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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9446627" data-attributes="member: 18">It isn't very clever, but nothing Verhoeven did was clever, that's part of his whole deal! Robocop isn't clever either, but it is pretty biting. His satirical movies are extremely obvious and straightforward, yet still a large proportion of the audience misses some or all of the joke/commentary, and takes it literally. Starship Troopers was particularly effective for that - for all the revisionist "Oh I always knew it was satire!" stuff, it's very clear a lot of people at the time did not know that (even one of my friends who went to it with me when it was in cinemas came out and was asking "That's meant to be satire, right?" because he wasn't sure - he also felt that, even if it was, it was perhaps too close to the real thing because some people would just buy into it - I think he was proven right on that), and still some people coming to it now, even having been told it's satire, often misidentify the satirical elements, or assume parts that are "obviously" satire/commentary are being played straight. I think part of the latter issue is because fewer and fewer people below about 40 ever saw any kind of "basically propaganda" 1940s/1950s war movies, let alone actual propaganda movies from WW2 itself, so have no reference point for some of this stuff.The book is just a mess on every possible level, which is solely remembered because olds want to try and argue it's not "fascist"* and because it has the first real power armour in it. It barely has a plot, has terrible pacing, non-existent characterisation, awful and excessive exposition, and the writing doesn't even flow well! Worse, it tries really hard to present this deeply macho (bordering directly on masochistic), really clueless "philosophy", which is completely incoherent and contradictory, and the justifications and excuses for it are so full of holes that Heinlein much later wrote a massive retcon to it (in a book about his books) which just directly contradicts what is in the book further.* = This is always very funny because such arguments only serve to illustrate the horror and inconsistency of the setting.Would definitely concur, but Interview and Lestat will always be important to me because having read and appreciated them was a great way to get smart, arty/nerdy girls talking to you in 1994! I think it even helped with my wife who I met in 2003!Also the sheer level of influence of Vampire Chronicles concepts on vampire lore in books, RPGs, and films over the following decades absolutely cannot be overstated, and often involved concepts from the later, less-good books as well as Interview and Lestat.</blockquote>

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