MichaelIronside[
S] 623 points 4 months ago
I don't think "parody" is an appropriate moniker to put on that film. I read STARSHIP TROOPERS when I was a teenager, which was a book, which was a very frightened, right wing, almost fascist view of our political world. And I was actually surprised that Paul Verhoeven was going to make a film about it. Or from it, I guess we should say, considering that Paul was a child of the second World War in Belgium and in Holland, he used to run around and plain the abandoned battlefields that the Germans and Allies had been in. So I didn't expect him to adapt a fascist, inflexible, very right wing, fear-based story. So I asked him, I said when I met him for the film, I said "Can I ask you one question?"
And Paul doesn't like questions. And he said "Okay, ONE question."
And I said "Why are you making a movie out of such a right wing manifesto?"
And he said "If I told a story that preached to everybody that war is bad," - in his own way of looking at the universe - if I made a film and preached to everybody that war is bad, and that violence based on politics and religion is bad, nobody would listen to me. So I'm going to create a perfect world where everyone is beautiful, and everyone has the right gun, but it's only good for killing bugs.
And that's what he said.