[OT] Re: Tired of the stupid comments about SST...

On Sat, 6 Mar 1999, John M. Atkinson wrote:
> devans@uneb.edu wrote:
> > 
> > I was tired of this before, and remain tired of this still. Suffice
to say, if
> > you've seen Robocop, and was surprised and offended by a brilliant
piece of
> > satire, you've no one to blame but yourself. 
> Eh?  Obviously you're too illiterate to have read and understood the
> book in question.  This puts the rest of your comments into adequate
> perspective.

People get the book and the movie confused. The book has lots of
politics,
very little of the movie's 'satire', and some very interesting action
scenes. I don't agree with much of the politics, and they take up a lot
of
the book, but the whole thing is a pretty good book. The Powered Armour
is
very cool.

The movie has silly satire pretending to be politics, military tactics
at
the 'drooling moron' level of sophistication, and so many
inconsistencies
as to be laughable. They also didn't use PA...

I'm willing to grant that the spaceship scenes are very good looking. If
you overlook the moron-level tactics shown there as well. Purely as
drama,
the ground combat scenes (esp. the fort scenes) are decent; as any sort
of
half-sensible combat squence, they're rubbish. Overall, I stand by my
earlier comment about feeding Paul Verhoven (the director) and the
scriptwriters to Bugs.

I think the movie tried to cross "Aliens" with "Star Wars"; it failed
miserably, getting only the worst elements of both movies. Aliens is a
better combat SF movie; Star Wars is better space opera; SST the movie
is
the worst of both worlds.

Try reading Heinlein's book some time. You'll be surprised at how much
Verhoven got wrong. True story: Verhoven has never even read
the book, and was only interested in the fairly-well-known name to front
his own version of the story, which contains what he claims are the
'essential elements' of the book's story. This is from "The Making of
SST"
which has an interview w/ Verhoven.

This is very OT, and YMMV,

Brian (burger00@camosun.bc.ca)			-DS2/SG2/FR!/HOTT-
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