Starship Troopers was on last night and something interesting occured to me.
I really like what Verhoven did with this movie even though it is not very faithful to the source material [and I like the source material, it's not the Moon is a Harsh Mistress but it's good stuff] what with the overall sarcastic tone and the fascist portrayal of the military/government. [There were various other significant changes which amounted to dilutions of the value of the novel - cf. the Mobile Infantry of the book inspired things like Robotech, the MI of the movie were much more traditional foot soldiers - but that's not my main concern at the moment.]
See, I have ranted before on how I have no desire to see Minority Report again because of how much of a perversion of the source material it is [this isn't part of it but I find it hilarious that there was not actually a "minority report" in the film.] But it looks I can't really say that my problem with Spielberg's movie isn't that he doesn't respect the source.
Following a tangent, I generally don't like movies based on books I've read; for example I was only mildly pleased with Cider House Rules, which is my favorite Irving novel. [Irving wrote that the amount of time he spent on getting that movie made the way he wanted it was about the same amount of time he spends writing a novel. To me (of course, whatever, it's his time) I'd much rather have had another novel (well, not The Fourth Hand, but....); to me it's not a reasonable application of resources. It'll be like August 11th at the Marquee, Built to Spill are likely to play their extended cover of Cortez the Killer and sure, it's a great song, but I'd much rather hear Distopian Dream Girl, Time Trap, Untrustable or Big Dipper - or, really, all four of them since it would take the same amount of time.]
At any rate, what I realized is that I prefer Dick's The Minority Report to Spielberg's Minority Report because I prefer a 10 page bit of imaginative and original writing on determinism to a visiually stunning two hour movie on the beauty of Tom Cruise and free will.
