Friday, June 10, 2005

Talk About Missing The Point

So I enjoyed the book "Starship Troopers".

I don't agree with all of its ideas, but at the very least you must admit that it does a reasonable job of making a case for them. The idea of a government where citizenship is based on military service, and thus the only people who have a say in government are those literally willing to risk their life for it, even if you don't agree with it, at least it's interesting.

When the movie came out, I went to see it, and I had pretty low expectations, I mean statistically speaking movies based on books I enjoyed rarely do justice to the original.

With those kind of low expectations, it wasn't hard for the movie to exceed them. I mean once you realized that the movie was totally different from the book, that it pretty much dropped all pretense of being about the political theory side of things, and pretty much ignored all the technical realism of the book, and really the only similarity was the existence of the aliens and the names of the characters, it wasn't all that bad. At the very least it was enjoyable as an action film, if nothing else.

So tonight, when I caught "Starship Troopers 2" on cable, I must admit, I was expecting something that was at least within spitting distance of the first movie, if not the book.

It wasn't even close. It was nothing like the book, and nothing like the original movie, it was basically a bad horror movie, set in the world of the first movie. Zero redeeming qualities.

What a waste.