You can't make a movie about something without glorifying it. There's no such thing as an anti-war movie as Truffaut said.
A movie lampooning militarism, xenophobia and… armoured supersoldiers grinding through bugs and taking their resources? Sounds cool.
Compare to games like Factorio and Helldivers 2. About 1% of the time I think “wait, am I the baddie?” and the rest is just raining down technologically enhanced Armageddon to further my mineral stockpiles.
I was really confused there for a second, before I remembered that there are native bug monsters in Factorio. I always play with the monsters disabled so the planet is empty.
(eg "service guarantees citizenship" is presented as a fascist idea the movie is parodying, but IIRC in the book you could get it by being a mailman.)
No, it's explicitly noted in the book that the civil service options are supposed to be at least as unpleasant as being a soldier - even if that means inventing useless make-work for someone unable to perform other duties. The explicit example given is that a blind man with only a single functioning limb might be given the duty of counting hairs on caterpillars by touch on a cold moon base for his full tour of service.
Of course, that's leaving aside the basic problem that the idea only works in an idealized abstract state where nobody in the basically unaccountable government ever indulges in even a little bit of nepotism when it comes to who gets picked for or promoted out of certain kinds of drudge work.
Several Starship Troopers movie scenes are lifted directly from the book, almost word for word.
As an Australian, I laughed heartily, and considered it just deserts for that Simpsons episode. ;-)
Verhoeven is something of an expert on this, since he grew up in The Hague during Nazi occupation.
There's an interview out there where he says when he making the film he was wondering if his movie was in-your-face enough about Nazis, to really make sure his movie wasn't too subtle or that people would miss the point he had the former Doogie Howser actor wear a SS officer's trenchcoat.
Because apes are not liberal, of course.
Ironically, the chaos of liberal democracy might be the greatest stabilizing force our species has ever known. Even the Pax Romana the ancient Chinese bureaucracy, and the European empires fell apart for one reason or another.
Let’s hope liberal democracy has many more miles left in the tank.
[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/nasty-brutish-and-short....
Do you feel ie recent All Quiet on the Eastern Front glorified war, or people involved? That book is even more powerful.
What you go for is a "damn I never want to go to war" reaction but what you get is "sucks those guys died, would have been different if i was there though" and that is the "glorification".
I think this is what Truffaut meant that it's a poor medium to convey conflict as the lens must glorify otherwise its not longer a movie, just footage.
There were no war movies before WW1 and no major wars for a few generations so there were millions of extremely eager young men lining up in front of recruitment offices in Germany, Britain and France. They had zero idea what they were signing up for.
I think this is plain wrong. Unless you count "glorification" to mean anything that makes a subject compelling to watch. But I think that's stretching the meaning of the word past it's breaking point.
This is an absurd statement, can you expand on this?
Have you never seen The Pianist, Schindler's List, Come and See, ..?
Yeah I've seen all of those and I know a fair amount of people that those movie had an opposite effect on.
But I'm curious which part of Schindler's List you got "righteous" from. It's not a vibe I got from watching it. Are you sure it's not just your prior judgement coloring your interpretation?
> I was conscripted into some faction of the Bosnian Army in order to "defend" our city. In truth, we had few arms or anything with which to defend. And as a very tall, largely starved girl, I wouldn't have made much of a soldier anyhow. So I was a "nurse." No training, of course. And no supplies, either. I was near the front line fairly often. There wasn't much you could do.
> One day, some shell exploded right on or near two young soldiers and they were torn into dozens of pieces. I say "dozens" because it wasn't hundreds or millions - I'd seen that happen too, and it's totally different. You could count these pieces. They were big lumps. A fellow "nurse" and I were near enough that we got there before anyone else. There was no one to save.
> As these soldiers were Bosnian Muslims whose bodies - what there was of them - would be returned to their families, we realized that we needed to collect these pieces to put the soldiers back together, kind of, because Muslims believe a body should be buried "whole" - to the extent that it's possible. With "only" dozens of pieces, it's kind of possible to do this. So we set about trying to match parts - one guy's leg get ripped off above the knee, but this leg has the knee attached, so it can't be this first guy's. That sort of thing. "Look," my fellow "nurse" said, "this one ate rice!" Rice was one of the few kinds of food that was readily doled out. Everyone hated it because they were tired of it, because it required a lot of water to cook (and no one had running water) and because it required a lot of heat to cook (and there was no gas and the trees were mostly gone and we'd already burned most of our books.) But we hadn't had rice in a while; this soldier must have been had some at home, stashed away.
> This guy's stomach was blown up, so rice was all over the various parts of his body that came from his torso. And I remember being so happy, because the hardest things to connect to a specific person are internal organs, but this guy's organs had rice on them, so you could tell they were "his." Ones without rice were, presumably, the other soldier's. So the job of piecing together bodies was made much easier than it normally would have been, when you try to make each "body" weigh about the same, even if you know parts are mixed. Of course, I don't need to add that when something like this happens, it's not just people - and rice - everywhere, but uniquely awful smells, and the flies get there so fast I still don't know how they do it.
> Later that day, I snaked my way to my aunt's, a few kilometers away. I remember smiling; I rarely smiled during the war. My aunt had made soup - good soup - and I ate a lot and told her and my cousins about my day. We all agreed it that things had gone pretty well, considering. I was pretty happy about piecing two young men together successfully because of the rice and having a stomach full of warm soup.
> War is dehumanizing. If, as in the Okinawa quote, you still worry about getting shit and piss on you, if you can even still smell the rotting flesh, and if it bothers you enough that you consider not eating your rations, if you can still consider your situation to be something like "hell's own cesspool," well . . . then you're still pretty fucking lucky. People like to read about that stuff; that's why they make it into popular movies and comic books.
> People don't make movies about the happiness of a young girl who finds she can reassemble people with ease, thanks to the fact that one of them ate a lot of rice earlier that day. Because it isn't very romantic or macho and it isn't full of hard-ass symbolism.
> The thing about war, too, is that it affects many many more civilians than it does soldiers. The military-centric ideas in the article don't grasp that. War, according to romantic notions going as far back as the Greeks, is more about guys toughing it out than women and children left to pick up the pieces.
https://www.metafilter.com/87979/Losing-the-War#2886398
This one, too:
> I found that piece very hard to read - self-serving and smug in the sense of looking for romanticism. I reckon that, if the author had ever seen war, he'd be quite embarrassed by it.
> Guess what - most people prefer the movie version of any human experience. War is mostly long, boring, cold, hungry and tedious . . . then every once in a while someone lobs a grenade at you or shells your house or a sniper's bullet pierces your arm or rapes and kills someone you know and you get hysterical . . . and then it goes back to being long, boring, cold, hungry and tedious for eons and eons. While I like a lot of the human experiences eschewed by many people I know, war is one in which the movie version is quite plainly preferable.
https://www.metafilter.com/87979/Losing-the-War#2886358
There’s some amazing (and harrowing) content in her comment history — highly recommend giving it a read. It made me realize that even films like Saving Private Ryan present war as a titillating kind of hell. Something like Threads will probably come closer to the truth of it.
The movie is bleakly depressing under its mockingly glorified surface shine.
• The main character's enthusiasm to enlist is portrayed as irritatingly naive and ridiculous.
• The combat centers around the main character accidentally killing innocent villagers and a fellow American soldier.
• The main character winds up paraplegic, impotent, incontinent.
And all this happens before Willem Dafoe even shows up.
There have on occasion been wars that were fought over resources rather than for recreation.
It's easy to see why someone would find aspects of 'Saving Private Ryan' attractive (eg: Private Jackson, the sharpshooter), and it doesn't require much imagination to see how aspects even of Nazi villains can be attractive (they had the best uniforms).
It's more difficult to see how 'Born on the Fourth of July' would leave anyone - even a sadist - enthusiastic about war.
It's not like Kubrik's 'Clockwork Orange' in which some of the violence, in a sick way, empowers the main character.
Instead, the main character pathetically bumbles into shooting people he doesn't mean to, is shot himself, and turns into an angry loser in a wheelchair (until he finds his calling as a peace activist).
And the fascists have the outfits
But I don't care for the outfits
What I care about is music
And the communists have the music
Great song thank you.
Personally, I would also include Schindler's List.
Except when you are Kubrik.