Starship troopers is once again a sucky movie based on a much superior book. The book was written by Robert Heinlein one of the masters of science fiction on the level of Asimov and Clarke. The book describes the live and adventures of a unit of Mobile Infantry, a group of hand picked highly trained elite soldiers who fight against horde's alien "bugs" using powered exoskeleton armor festooned with advanced weaponry. This is the first instance in literature of the fabled Power Armored Space Marine, which have since become the cornerstone of any space military game or story.
Heinlein's world is a one where to become a citizen with full voting rights you have to complete a set number of years of Federal service. Before you start screaming "militarism", you should know that the military service is not the only option, in fact since the Mobile Infantry is an elite unit, they only accept the best candidates. The real kicker is that if you volunteer for service the Federation is required to find you a position that fits your skills and abilities, this maybe something as benign as teaching a group of orphans or something more dangerous like being a guinea pig for medical experiments. I like this concept a lot, if you want to volunteer there is always a place for you to go to, which is in stark contrast to Finland for example, good luck getting into the national service with a serious medical condition.
The movie on the other hand fucks a lot of what's great about the book. In the movie the Mobile infantry is just a bunch of dudes with assault rifles making suicidal human wave attacks against aliens that can rip a man to shreds in 5 seconds. The federal service is limited to the military and they take anyone, drowning the whole concept of well-trained well-equipped elite soldiers in a pile of bullshit.
Tactics in this movie are almost non-existent, the main idea is to run with-in 5 meters of an alien and then proceed to shoot it to bits with your assault rifle on full auto. To makes this even more stupid, the movie even has an informertial that shows how a single bullet to the aliens head will kill it instantly and yet every single scene of the troopers shooting at alien is a one where they basically blast every other part of it off before shooting it in the head. This movie tries to be a film about an infantry unit fighting aliens but it was blatantly obvious that the makers didn't have the slights idea of how infantry fights.
Here is my way of fighting a bunch of melee oriented aliens in the Starship Troopers Universe.
1) Train my troops to FUCKING AIM. If all it takes to kill one is one bullet shot into its head, it is pointless to shoot at anything else, the troopers should be trained so well in the art of head shots that they can do it in their sleep while both their legs are cut off. This simple tactic is even easier to do on the bugs since their head is basically in the center of their body mass.
2) Train my troops to shoot at FUCKING LONG RANGES. All the shooting in the film is done at virtually point blank ranges, an assault rifle in our age has an effective range of 150-300 meters. A distance where the aliens have no hope in hell of hurting you.
3) Train my troops to use FUCKING TERRAIN. Charging into close proximity of a melee monster like the aliens in this film is nothing short of suicidal. Pick an easily defensible piece of terrain like a hill, set up there, use my long range weapons to deal some serious death on the aliens while they struggle to get in close. A liberal use of field fortifications, mines, booby traps and obstacles make the prospect of the aliens ever getting to a striking distance even less likely. Even better if the cover is used properly it might even a take a while before the aliens figure out where the fire is coming from.
4) Get some FUCKING ARTILLERY. If the range of a 150-300 meters against a melee opponent sounds fantastic, how does a range of 20-40 kilometers sound like? A horde of tightly packed enemies in open is the dream of every single artilleryman in the history of artillery. A single battery of 6 modern pieces of artillery would make instant minced meat of any horde of the aliens in few minutes.
5) Use FUCKING MOBILITY to my advantage. In the movie the Mobile Infantry are usually dropped off on the planet by spaceplanes. Here is wild idea how about using those transports to move the troopers from point A to point B on the planet side as well. I would use the transport ships to move my infantry from one defensible position to another instead of moving by foot which is not only slow as hell, but also exposes my troops to ambushes. Greater Mobility+Longer Range Firepower=a bunch of dead aliens.
With these 5 simple principles you could drop the casualty rates of the humans from horrendous to insignificant and the inflict casualties on the level of genocidal on the bugs. The movie attempts to portray a bunch of overgrown insects as an existential threat to humanity, but really the only thing that threatens humanity is the apocalyptic levels of stupid exhibited by humanity, ironically when it comes to one of our favorite pass times, warfare.
Now that my major beef with this film is settled, time to move on to the minor stuff, number on being the cast. In the book as it is the film the protagonist is Johnny Rico. In the book Johnny was Rico's nickname, his first name was Juan. This was one of Heinlein's favorite tricks, he would build up a strong and likable character that the reader would love only to reveal later that the character was either african-american or hispanic, this was shocking when the book came out in 1959. The movie has no respect for Heinlein's efforts to fight racial prejudice, Johnny is played by a chicle jawed all-american white boy, in fact the whole cast is made out of soap-opera stars.
Why Hollywood, Why? Why can't you make a good movies out of good books? Why have you made fucking up old good movies and books into an art form?
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