Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

-After watching Starship Troopers at the early part of this summer, I realized that the film is not just a sci-fi, action blockbuster about future-soldiers kicking alien-bug ass (the first time I saw it I was like 12… gimme a break). Instead, I noticed that the film is blatantly a work of pacifist-propaganda.
-I was originally going to write something about that, but now that I’ve watched the most recent installment of the greatest film series ever (second only to the Predator series) I’ve decided to merge that idea into this.
-If you’re unfamiliar with Starship Troopers you… No. I’m not gonna do that this time. I know you know what Starship Troopers is, and I know you at least loved it for part of your life (and I know that when you played StarCraft you always did Terran VS Zerg to replay the movie, but the computer would make crazy units like Mutalisks and Ultralisks and Queens that aren’t in the movie and it pissed you off because all you had were marines because in Starship Troopers the only vehicles they use are dropships, but instead of spending the money on building a gas refinery you just built more marines and became grossly outnumbered and you stopped playing StarCraft).
-But even if you’ve read the original novel, you’re probably familiar with how bad of a wrap the first movie got (the second one was straight-to-TV. This one is straight-to-Internet). People slapped it with pro-fascist and pro-military reviews that really don’t make sense. The story is a simple tale of a gullible boy being corrupted by his dystopic society and eventually becomes a black-clothed, bloodthirsty killing machine. Kinda like Anakin Skywalker.
-If you need a little revamp of the plot it goes like this: Johnny Rico is a high school senior who definitely isn’t played by an 18 year-old who goes against his parents and enlists in the army like everybody else in his class to be “cool” but then the bugs blow up the city he’s from and a war officially starts and Johnny Rico’s all pissed because his parents are dead and he stops at nothing to kill all the bugs thus making him shine in the eyes of his commanding officer which eventually leads to him replacing his commanding officer and becoming just as much of a hardass until, like some messed-up butterfly, he emerges from his cocoon as a lean-cut, no smiles, army-man. It should also be noted that the reason the bugs attacked in the first place is because the humans were being bitches and colonizing their planets – which, unsurprisingly, the human characters ignore.
-So with all that in mind I’ve started to question why American culture right now doesn’t have a rebirth of Starship Trooper fever? What do DC and Marvel comic heroes have to offer us as an escape from the daily news of more soldiers dying in a war that’s lasted too long? Why are dangerous tomatoes making more headlines than trillions of dollars fueling a failed attempt to reap “justice”? Starship Troopers is an exact parallel of this war: The humans get into it through questionable means, which results in all aspects of life (even baby-making) going towards the war effort, and they aren’t even winning the war- instead, relying on ingenious propaganda campaigns like commercials, songs, and video games to maintain national morale.
-Could you find any work of campy action blockbuster that is more of a parallel to today’s society?
-However, the first Starship Troopers movie is just a dystopic future sci-fi flic, and it’s very easy to parallel USA of 2008 to a dystopic future sci-fi flic (you see the phones people have now? We’re totally in the future!). But now there are two more Starship Trooper movies, both of which were made after this war started. The second one was not a typical Starship Trooper thing, but much more of a suspense horror and was actually a really entertaining film so I’m not gonna talk about it anymore. But this third one, Marauder, starts off with the exact same feel as the first film, along with some horribly blatant political commentary.
-It opens with the whole TV-commercial-propaganda thingy that make Starship Troopers and Robocop hilarious. But this time, the thing’s humor is so intensely dark it becomes a black hole that pulls you right up to the computer screen and you’re instantly reminded of checking Google News and seeing headlines of “War in Iraq: Have Our Troops Had Enough?” “Who’s Winning This War?” “So-and-so Famous-Person Says This-And-That About Middle East.” “AFGHANASTAN IRAN GRA!!!”
-Next, the film quickly fills in background (as all good action movies do) showing the audience that speaking out against the war results in you getting hung, and that our main characters will be on a small military base on some backwater planet fighting to help out the farmers who live on the planet, but who hate the soldiers because they blame the war on them.
-Obviously, hanging: Saddam. Farmers: civilians: fed up with the war: typical American audience member.
-After some bug killing, characters begin to get diversified in a sky marshal who faints at the sight of a dead soldier, but has a hit song called, “It’s a Good Day To Die,” and a veteran who is now leading anti-war protests. Leading officers are constantly making hubris-filled calls that lead their underlings into ridiculous amounts of peril and as usual, war is displayed as painful and unfair. The aspect of extreme religious beliefs and if soldiers should follow their own god or their superiors is a running theme.
-So why was this movie released straight to the Internet? Are we, as a society, so fed up with the war and being sad about how bad life is that we’ll ignore something that could open our eyes to our society’s blatant hypocrisy? If the majority of US citizens are fed up with Iraq, why are we still fueling the civil war? Why are we still causing bad emotions in Iran and Afghanistan and Palestine and Korea and almost everywhere but Antarctica (oh wait- pollution. Nevermind).
-Out anti-war anger fizzled out a long time ago. There are no more ‘boo-hoo war is bad’ movies and the ‘up and down the street not across the sidewalk music’ is being replaced by snap rap, nerdcore, and hair metal. So is it just that people are so tired of war-related-things that we’re now content to ignore reality?
-Eh… Or it’s just a fast-paced action flic hoping to feed off American adrenaline and make a few bucks.

~Teck~

PS- one of the main character’s name is Dicks. Seriously.
PPS- Slamball’s coming back. Start’s airing in August.

Kobayashi! Ready for Retirement!?

~I think he is. He’s just wearing contacts.~


-Apparently, the great Japanese hot dog eater, Takeru Kobayashi, has come in second in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest for a second year in a row!

-Now, if you don’t know who Takeru Kobayashi is, that’s totally okay. You either don’t watch MTV, don’t follow competitive eating, nor are you aware of US-Japanese popular culture. But that’s cool! I’ll fill in some of the information for you:

-After surfacing from the depths of some hidden, jungle-ninja-village in Hokkaido, Kobayashi dropped jaws with his double-stuff-eat-jutsu (no joke. He breaks the hotdogs in half and sticks both cylinders into his mouth at the same time), and “Kobayashi Shake” techniques (seriously, that’s what his move to actually get the hot dogs from his mouth to his stomach is called. In other words, he has a NAME for the action of swallowing).

-In his first US contest he dominated by eating 50 hotdogs in 12 minutes. The previous record was 25. From there, Kobayashi’s life turned into one not too unlike that of Ryu from the Street Fighter series. Great eaters from all over the world began traveling on the backs of bears (Russians), sharks (Atlanteans), and slave-children (Chinese) to compete in Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest and test their esophagus’, and gag reflexes against the Sausage Tsunami.

-Although Kobayashi was able to rely on his stomach-expansion-jutsu for the first few years, the onslaught of international eaters pushed the young vacuum cleaner to begin training. He started eating massively huge meals and weight training (think Goku’s style of training but without the energy blasts) to increase the amount of calories his body could take and make sure that his fat cells didn’t store it or something… I don’t really know biology. Anyways, his training worked and he dominated in a five-year reign from 2001 to 2006 as The World’s Strongest.

-But that all came to an end when milk-guzzler Joey Chestnut slammed down 66 hot dogs in 2007. Before the competition Kobayashi had been experiencing somewhat unexplained “jaw problems.” After loosing his first sausage swallowing competition since sausages were first created (yes, he was alive then), there were rumors of the Tsunami going into surgery.

-Luckily for Kobayashi’s face, no scalpels were inserted and the Kobs continued scarfing down massive amounts of whoknows what kinds of foods.

-And now he has lost again. The contest was brought down to 10 minutes, and it seems like they used a different kind of hotdog. He tied with milk-guzzler Chestnut at 59 sausages, but then lost in a 5 hot dog tiebreaker.

-Does this mean the dynasty of Kobayashi is over? I think so. It probably has something to do wit those strange “jaw problems” from 2007 but it’s looking like the World’s Strongest is simply past his prime.

~TECK~

PS- The only being in the universe that has been recorded to legitimately kick Kobayashi’s ass, however, is a 1,089 pound Kodiak bear, on the amazing show, “Man vs Beast”.