Starship Troopers 2

[GobotFool]

In retrospect, I think Terminator 2 started to show his decline. As much as I love that film, it really drags in the middle.

I will agree and disagree with you in this point. I think T2 was the height of Cameron, it's also some of the best fusion of action and story I have ever seen in a action sci-fi flick. The draging middle I felt added some depth to the flick that helped it rise above standard action crapola fare. However, I think after getting praised for adding emotional depth to his work, cameron went all crazy on us and blessed us with movies drenched in sap, finally culminating in Titanic.

[Southpaw Samurai]

I haven't seen ST2, nor probably have any real desire to see it, but I do have a comment or two on the original.

As an adaptation of the original novel (or as even a good sci-fi movie), I have to concur with most of you and say there's little good to say about the movie.

The thing is, P.V. never intended for it to be those things. Sure, he was probably glad to have the name recognition of the novel and have plot elements already written, but I don't believe he at any point considered truly adapting the novel as much as using it for his own ends (which are at times against the themes of the book). I love Starship Troopers as an over-the-top sarcastic black comedy about how at least a little fascism is a necessary and pitiful part of any war mongering state (perhaps this notion hits too close to home for some of us Americans today). When I first saw the movie in the theater, I came away not knowing whether I thought it outright reeked or if there was something I was missing (because of the little chuckles it caused in me). It was only a few years later catching it on TV did I realize that it wasn't the movie I thought it was going to be. If you can stomach it with that new insight, you might also find the movie not only tolerable but potentially even enjoyable.

The CGI version does do a better job of sticking a little closer to the book (but still had to have the lighter armored versions both to appeal to the movie fans and so that characters could be distinguished). Has anyone seen the anime version? I heard about it a few years back and how it actually something something that would actually make you think 'ape' when you saw the M.I.'s suits. I'm curious how well it sticks to the book otherwise.

[Myriad]

On the old forum someone was going to rip a VHS copy of the Anime Version to digital format. Unfortunately it never happened.........

I wish you Skinny's would stay on topic

[bsu legato]

I believe it was actually JsARCLIGHT who had an old, nth generation VHS copy. Whatever happened to that project?

[Agent ONE]

..., cameron went all crazy on us and blessed us with movies drenched in sap, finally culminating in Titanic.

As much as I dislike that movie, you can't blame him for taking on such a lame project. No one could have made that movie entertaining.

[GobotFool]

..., cameron went all crazy on us and blessed us with movies drenched in sap, finally culminating in Titanic. 

As much as I dislike that movie, you can't blame him for taking on such a lame project. No one could have made that movie entertaining.

Not even Arnold?

[JsARCLIGHT]

I believe it was actually JsARCLIGHT who had an old, nth generation VHS copy. Whatever happened to that project?

Yes that was me with my copy. Three things went horribly wrong with it:

1) the guy doing the transfer for me was doing it as a "favor" and thus it was back burnered for him as he completed more important projects at work. Then that guy up and quit on me and I hired a new editor but I don't know him from adam so I can't ask him for a favor of this magnitude just yet. (Image you just starting a job and your boss walks in and says "hey, I know you have tons of crap to do to but could you see to it to digitize and clean up this old worn out VHS tape for me? Thanks!")

2) Durring our office move our entire network got buttholed... thus we lost many very important projects and our entire raid system... guess what was on that raid system somewhere in some small capacity.

3) Of what Darin got time to transfer and attempt to clean up (the first episode if I remember right) the cleanup process was a steep order as the tape the first three unsubtitled episodes are on is not only a copy of a copy of a copy but it has serious "shelf rot" and the speed jumps regularly and the picture is fuzzy and quite crappy at it's best.

... so as of now the whole endevor is dead. I have no time to do the transfer myself and neither does our new guy. Add to that that our editing suite is in high gear right now and the only time at the controls I could get would be between 9pm and midnight if I where to do it myself.

Sorry to break the news so hard and so late but my copy is too far gone for a VHS to VHS transfer worth anything and digitizing it and cleaning it up will take a lot of time I don't have at the moment.

[Myriad]

I believe it was actually JsARCLIGHT who had an old, nth generation VHS copy. Whatever happened to that project?

Yes that was me with my copy. Three things went horribly wrong with it:

1) the guy doing the transfer for me was doing it as a "favor" and thus it was back burnered for him as he completed more important projects at work. Then that guy up and quit on me and I hired a new editor but I don't know him from adam so I can't ask him for a favor of this magnitude just yet. (Image you just starting a job and your boss walks in and says "hey, I know you have tons of crap to do to but could you see to it to digitize and clean up this old worn out VHS tape for me? Thanks!")

2) Durring our office move our entire network got buttholed... thus we lost many very important projects and our entire raid system... guess what was on that raid system somewhere in some small capacity.

3) Of what Darin got time to transfer and attempt to clean up (the first episode if I remember right) the cleanup process was a steep order as the tape the first three unsubtitled episodes are on is not only a copy of a copy of a copy but it has serious "shelf rot" and the speed jumps regularly and the picture is fuzzy and quite crappy at it's best.

... so as of now the whole endevor is dead. I have no time to do the transfer myself and neither does our new guy. Add to that that our editing suite is in high gear right now and the only time at the controls I could get would be between 9pm and midnight if I where to do it myself.

Sorry to break the news so hard and so late but my copy is too far gone for a VHS to VHS transfer worth anything and digitizing it and cleaning it up will take a lot of time I don't have at the moment.

Sorry to hear that. Maybe someday. Thanks for trying!

Even Megs is crying about it...........

[JsARCLIGHT]

Well I still have the tape... all it will take is some down time in the edit suite so I can get in there and work on it for a day or so. Perhaps this winter when things calm down in late 4th quarter I can take a shot at it again. But right now I'm working my ass (and my team's asses) to the bone.

Yeeehaaaw, another 12 hour day!!!

(hint to kids in school: marketing and graphic design is NOT a job for you if don't like your workahol.)

[MSW]

Titanic, True Lies and the Abyss are all terrible movies and James Cameron is a hack. Just because he had one of the highest grossing teen cryfest summer shlock movies of all time under his belt and the academy awards popularity does not make him a good director. What has he done since? Jack. Terminator 1, 2 and Aliens can be seen the same way, they are attrocious movies but everone loves them because of all the guns 'a blazin' and special effects. Same goes for Peter Jackson, He was not much more than a third-teir New Zealander gore movie hack until he landed LotR... and Jackson got lucky that he did not totally destroy the LotR trilogy as he had the bonus of good story material, good actors and a good crew behind him. Plus "Founding" an effects shop in this day and age is no big thing as it is just a matter of money and headhunting the right talent. As for Savini and Burton they also have one or two box office successes, more due to their cast and story talent. But the element all these people have that Phil Tippett does not is experience. Their "good" movies came at number 4, 5 or 6 in their careers. ST2 is Tippett's first film in the chair and it shows bigtime. Just as the movie Spawn was a first time shot for most of it's leading crew, ST2 shows itself as a very shallow, immature film. Budget is just an excuse, mainly being an effects person Tippett is used to having about a 100 million in breathing room to fire up his flints and maya seats. I think King George has proved the point that good effects are no match for a poor story and lousy acting and now Tippett has proved that a bad story, budget effects and an inexperienced director can do the same. But seeing as the budget was so low ST2 will most likely will make money in the first week (like the Spykids franchise) and will convince him he should make more movies. Don't you just love hollywood?

So, in your opinion, any person who has had an film effects background can never, ever possably be a respectable film director?

In your opinion there is something about being involved in the technical issues of model building, effects photography, creature and prostetic makeup sculpting, puppetry, and animation that automaticly bars a person from makeing good, let alone respectible, decisions involveing the paceing, tone, and acting within a motion picture?

If so then what, pray tell, constitutes a respectable director in your eyes? do they have to have been indoctorned through filmschool, do they have to have been actors themselves, do they have to have had theater directing experience?

It's all good and fine that you conclude Cameron and Jackson's work to be subpar, it's fully within your right to hold such opinion...The only reason I made that last post was to correct the impression you made that the last time an effects man directed a feature we ended up with the Spawn film; when in fact there have been a great number of films made sense then; directed by former even current effects people....Look, I'm not asking you to buy, let alone watch, ST2...I only ask that you don't dismiss out of hand the effects field as being completely incompatable with the glorified directors chair...you are dismissing the entirety of animation when you do that.

[Blaine23]

Well... ideally a good director would be good with actors, primarily (and yes I am talking about humans here). Aside from that, he needs to have a vision for his work and an understanding of nearly every job on the set.

I think what JSA's post was implying was that ST2 had no real known quality actors, no real known fantastic script, and no proven director. Regardless of whether this guy's pedigree was in special effects or dog grooming, that's still bad odds for a good movie to emerge.

It can happen, but on a major studio (much less a sequel) job - it's most likely to turn out a film full of explosions and "trailer moments" and precious little else.

However, I think it's ridiculous to deride Cameron or Jackson's work, though. It's very easy to be Mr. Armchair Movie Critic, but it's another thing to have a film that grosses hundreds of millions, in the top 10 grossing films of all time and takes home the Best Picture at the Oscars.

No offense, homey - but if that's hackwork - then sign me up to be a hack.

Personally, I can name 100 films easily that I like better than Titanic or LotR - but I'm not about to sit here and say these guys aren't great filmmakers, because obviously they are doing something right.

[Agent ONE]

..., cameron went all crazy on us and blessed us with movies drenched in sap, finally culminating in Titanic. 

As much as I dislike that movie, you can't blame him for taking on such a lame project. No one could have made that movie entertaining.

Not even Arnold?

Woah!!! You should be a director!!! You are totally right! Arnold WOULD have made that better!

[JsARCLIGHT]

My point on directors comes from my own real life experiences working with them on TV commercials and other productions. A Director's background and training completely influence their ability to direct others and create. A "classic" Director, someone who has always been "in the chair" or striving for it usually has an open mind with few notions and limits. They tend to be more flexible and get their actors to emote and perform very well. A large degree of that cannot be taught but comes from personality and experience. Couple this with their background and generally you have the makings of a good Feature or Short Director.

People who came up through the ranks of other professional film or video post production routes tend to be very, very entrenched in their ways. SFX guys who direct always revert to "what they know" and their pieces generally are FX heavy, little to no plot or character drive and they are the cheif abusers of the now classic lines "we'll fix it in post". In a production environment when the pressues, deadlines and budget start closing in on you you always revert back to your core, your "center"... what you know. A classicly trained and educated director will fall back on his actors to work with him to achieve his goal... whereas these TD's and SFX guys who become directors rely on their trade (special effects) to save their ass. A lot of modern movies have been directed to a degree from the shadows by old SFX people and they are all weak because when push came to shove they relied on their fancy spaceships and dissapearing gnomes rather than their storytelling ability or their actor's skills.

Anime suffers from this same thing a lot of times as the people driving the production are so steeped in their backgrounds (like mechanical design or giant robots) that their production is very weak because they only focus on what they know they can do well. Cameron and Jackson are prime examples of this, they only do what they know and they fall back on effects to save them when their storytelling ability fails. George Lucas can also be sited as an example of a classic director "corrupted by the dark side" of the FX people in that he now relies so much on the FX to do his storytelling for him that his movies blow.

[Mechamaniac]

No Verhoven

No ILM CGI

No Dina Meyer

No Denise Richards

Straight to video?

Nah.....I'll pass.

IMO, those are reasons TO buy it...

Is that moron Casper Van Dien in it?, jeebus what a dolt that guy is.

I think I'll just stick to the book.

[renegadeleader1]

Hey, at least we're not seeing...

umm....

Alright, so it's bad. I mean "Plan Nine From Outer Space" bad, but at least we can reveal in it's failure that there won't be a third one.

-NOS

And you thought going back to the hood was bad.

If that was true then we would have never gotten those many many wonderful universal soldiers direct to video sequels. which were oddly enough better than the last theater version with Van Damme (this sucks! )

[Myriad]

I rented it. It rates about the same as the first movie. The effects were about the same quality as the first movie. It was better then the Ep1 The Phantom Menace.

Oh.. This thread is not about Camera, Jackson or The Little Rascals. Stay on Topic!

Edited June 3, 2004 by Myriad

[Radd]

I rented it. It rates about the same as the first movie. The effects were about the same quality as the first movie. It was better then the Ep1 The Phantom Menace.

Oh.. This thread is not about Camera, Jackson or The Little Rascals. Stay on Topic!

Tsk, as much as Phantom Menace pales before any other Star Wars movie, I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first Starship Troopers movie. Of course, there are few movies I dislike nearly as much as Starship Troopers. I can only think of one movie I disliked more.

[MSW]

A lot of modern movies have been directed to a degree from the shadows by old SFX people and they are all weak because when push came to shove they relied on their fancy spaceships and dissapearing gnomes rather than their storytelling ability or their actor's skills.

JsARCLIGHT - I too, have on set experience for a wide variety of local TV commercials, as well as some experience in independant film production (gotta toot my silly "claim" to fame here...Catgirls was the original title, but Troma picked it up for distribution and it became Teenage Catgirls in Heat ....It's the only feature I've worked on, and will openly admit the experiece was great...even though the film wasn't, but it never really aimed to be either )

Anyway...I don't disagree with you exactly...however the above quoted statement seems a bit short sighted in terms of film history...films are obviously a collaberative medium, be it live-action or anime...only now in the last 40 years or so has the director been given the rather lavish (and ego boosting) attention as the film's "visionary" leader...previously that fell to the producer (which is why the Oscar for "best picture" is awarded to the producer)...the director has always been important, but in the olden days the effects artist typicaly were the directors of the shots they were responceable for working on...Ray Harryhausen often directed the actors in the shots he was to apply his special brand of effects work to...Matte painters like Albert Whitlock commanded attention shooting the plates for thier own work...this form of directing wasn't often even overseen by anyone other then the producer...the effects artist acting as director had control over the camera placement, the lighting, the actors, everthing that we attribute to what the director has command over (tha same held true for the stunt people concerning thier work)...What you are senseing today in modern films is actualy a carry over from days long past.

Of course on the other hand, in modern times when you are dealing with a director whom has to answer to a studio (with concerns over the findings of pre-release focus group viewings of the film)..you may end up with the people writeing the cheques demanding that the effects people produce only what they can be relied upon to do (produce more spaceship shots, etc...) and not entrusting the effects person enough to come up with something better...film after all, especialy in Hollywood, is a buisness first....

anyway...

In 1933 Willis O'Brian brought to life one of film's greatest larger than life characters...King Kong...this was a character that required no actor to bring to life, no lines of dialog to emote, and in the grander scheme of things concerning the films plot Kong need not show anything other then fierce violent anger...But O'Brian's animation of Kong, still to this day, displays a sense of character, a sense of compassion a sense of wonderment in his predicament, and even a sense of humanity far beyond much of the rest of the human actors in the film display - even though the part of Kong never required it...No, the animation isn't nearly as technicaly smooth as CG is today, no the effects arn't photo real...but those are technical issues we have had 70 years to improve upon...King Kong is great simply because of the character of Kong, because Willis O'Brian gave a rabbit fur covered puppet a sense of life far outside the part it was built to portray...and no Kong wasn't even the first time such stop-motion animation was ever used in a film...but King Kong is a film that stands as an ,at least noteworthy, achievement of an effects person haveing the directoral chops to make something beyond simple eye candy.

Edited June 3, 2004 by MSW

[GobotFool]

I rented it. It rates about the same as the first movie. The effects were about the same quality as the first movie. It was better then the Ep1 The Phantom Menace. 

Oh.. This thread is not about Camera, Jackson or The Little Rascals. Stay on Topic! 

Tsk, as much as Phantom Menace pales before any other Star Wars movie, I have to say I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the first Starship Troopers movie. Of course, there are few movies I dislike nearly as much as Starship Troopers. I can only think of one movie I disliked more.

Do tell what is that one other movie

[Radd]

I think it's called 'Shrunken Heads'. It's about these kids that get killed by a street gang, but they're brought back to life by the local comic book store owner who happens to be a voodoo priest or something, anyways, he brings them back as floating shrunken heads that bite people and turn them into clean-freak zombies.

This is the only movie I've seen that actually induces physical pain.

[Blaine23]

Cameron and Jackson are prime examples of this, they only do what they know and they fall back on effects to save them when their storytelling ability fails.

Your point is good, but it is also painting anybody who's ever worked in the line with a pretty wide brush, JSA. It's has its merits, but it isn't always true.

In the case of Peter Jackson, in particular - I would find his "inability" to direct actors and rely on special effects could have ever turned out a film as good as Heavenly Creatures.

And to be back on topic - Starship Troopers may suck, but can anyone tell me how my favorite lady from Nip/Tuck looks in it? She's almost always partially nude on that show... it says on the imdb that she plays Charlie Soda. Any luck on a shower scene?

She's also looking quite nice in Stuff magazine this month - Kelly Carlson.

Now if that's not a really nice way to get back on topic, nothing is.

[EXO]

In the case of Peter Jackson, in particular - I would find his "inability" to direct actors and rely on special effects could have ever turned out a film as good as Heavenly Creatures.

I don't really get that statement from anyone, not just you Blaine... I mean this is LOTR, what's he suppose to rely on? Sock puppets and cardboard castles?

Ok, back on topic... um... still haven't seen it....

Edit: Please direct all and any comments about directors in this new thread...

http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=8590

Edited June 3, 2004 by >EXO<

[Radd]

In the case of Peter Jackson, in particular - I would find his "inability" to direct actors and rely on special effects could have ever turned out a film as good as Heavenly Creatures.

I don't really get that statement from anyone, not just you Blaine... I mean this is LOTR, what's he suppose to rely on? Sock puppets and cardboard castles?

Ok, back on topic... um... still haven't seen it....

Edit: Please direct all and any comments about directors in this new thread...

http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=8590

I think he did an alright job for the most part, but there's a couple scenes, especially in the third movie, that were just flubbed. The part where Aragorn is raising the army of the dead was completely ruined, mainly due to needless rewriting. This is not a case of a scene that needed to be rewritten to have it make sense in a movie context, it was a case of turning a somber, awe inspiring scene and turning it into a flashy action scene with a couple of jokes thrown in.

The scene where the fleet arrives with it's undead passengers was ruined due to poor directing. Not just the actors, but the flow and the mood.

Overall, I disliked how the movie tended to take big, epic, roles of grandeur, put them to the side, and drop the spotlight on "comedic" dialogue and characters. I suspect Jackson had a lot to do with that.

I don't have any complaints about the acting, really. They all seemed to do a good job.

[Myriad]

http://www.trooperpx.com/AFS/AFS01.html

They are similiar to Madox.....

toys......

http://www.robozone.com/poweredsuits.htm

Edited June 4, 2004 by Myriad

[Wabbit]

More tacticaly wrong movies? I think the first movie had some flaws in military thinking, though I never been into service: Why using troopers to clear out a planet? Just drop nukes on it or carpetbomb it. They have the resources to build gigantic cruisers, but they don't have real weapons on it. Maybe I should call it gigantic troop carriers. And why did they have to fly in close formation with those behemoths?

Just make a Wing Commander movie again, this time a really good one please.