TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK: Starship Troopers and Destination Moon

Splendid review once again. Starship Twoopers is teh gay.

Like a lot of 'straight' science fiction movies Destination Moon (and to a lesser extent 2001) suffers from the lack of a dramatic story, substituting in its stead gee-whiz enthusiasm for rockets and future technology. A good science fiction film is a good film first - the SF aspect has to be integrated seamlessly, without dragging on the story. Although it's comedy, Galaxy Quest achieves this in spades.

Splendid review once again. Starship Twoopers is teh gay.

Like a lot of 'straight' science fiction movies Destination Moon (and to a lesser extent 2001) suffers from the lack of a dramatic story, substituting in its stead gee-whiz enthusiasm for rockets and future technology. A good science fiction film is a good film first - the SF aspect has to be integrated seamlessly, without dragging on the story. Although it's comedy, Galaxy Quest achieves this in spades.

I can't say that this made me want to go get a copy of Destination Moon. I wonder if it was as dull when it was first released? Our expectations have changed quite a bit and people are expected to fill in a great deal of information between scenes and shots. I find most older movies unbearably slow and this one may have been made even slower on the assumption that the audience wouldn't have a frame of reference to explain anything that wasn't panned over, slowly. Yes, I will admit it. I'm not a classic movie fan. Not nearly.

I recall only being somewhat disappointed in Starship Troopers, which is undoubtedly because I didn't remember the book well enough to compare it. The sad thing is that the commentary on citizenship (which isn't even necessarily that we ought to do it that way, but maybe we ought to appreciate the responsibilities of citizenship more) could have been included without doing any sort of violence to the action plot.

Have you read Darkship Thieves by Sarah Hoyt? She presents it as a homage of sorts to Heinlein. I've considered trying to do a fan-adaptation of it, just for practice. It wouldn't be easy, of course. A novel doesn't really *fit* in the space of a movie.

Leave it to Hollywood to take a novel that has been a Science Fiction classic for over 50 years, and then decide they need to 'improve' on it. Starship Troopers is one of the best science fiction novels of the 20th century, and one of the WORST movies. My only hope is that someone will decide to make a new, decent version of it. The first Hulk movie was terrible. The second one was pretty good. If anyone does decide to remake Starship Troopers, read the damn novel, and base the movie on the novel. Take what Verhoven did, and do the opposite. You'll make a zillion dollars, for sure.

The genius store called, they're rnunnig out of you.

Aurora Looks good. The greatest challenge is to craft a crisis that does not make the planners look like fools. Every movie with a space ship in it seems to the same basic flaw. To create a ship board crisis they invariably leave something out in the design that to me as a former participant in the Artemus Moon Project sees as just plain obvious. The british series Outcasts was particularly bad in that case. BBC Space Odyssey had some of the same flaws. Terranova is another case where you can see dozens of solutions not pursued to keep the plot dynamic.
Auroras great challenge will be to deal with this temptation. Star ship troopers did the same by playing around with the idea of live fire training. As well as underarming its troops; something the book does not do.

I like the CGI model of Aurora. It intregues me however how they might shield the habs on the end of the spinning arms. That's one of the great challenges out near Jupiter as you've noted; heavy radiation.
I'm a little bias however I have my own artificial gravity design. Its the first one that would work on both aurora and all the solarsystems moons. http://bit.ly/BankedTrackGravity
I hope to be able to help out.