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[Dead]

The satire in Starship Troopers always seemed incredibly obvious to me.

I was shocked to learn that people thinking Starship Troopers was serious was a thing. I honestly can't fathom how that'd be possible.

 

[akira28]

Philip K. Dick was a fairly ardent right winger, he probably believed in the nationalistic themes of that movie.

I think you meant Robert Heinlein, of which Phillip K Dick had this to say:

"Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."

I still want to see a faithful representation of the Roughneck drop armor

 

[Black Mamba]

People read so many things into the Big Lebowski but at the end of the day it's just the tale of a dude wanting his carpet back.

Well, it really tied the room together.

 

[User 100115]

looking at the entire scope of the movie, from the extended cut, to the director's originally intended ending (the one no one has seen), etc, I think those video's are for the most part right on the money.

I don't think I really agree with the theory that it also criticises third wave, but maybe more the people that take advantage of third wave to pass off stuff that would otherwise be criticized as awful as 'sex positive empowerment'.

 

[xbhaskarx]

Philip K. Dick was a fairly ardent right winger, he probably believed in the nationalistic themes of that movie.

lol

Starship Troopers by Phillip K Dick, now that would have been something...

 

[Madrin]

from that thread...

I was hoping this truly was the subtext of the film because that would be hilarious, but reading the movie synopsis makes it pretty clear that it's just a regular underdog story.

 

[sixteen-bit]

I let one of my classmates borrow The Matrix on DVD fully expecting her pastor father to flip his shit since the entire movie is blasphemous, but the whole family ended up really enjoying it.

 

[AcceptableGhost]

I read all Arthur C. Clarke's 2xxx-3001 novels so I pretty much know what's going on there- he literally spells out what's going on in 2001 in the book.

Reading 2010 was a huge mistake.

 

[Oersted]

American Psycho. I definitely know of a few people who view it as a straight up horror film. It's not very good in that way haha I've heard someone claim it's "the worst horror movie ever made"

Not that AP is especially deep or confusing. It's not. But it seems like the dark comedy aspects get overlooked by some, as well as the look at a materialistic 80's society.

At no point does American Psycho feel like a horror movie. It's so clearly an 80s yuppie culture satire and black comedy. It's as much of a horror movie as Freddy's Dead or something.

I always saw it as a comment by a woman on a mens world.

 

[Count Dookkake]

The "aliens" from AI.

starship troopers: people think it's a serious attempt at hard scifi à la Aliens.

Beyond that, critics went on record accusing Verhoeven of being a fascist or a Nazi sympathizer, which is kind of silly given that he grew up in the rubble of WW2. It was not really until it hit DVD that the establishment got it.

 

[Dead]

lol yeah, the ending to AI is probably one of the most, if not the most misunderstood moment in cinema in the past 15 years.

 

[Count Dookkake]

Audience "Intelligence"

 

[Coffee Dog]

The point of Metal Gear Solid 2 was largely lost on an industry without art critics. It will forever be remembered as "the crazy one that nobody understood".

 

[Reeks]

Correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while since I've seen CH, but isn't this somewhat, maybe a bit implicitly, mentioned at the end of the movie by narration?

Yes, you are correct. But I think it's still worth mention given that I've talked to people who have seen the movie. And that message for whatever reason was lost on them...

 

[pigeon]

Silver Linings Playbook is a movie about how the difference between a mentally ill person and a normal person is two bad days, and most people just cobble together systems that will keep them from having two bad days in a row. It just looks like a romantic comedy.

 

[Count Dookkake]

Yes, you are correct. But I think it's still worth mention given that I've talked to people who have seen the movie. And that message for whatever reason was lost on them...

It's a common occurrence.

Many people lose the ability to think when they are offended by content.

 

[Superflat]

Way too many people judged Shoot 'Em Up as a straight action movie when it was a black comedy/satire.

 

[XANDER CAGE]

A good portion of the comments listed in the OP read more like people congratulating themselves. None of those interpretations are really uncommon (Napoleon Dynamite is about loneliness and disconnect? Wow, you really cracked the code!), but these redditors have written about them like they've uncovered some dusty old secret. That Inglorious Basterds one is literally one of the points of the movie that nearly every critic praised it for, and I'm fairly sure Tarantino even said that was the point in interviews. Likewise with 500 Days of Summer. Does anyone really think it's a quirky romantic comedy, given how it ends, and its key line "just because she's into the same bizarro crap you are doesn't mean she's your soulmate"?

I think the best examples of truly misunderstood movies are things like Inception (people obsessing over whether or not the top falls down? Guess what it doesn't matter and isn't the point) or Fight Club (which is actually a criticism of blase misanthropy, not an endorsement of it). Scarface is a fair one too.

Way too many people judged Shoot 'Em Up as a straight action movie when it was a black comedy/satire.

Who? How do you get past the opening scene of that movie and think "yeah this is serious"?

 

[Superflat]

Who? How do you get past the opening scene of that movie and think "yeah this is serious"?

Reviews and hearsay when it came out, and none of the opinions I read let me know that it was a comedy. It colored my expectations before I went to see it, and it turned out to be completely different.

 

[Extra Sauce]

the secret meaning behind zero dark thirty is that it's actually terrible

So it's like a modern day Scarface?

Spoiler

Truthfully I don't think Scarface is flat-out terrible, but I find it very overrated and have learned to despise it via the countless Scarface poster/t-shirt adorning douchebags I encountered in my life.

 

[bomma_man]

I always saw it as a comment by a woman on a mens world.

Even though the book, which the movie doesn't deviate a lot from, was written by a bloke?

 

[FeedMeAStrayCat]

Way too many people judged Shoot 'Em Up as a straight action movie when it was a black comedy/satire.

Shoot 'Em Up is fantastic! Just felt like I needed to share that. Paul Giamatti's best role!

 

[strobogo]

So it's like a modern day Scarface?

Spoiler

Truthfully I don't think Scarface is flat-out terrible, but I find it very overrated and have learned to despise it via the countless Scarface poster/t-shirt adorning douchebags I encountered in my life.

Scarface isn't bad, but it certainly isn't great. It skirts good at times. I have no idea why it got so popular with gangster culture.

 

[squidyj]

I don't understand how people don't get Inglorious Basterds

 

[Count Dookkake]

Inglourious Basterds is especially entertaining to me because the finale is a bit of a pun.

Spoiler

revenge movie

 

[zomaha]

I read all Arthur C. Clarke's 2xxx-3001 novels so I pretty much know what's going on there- he literally spells out what's going on in 2001 in the book.

fwiw, Kubrick's 2001 is not really associated with Clark's version. like other films he made, kubrick took a book's basic skeleton, but filled it with his own ideas.

my favorite analysis of 2001 is by Rob Ager, found by clicking here

 

[kai3345]

Yo, what's up with Sucker Punch? I just remember it being a particularly awful film, I must have missed the subtext.

They're strippers/whores/whatever in a whorehouse being exhibited to these men for money. When they do their performance, they're suddenly transported into action movies. So I guess Snyder is saying that action movies use scantily clad women in the same way a whorehouse does.

Or something.

 

[Matt]

That explanation for Signs sounds good until you realize it is directly countered by the movie itself.

 

[Chichikov]

Starship Troopers was just too ahead of its time with its political viewpoint. Imagine if it came out in the run up to the Iraq War, it almost would have been too obvious.

Startship Troopers works amazingly well as a 9/11 metaphor, eerily so.
Of course, no way in hell it coudl've been made after 9/11.

 

[G-Fex]

I kinda thought this stuff about 2001 as I was watching it.

Guess that kinda makes me feel special

 

[MattKeil]

For those asking about Sucker Punch interpretation

Why you are wrong about sucker punch part 1

WHy you are wrong about sucker punch part 2

Moviebob attempts to explain Sucker Punch.

I Have never watched the movie and cannot comment on the movie itself but he does a decent enough job explaining one of the interpretations that has been mentioned already in this thread.

I unfortunately have watched the movie and this is inane. They are giving way too much credit to Snyder here, especially given the rest of his body of work.

 

[Kai Dracon]

Startship Troopers works amazingly well as a 9/11 metaphor, eerily so.
Of course, no way in hell it coudl've been made after 9/11.

The thing I love about Starship Troopers and its eternal metaphor is that there's almost no actual villains in the movie, in my view.

- The Bugs aren't the bad guys, they're reacting to a threat.
- Human kids raised in a fascist society don't question the reality presented to them.
- The elders, such as the teacher, are not evil people but sincerely believe in their ideology.

The closest thing to a true villain IMO flies by very quickly - the lunatic, glassy-eyed conservative "human supremacist" ideologue on the talk show, debating the rational woman who was trying to say the Bugs may not be aggressors. He was the kind of person who takes advantage of universal weaknesses in human thought and one would imagine, his sort helped build the society seen in the film.

But everyone else was just a cog in the machine. It's a pretty bleak movie really; as if humanity is doomed to repeat the same cycle over and over.

 

[See You Next Wednesday]

Philip K. Dick was a fairly ardent right winger, he probably believed in the nationalistic themes of that movie.

I think he (Robert A. Heinlein) was stated to support the idea to be able to vote in a democracy, you would first have to serve in the military.

Paul Verhoeven, having gone through World War II & the nazi takeover as a youth, didn't particularly share Philip K. Dick's views.

 

[daviyoung]

Startship Troopers works amazingly well as a 9/11 metaphor, eerily so.
Of course, no way in hell it coudl've been made after 9/11.

Its a war metaphor. Not specific to any type of war, but it was made with WW2 in mind.

 

[AlternativeUlster]

Holy Motors's main character's name is Oscar and he is going to different scenes trying to make an Academy Award winning performance. Holy Motors is a satire that lampoons that films are made for that reason.

 

[Transhuman]

The remote detonators on the barges in The Dark Knight were probably rigged so that whoever triggers the detonator first blows themselves up, instead of the other way around. Considering The Joker's previous experiment where he swapped the addresses for Rachel and Harvey, he obviously likes to flip things on their head, so that instead of being a prisoner's dilemma, the barge crisis would be a reverse prisoner's dilemma.

 

[megamerican]

Silver Linings Playbook is a movie about how the difference between a mentally ill person and a normal person is two bad days, and most people just cobble together systems that will keep them from having two bad days in a row. It just looks like a romantic comedy.

I don't know, I took away the opposite. I remember trailers having a darker tone and dealing heavily with the mental illness theme. The movie itself starts that way then veers off into a rom-com.

 

[Trent Strong]

Silver Linings Playbook is a movie about how the difference between a mentally ill person and a normal person is two bad days, and most people just cobble together systems that will keep them from having two bad days in a row. It just looks like a romantic comedy.

Well, that's a ridiculous view of mental illness if true.

 

[Robot Pants]

12 Monkeys is a sequel to Fight Club: in the book, Tyler doesn't actually blow up the buildings and ends up in a mental institution. Tyler is Jeffrey. Watch the movie, listen to Jeffrey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcztDZ13TLI

Space monkeys, 12 monkeys, same thing, he is trying to restart what he did in Fight Club. Remember his mentions of swinging from vine to vine across the Rockefeller Plaza. Now he releases the animals in the city, with his army of 12 monkeys.



And yes, 12 Monkeys came out first, but it's a time travel story, what do you expect!

This is hilarious hahaha

 

[NearRivers]

The Napoleon Dynamite theory is great. It was unfortunate that so many people dismissed the film as "bad" when it does such a good job of depicting uncertainty, loneliness, isolation, and depression. It's dark humour and subject matter is lost on those who can't relate to it. Although, maybe that's for the best.

 

[Tookay]

I let one of my classmates borrow The Matrix on DVD fully expecting her pastor father to flip his shit since the entire movie is blasphemous, but the whole family ended up really enjoying it.

So are you implying that they're stupid for being able to separate their beliefs from entertainment or that you're stupid for assuming the worst of them?

 

[FantasticMrFoxdie]

Damn these are all pretty crazy

 

[sixteen-bit]

So are you implying that they're stupid for being able to separate their beliefs from entertainment or that you're stupid for assuming the worst of them?

Neither, they misunderstood the movie, ala the thread.

 

[Riposte]

I feel like anyone who cares too much about meanings and metaphors misunderstands movies.

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Starship Troopers is obviously not a serious movie, but I would argue that it is misunderstood in a different way. People often suggest that it is a parody or critique of the source material, when really it's not. The elements taken directly from it are basically played straight or only exist in a significantly changed form. Most of the over-the-top satire is targeted at fascism or state propaganda in general, with no real connection to anything in the book. The Federation in the book is very different than the film, with the only common connection being the service-guarantees-citizenship thing, which is itself not translated accurately anyway. The aliens are different, the story is different, the society is different, the Mobile Infantry are COMPLETELY different, eh. It's about as much a critique of the book as Neon Genesis: Evangellion is a critique of the bible - the creators had no idea about the source material and just took some names from it without thinking too hard.

 

[MjFrancis]

I feel like anyone who cares too much about meanings and metaphors misunderstands movies.

I want to read a ten-page essay on Crank. You know someone has already done something like this.

 

[strobogo]

It's all about addiction, man. Addiction to LIFE. LIFE 4LYFE.

 

[NinjaBoiX]

Donnie Darko is the thematic counterweight to It's a Wonderful Life. Donnie gets to see just how much worse life would be for the people he knows if he didn't die.

Whoa!

 

[Count Dookkake]

Starship Troopers is obviously not a serious movie,

Who says a joke can't be serious?

Those are the best jokes and the best lessons.

 

[RustyNails]

I feel like anyone who cares too much about meanings and metaphors misunderstands movies.

Perfectly suitable response from someone with Resident Evil avatar.