, satire and all. I think I'll sit down and watch it this weekend.

------
seanalltogether
It's funny the article mentions rifftrax. For their halloween special they did
a live performance over night of the living dead. One of the jokes during the
movie was the fact that online bloggers will never stop trying to educate the
rest of the world about the brilliance of starship troopers.

------
Intermernet
Really? There were people who didn't understand that the movie was satirical?
Even though it was made by Paul Verhoeven?

I just lost some respect for Roger Ebert. I thought he was more perceptive
than that.

~~~
flomo
I strongly suspect Ebert and the other critics were in on the joke. They knew
if they played it straight and panned the movie, even more unwitting teenagers
would pour into the theaters on opening weekend.

(At least, I had no idea the movie was satire until the opening scene started
playing. The early internet reaction was mostly nerdrage from Heinlein fans.)

Edit: In retrospect, I was very familiar with Verhoeven's films, but somehow
still bought into the hype that he may have 'sold out' until the movie started
playing. This movie really had some great marketing/pr.

------
pessimizer
Starship Troopers 3 is great too, with a lower-budgeted, more aggressive
critique of patriotism, nationalism, propaganda and religion. It's also
hilarious. Avoid part 2 like the plague.

~~~
schainks
This. The moichendizing was a riot - "It's a good day to... buy!"

------
InclinedPlane
I have to wonder if the failure of so many people to pick up on the blatant
satire in, for example, Starship Troopers and Robocop is due to something akin
to Poe's Law as applied to so many other films which were not satirical
muddying the waters.

Dirty Harry is, seemingly, not satirical, yet it is every bit as ridiculous as
Robocop.

------
lmm
Science fiction has always had a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with
fascism; I'm reminded of the response to Spinrad's "The Iron Dream", where he
was trying to point out the fascism inherent in a lot of sci-fi stories:

 _To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware
reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the
Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler 's saga was spelled out by a
tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point...
And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. "This is a
rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it," the gist of it went. "Why
did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?"_

------
PhasmaFelis
Communication is the writer's job, not the reader's. If a creator sets out to
convey a message and 99% of the audience does not receive the message, it's
not the audience that has failed.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes
back as a robot. Awesome.

I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-
political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.

If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely
been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.

The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed
doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.

Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals
means, for you, that Orwell failed?

------
eggestad
I always saw it as satire, as I'm on&from the eastern side of the Atlantic the
references to facism was unavoidable.

The thing is that it's stopped being satire after 9/11\. Just replace "bugs"
with "islamists" and it becomes depressingly prophetic. I end up thinking of
Pat Tillman every time I see the mobile infantry.

------
dmak
I was too young to understand it, but I did really like Robocop and I thought
it was really cool when I was a kid.

------
was_hellbanned
The movie had some satirical elements, but regardless, it was mostly just
crap. This is just revisionist hipsterism, just like the script writer of Far
Cry 3 claiming it was all satire of "tropes" after it caught some flak.

------
radley
I always described it as happy hardcore.

Everyone doing it was in on the joke and played for it. At first glance it was
Ken & Barbie go to Space War, but then there was sooooo much blood...

------
alexeisadeski3
Okay, so a movie about all-out war for survival against genocidal aliens is
supposed to be a good setting for an _anti_ -war story?

No wonder so many missed the satire.

~~~
cdacos
The genocidal aliens were the humans. Seemed pretty subversive to me.

No-one else has noted that Paul Verhoeven was a young boy in Nazi occupied
Holland. There's no way he didn't know what he was conveying...

------
kstenerud
Pretty much on the money. Another greatly misunderstood masterpiece would be
Natural Born Killers.

~~~
radley
Actually, it's quite the opposite. Starship was a tongue-in-cheek war satire.
NBK was a hyper-saturated parody of satire.

------
otikik
I still don't understand why didn't they just bomb-carpet that worthless bug
planet.

------
Aqueous
At what point is the satire become so thickly veiled that it's not actually
satire?

------
pinaceae
are Americans that daft? seriously, how can one _not_ see this movie for what
it is?

feels like a giant whoosh.

~~~
zhemao
I mean, there are some really terrible sci-fi B-movies out there. It's
sometimes hard to tell satire from actual terribleness.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law)

I didn't really see it as satire until I read articles saying it was. I
thought it was just a really campy military sci-fi movie. I also don't really
see how the movie portrayed the bugs as acting in self-defense. The movie
begins with them slinging an asteroid that destroys Buenos Aires.

~~~
stormbrew
It's been a while, but I think the movie makes it relatively clear that the
asteroid attack was in response to violent colonization by the humans.

------
AsymetricCom
Wow, The Atlantic sure is on a streak of foul smelling turds lately.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Going on a couple of years now.

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hydralist
i instantly understood it was sarcastic

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officer_gotcha
Wow, what a smart, timely and appropriate comment. However, making a smarter
and even more condescending one is too easy. Here:

Folks, consider this for a moment: the movie is better than that crappy blog
post, the book is better than the movie, it isn't the best book of that
author, and that the author, while good, isn't the best the literature can
offer.

Why waste time discussing the blog post?

