Mortal Kombat was not a bad movie if you ask me.
Holy crap, this is bad. 3% on Rotten Tomatoes...
Applying those words to the Resident Evil sequels surely is some form of crime against humanity
I was about to bring this movie up as a counter-example, but I guess the opinions on this are very much split.
As with many other franchises, the follow-ups aren't worth watching.
It's always refreshing to see movie directors make a great movie that has a potential for mediocre sequels, but not give in to that temptation (e.g. Matrix).
Directors pretty much define the quality of the movies, so it's more important to follow them instead of the franchise itself.
No, I read the novel, and didn't get that impression at all. (Nor did the novel contain strong barriers to citizenship; it simply portrayed a society which retained the [near universal, in the time and society in which it was written] idea that citizenship required a commitment to service, while reversing the [similarly generally accepted] idea that citizenship was mandatory and automatic with birth.)
And especially I don't think the descriptions equate to simple endorsement after reading lots of Heinlein, where to maintain that shallow attitude toward his work I'd have to think that Heinlein rapidly cycled through deep devotion to a wide range of radically contradictory ideologies. He certainly has certain themes and ideas that he liked to remix that had some relation to his actual political views, but, at least in his fiction, he doesn't seem to be given to simple presentation of what he sees as an ideal.
That might be one of the first times that I learned to enjoy both a movie and a book separately, even if the movie is (objectively) a poor portrayal of what was in the book. Now, I actively enjoy things like that, which are faithful in only a few of the dimensions of the original.
The movie was pretty much completely conceived before anyone pointed out a superficial resemblance between certain elements of it and the book, which led to a (sadly, successful) effort to secure rights to the book, Verhoeven reading a small part of the beginning of the book and tossing it in disgust, some light plot and character changes to justify the connection, and then slapping the title of the book onto the movie.
Starship Troopers was a C- bit of social commentary masquerading as a an adaptation of a work to which the creator of the film was hostile without reading.