The Letters to the Editor department is intended to be a forum for our readers to express their own opinions and ideas. While we appreciate the many complimentary letters we receive each day, you won't find them on this page. Instead, you will find letters that go beyond or even contradict what we have written, letters that offer a different perspective and provide a different view of science fiction. If you would like to submit a letter, please use our feedback form or send a message to scifiweekly@scifi.com.
-- Craig E. Engler, Editor
Alien Resurrection was just blood-and-guts
y husband, and I just went to see Alien Resurrection and I wish I had read the review before going to see the movie. Our first movie date was to see Alien. We were hooked. Aliens is probably one of my favorite movies, and of course we were anxious to see the third movie. We [walked] out of there saying we could have written a better plot. This last movie could have been really good, but all the blood and guts turned our stomachs. Obviously this movie wasn't made for those of us who like to be scared but also enjoy a good plot. I would love to see another attempt, but we need to get better writers (fans could probably come up with a more unique plot) and resurrect the original director of Aliens.
Linda Cook
david@ptsi.net
Shut up and enjoy Troopers
sympathize with those who disliked Starship Troopers, but I refute their reasoning: they took the whole thing wrong. In one of the many SF magazines I read in the store I work at, the screenwriter explicitly stated that the book served only vaguely in his idea for the movie. In truth, the man just wanted to write a bug war--and it's that simple.
It wasn't really Starship Troopers he was making, that was just an archetype for the story actually written and filmed. It's obvious he made only a cursory attempt at being faithful to the book, despite what Verhoeven said. He wanted to give his audience a bug war, and he did, and did it gloriously. The movie, in my view, was excellent. Why? Because unlike most, I judge "art" (and I use the term loosely) by the aim of the artist, not by my own preconceived notions of what parameters "must" be met in order for me to like it.
The man wanted to entertain us, and for the most part he did just that. So don't gripe about the missing powered suits (it would have cost them $250 million to do it!) and don't gripe about the shallow characters (only the barest connective tissue needed to show the fight scenes). This is the "B" movie at its best, so just shut up and enjoy, and maybe you won't care so much that [there are] still M-16s--like they're not really M-16s?--aboard starships!
Ike Davis
freejack@cybermax.net
Starship Troopers tells it like it isn't
tarship Troopers:
A very disappointing movie in many ways. Director Verhoeven does not know, or does not care to know, how to direct actors...he asked nothing of his cast in terms of acting. The Ibanez character sums up the horrible acting present in the movie--as starships blow up and thousands of her comrades are dying, the Ibanez character looks as if she is waiting for someone to ask her for a date. In another scene she snubs a former high school classmate. Do you think that if you were light years from home, in such a deadly situation, that you wouldn't even say hello to an old rival from high school? Not.
In the book by Heinlein, he did not preach a fascistic form of government, merely a government and a society which took its responsibilities seriously. No one was forced to join the military. Full citizenship (voting and office-holding rights) were conferred on those who served a voluntary term in the military. One can argue about this setup, but if the society agrees with it, then I guess that is what that society wants, so it was arrived at democratically. One can also criticize the military, but they are the ones who have joined and are willing to die to protect your right to exist, free from the enemies who wish to destroy your way of life.
The movie made fun of this sense of duty and of chosen sacrifice and is an insult to all who have served, who have died in the service of their country, and I speak not only of American vets, but of the vets of all nations who have fought honorably and perhaps died or who were wounded in war. Verhoeven showed that he did not learn much from his younger days. Who saved him and his countrymen from the Fascists? Just the everyday man from the streets of the USA, Britain, France, Poland, etc., who joined and died by the thousands to fight the nightmare world of Hitler. This film should have been a tribute to men and women like that, instead it was a slap in the face.
The battle scenes were very good in the movie, perhaps marred by the primitive weapons the troopers were using. I doubt that 400 years from now that soldiers will still be using machine guns firing cased ammo! What was great about the battle scenes was the bravery of the soldiers against an enemy that was almost unstoppable.
The rest of the movie was terrible, I don't even think I want to own it on video.
Dan Kardas
dsk11@ix.netcom.com
Troopers had too much gore
hile the idea of making Starship Troopers partially a news-type program was original and well-crafted, I think that the movie suffered from too much gore. Even the best flicks use gore sparingly and mainly do their worst stuff in the background. Not Troopers. In this movie, they laid everything out (literally) right on the screen, with the only exception being the clip that had "Censored" right over the gory stuff.
I think Troopers would have been a better movie had they used the money that they spent on the splattering and put it to better use somewhere else. I doubt highly that I will ever rent or buy this film when it comes out on video--and I'm certain that I will not see it again at the theater.
My rating? Definitely a C-!
Carl Riley
spock@macomb.com
Stop the carnage
hen I first heard that Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers was to be made into a movie, I had a sneaking suspicion that it would not get the proper treatment it deserved. I was right, [and] I'll bet Heinlein is furiously spinning in (not just grumbling from) his grave.
The only worthy thing of mention from this movie is the special effects, everything else sucks more than a black hole. Did anyone that worked on this film ever read (and understand) the novel? I keep hearing the term fascism applied to this story, but if Heinlein were alive today, anyone who said that within earshot of him would likely very quickly retract it through a mouthful of loose teeth.
Starship Troopers is the third Heinlein novel to be made into a movie, and the second to be turned into total crap by Hollywood (The Puppet Masters was also a great disappointment), where's George Pal when you need him?
The next time some moron from Hollywood decides to make a movie from one of sci-fi's great novels, I suggest drawing and quartering for starters. Can you imagine what kind of farce they would make of Stranger in a Strange Land?
Please, stop the carnage!
Steven La Favor
sdlafavor@mortimer.com
Crap begets crap
his movie [Starship Troopers] is absolute garbage and it should be recognized as such so that no more like it will be made. Showgirls in Outer Space, as it should rightfully be called so as not to confuse it with any work of literature (even one written specifically for war-crazed pulp fans), fails by any standard. As a science fiction movie it is insulting, giving us asteroids that travel thousands of light years in the space of a few days or hours while still moving so slowly that an oncoming spaceship has time to change course to avoid one (not to mention the fact that any massive object traveling at anything near the speed of light would obliterate the entire planet, not just surgically kill the hometown of our intrepid heroes).
Showgirls in Outer Space also fails as a war movie (it really is a straight adaptation of the old WWII propaganda movies). As has been mentioned elsewhere, no military organization would ever send ground troops to a completely unknown area with no knowledge of the enemy's capabilities and no aerial bombardment to clear the way. A very simple way around the huge internal inconsistencies of this sort would have been to have the aliens land on Earth and attack. Then any sort of half-assed defense would be easily accepted by the audience (couldn't use the big guns for fear of destroying our own cities, etc.). The failure to use such a simple plot device instead of blundering ahead with the ridiculous premise used demonstrates a disdain for the audience that shouldn't be tolerated.
This movie could have been used to explore social and political questions: an alien species has attacked humanity for reasons unknown; men and women fight (and shower) side by side in this future army; citizenship is restricted to those who serve; for some reason the Buenos Aires of the future is populated solely by Americans. Any one of these ideas could have been explored to produce a decent movie, but no idea in the movie is used for anything more than window dressing.
There is some evidence that this is supposed to be a love story of sorts. There are the pretty, plastic kids and they talk about being in love with each other. Then they play football or fight or get speared by the bugs. One couple actually had sex. Too bad no one cares. I suspect that the "actors" in this film were people who didn't quite make the final cut for Verhoeven's earlier masterpiece (henceforth to be known as Showgirls I).
This movie should fail at the box office. Unlike other "sci-fi" garbage that has raked in the cash in recent years, this movie with its R rating will probably not be seen in large enough numbers by its core audience (pre- and barely-pubescent boys) to make the cash required to recoup its cost. This is another failing of the producer. Why put nudity into a movie that's essentially made for children? Or why not put in more nudity and cut some of the gore if you want to make an outer space love story? Whatever audience this movie might have had is sure to be turned off by one or another of the film's major flaws.
So why does it make people (like me) so mad? Because when crap like this is swallowed by the public it ensures that more crap will be made. No one will bother making a decent science fiction movie out of the thousands of excellent stories available when they can still get that same audience to come to any piece of garbage with the word "Star" in its title. And I paid my money to help it along! Gak!
Matthew Brewer
brewer@oncology.wisc.edu
Troopers was eye candy
hile I didn't care for the way Starship Troopers failed to follow Robert Heinlein's book, I did enjoy the escape from reality it allowed (don't like bugs anyway). I didn't enjoy the depiction of the military in this movie as so Nazi-like, Robert Heinlein was as anti-Fascist as a man can get. He was enamored with the individual who could when necessary work together to accomplish anything.
Most people who have not served in the military and have not fought for their country could, possibly, not understand where Heinlein was coming from with this book. Service to humanity was his point, if you are willing to put your life, liberty and sacred honor on the line, then you had earned the right to help control the direction of civilization. The right to put your hand into someone else's pocket to defray the expenses. If you were not, then you could not. Oh and by the way you couldn't vote yourself a free ride either.
In today's society, honor, duty, obligation, responsibility and military have become words people sneer at. Needless to say today's society will not last long. When these values become obsolete to a nation, that nation is on the downhill slide into oblivion.
I would not espouse a hard-line liberal attitude or a hard-line conservative attitude. I will say that the liberal side of our nation has had control too long and I am afraid that our great country will not survive to once again reach an honorable, responsible position where liberal and conservative ideals are used in ... equal measures to keep us above water.
Enough preaching, the far left won't listen and the far right won't either. Loved the book, movie okay for eye candy. Did miss the suits, skinnies and neodogs though.
Bill Denby
bjdenby@flash.net
Are we supposed to choke this down?
tarship Troopers was the biggest disappointment of the year. Not only was the acting stressful to watch, I had to cringe every time a spoken word was wasted. Garbage like this has been tossed around Hollywood far too often, are we supposed to choke it down and keep shelling [out] our hard-earned money?! I'm not only interested in just sci-fi and horror, but love all movies. The attempt at acting, irony, and plot development was so wooden this "movie" boiled down to nothing more than a boring slide-show with airbrushed pictures. The expensive eye-candy apparently took all the money out of the budget left over for scripts and decent actors. But that's what you get for hiring everyone from Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.
William T. Landry II
WLandryii@aol.com
Alien is a true classic
hen I saw Alien reviewed as "Classic Sci-Fi," my first reaction was, "That's not old enough to be classic--I remember when that came out!" But, as I go over some recent movie reviews, including Alien Resurrection, the more I am thinking of Alien as an historic marker for speculative fiction films. I see Alien as the first truly R-rated film of its type, and it seems to have opened a Pandora's box of on-screen violence, carnage and stomach-churning special effects.
Studios seem to think that they have to keep upping the ante to get us into the theater, so we get films like Event Horizon, Starship Troopers, and Lost World: Jurassic Park. By comparison, earlier R-rated films like Blade Runner, The Terminator, and even Alien (with the exception of Kane's little gastric eruption) seem tame by comparison. But these are films that will be labeled "classic" because of their overall quality, not because they gave us 20 different ways to slice and dice humans.
I had to leave work early and stand on line two hours to see the release of Blade Runner: The Director's Cut a couple of years ago. I can't see the latest batch of speculative fiction films having that sort of lasting appeal--the plots are pushed aside to make room for a higher body count. That grows old pretty quick. Sooner or later the studios will figure out [that] a film with a good plot and likable characters--and a 20-year run of money-making popularity--beats out bloodbaths, explosions, a big weekend opening--then straight to video--any day. Or don't they remember squeaky-clean Star Wars?
Anne Simmons
asimmons@nas.edu
