They Sucked His Brains Out!

I’ve just rewatched this movie with my girlfriend (who hates scifi) and she *loved* it. The effects, the cheesy dialogue, the outrageously fascist poppy advert breaks, the homogenous post-Hitler Youth preppies. And that’s where the “problem” with ST lies. Too many rabid libertarian Heinleinites wanted to see their book transferred 1-to-1 onto the screen as a great, dull, didactic vomitous mass, rather like Battlefield Earth. Instead, we get an ironic look at what a blind infatuation with militarism and neo-fascism leads to, in a cartoon society where fighting the enemies of your society has become the highest honour. The human trooops have been made deliberately ant-like and petty, running around as a teeming mass with their tiny stinging popguns. Why? They are expendable to the society that controls them. “100K dead in one hour” runs one of the funny advert segments in the movie. Well guess what, compared to human losses in WW1 this is chickenfeed. What’s important though, is obviously the paranoia and fear that these adverts instill in the general population… rather like the open-ended Justice Department “Threat Assessments” we get today. In ST, all those soldiers’ deaths provide merely a mechanism for the ascension of a new political leader, the “Sky Marshal”, in what is obviously an endless power struggle within the ranks of this future world’s leadership caste.