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I'm pretty sure this story, in novel and film both, is about the downfall of Alec Leamas, a talented and intelligent upper member of British Intelligence, almost certainly to be Chief one day, who is driven to despair and alcoholism by his own boss, Control, who sabotages Leamas' agents and networks by turning them over, one by one, to East German Intelligence, and then finagles a 'revenge mission' to eliminate Leamas, and discredit a talented and intelligent upper member of East German Intelligence, all to protect its head, Mundt, his own double agent behind the Iron Curtain, and also possibly to protect his own job and position. When Leamas, who has lost his job, his career, his pension, and his reputation, sits atop the wall and witnesses the death of Nan, he finally realizes she was the last thing in his life that hadn't yet been taken away. Control then took her away, too, since she could never be trusted to keep secret the things she now knew. Time to leave the party.
Fiedler was already on Death's door because he was Jewish, living in a system where anti-semitism thrives, now that the Nazis have been beaten. In the end, if it came to that, Fiedler was always going to be the one liquidated because he was Jewish and Mundt wasn't. If you look at the whole story, you can see that Fiedler and Leamas were both necessary sacrifices made to protect Control's REAL asset- the double agent Mundt.
In the book: grief and guilt over the General's death drives Mostyn to resign. In the film: Enderby knew Mostyn gave Smiley privileged information, and fired him for it.
Neither film fared well with critics, but they seemed to respond to the style of the film, with its satire, and tongue-in-cheek treatment of military intelligence, religion, and nudity in film, all elements of the original film, which is by far the best of the three.
The name is obviously a mashup of 'behemoth' and 'Quetzalcoatyl', and does seem to resemble a Lovecraft-type demon. It also resembles late-twentieth century fantasy/horror art, particularly that of 'Heavy Metal' magazine. I suspect one of the producers was a fan back in the day, and the film 'Heavy Metal' seems to still carry a heavy influence on the genre.
Why do the bugs, an extraterrestrial race, so closely resemble Earth insects? How did they create a monotheistic religion? How does their religion affect their day-to-day lives? There are a boatload of similar questions to be asked, but I don't think anyone's answering them soon.
As for turds, if they can't be polished, why is it so many people try? And try? And try?
I didn't hate Lola, but I thought they should have worked a little harder in the costuming department to make her look a little less like T'Pol from 'Star Trek: Enterprise'. I think it's an interesting concept to make a strong woman such as Lola into a Christian convert. Knowing this plot-point, I might have referenced older, classic films exploring faith, like 'Quo Vadis', 'The Robe' and 'Androcles And The Lion (which, adapted from a play by George Bernard Shaw, is satire)'. They might even have referenced 'Contact', a science-fiction film whose main protagonist is a strong-willed, stubborn scientist who undergoes several 'crises of faith' in the course of her dealings with extraterrestrials.
I don't think so. I didn't.
The characters are clearly analogous, but I don't think that this film, with its budget, could have afforded even Denise Richards.
Given that his demeanor at the beginning is all part of a byzantine plan to recruit Rico into the Marauder program, I understood his character change midway through. Also he is depicted as a 'true believer' in Earth's system, its military, and their strategy in the Arachnid Wars. I don't think you're supposed to think he's anything but a douchebag, but the phrase 'At least he's OUR douchebag' did occur to me while watching the film. Yes, he could have been killed and declared a martyr, but they tried that with the second film and it failed to move audiences. My feeling is he was a kind of analogue character to Carl Jenkins (played by Neil Patrick Harris in the first film), as Blalock with her photogenic torso seems to be analogous to Carmen Ibanez (played by Denise Richards), and that the whole point of the ending of 'Marauders' was for our original group of friends to live 'happy ever after'. This is satire, after all.
It was a poor film, hampered by a low budget, a meandering, poorly-developed storyline, and a poor cast. So it is easy to hate, especially if one is particularly nostalgic about the first film. Personally I feel Casper Van Dien did a good job reprising his role as Johnny Rico, and though Jolene Blalock is, perhaps unnecessarily distracting, her ending performance echoed the wide-eyed, silly, hyper-patriotic style of the conclusion of the first film.
The film is a satire of religion being marginalized from, and then co-opted into, a military autocracy. That was the purpose of the film. That's what it's doing there. The degree to which it succeeded is, I suppose, a measure of its success. It did not do so well, and several anti-war films have already presented the exploitation of religion in war, though with far greater subtlety than this. Blame the writers if you must, but this really has little to do with going to hell, or concepts of what is, or is not, appropriate in film.
There are many ideas being presented here, particularly the revelation that Earth is simply using its trooper resources as cannon-fodder to maintain an endless state of war, thus conflict, thus the use of an increasingly autocratic military-controlled government; though this strategy is suggested as a losing one in the first film, continuing it may nevertheless be seen as anti-military satire. No war was won in the first film; Earth forces merely earned a breakthrough insight into Klendathu tactics and organization; the ending of that film is clearly pro-government propaganda presented as an Earth triumph. Earth weapons actually DO seem to be more destructive to the Klendathu in 'Marauder', forcing the enemy to adapt by producing exploding soldiers. The war appears to be fought on only a few localized planets and planetary systems, suggesting it is hardly the existential conflict Earth forces claim it to be. Somehow I don't think this film series was meant to be a realistic military film series, nor do I think it was meant to be taken as seriously as you somehow seem to have taken it. To be fair, the third film suffers from a low budget, and visual effects of its day that are simply not comparable to the first film in its day.
Not so fictional. This happens all over the world in countries where an authoritarian or totalitarian regime has taken over. In the United States extreme-right-wing politicians are presently speaking about what crimes they would consider 'treason', in order to seek the death penalty against perceived domestic enemies. In Iran and Turkey, speaking out against the current government merits beatings, imprisonment, and whatever else these governments think they can get away with, including assassination and extrajudicial murder. Robert Heinlein's original premise was that in the absence of a unifying force from the left, a unifying force from the right would seize power globally the way the Nazi party did in pre-WWII Germany, suspending individual rights under the pretext of an 'emergency' and then dispensing political power as a transactional meritocracy. We have seen how former President Donald Trump demanded absolute loyalty from his supporters, as a transactional act with appointments and promotions as the return. This is identical to the meritocratic world presented in 'Starship Troopers'. 'Thoughtcrime', the act of forming or carrying thoughts that are opposed to the doctrine of the party in power, is a key plot point of Orwell's '1984', and the ability of governments to legislate what their people may or may not think, is commonly considered at odds with any form of democracy.
The premises for this film are difficult to reason out because they are contradictory. We are told humanity faces fatally declining population, yet the real crisis seems to be depletion of resources, namely food, that are stressing human populations. Large, seemingly nomadic populations of the unemployed and disenfranchised engage in acts of social protest over the proliferation of robotic labour, yet seem well-fed, clothed, and able to support an entertainment industry that coddles their persecution complex by destroying obsolete robots before their eyes that nobody wants anymore, anyways. A mere two thousand years later humanity is extinct, apparently having failed to survive a global glaciation, ostensibly brought on by precipitous, sudden climate change. Whether the acceptance of intelligent robots into human society caused a plunge in human birthrates, or an environmental catastrophe destroyed humanity's eco-niche on Earth, or if present-day humans simply lost the will to live and reproduce, is not stated. We merely have the say-so of a group of apparently intelligent machine-beings who, like ourselves (the audience), assume they are the descendants of early human-engineered AI; Yet, their own records are fragmentary and they therefore cannot verify this, nor do they wish to entertain the possibility that perhaps they themselves are the real descendants of humanity, having evolved during the glaciation and ultimately replaced the earlier model. Is AI a parable about unconditional love as computer programming, or is it a forecast of the next stage of human evolution, beginning with the catalyst of emotional robots? It seems safe, eons later,
to consider Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, and perhaps even earlier hominids to be our ancestors, but I'm pretty sure none of us really wants them around, nor would they have much of a place in our present society. Clearly these questions have no definitive answers, which is kind of how Kubrick worked.
Louis is an anarchist who despises the government bodies that help and fund both parties. His actions may seem irresponsible and unduly emotional, but it fits his character and expands the obvious conflicts between Papa and his children (Remember how Papa upbraids them both in the presence of Avner). The plot device, however, is pure Spielbergian fantasy, in order to create a scene where both parties express their wishes.
Well, they are the creations of the 'Visitor' mythos, whether you adhere to such things or no. You'd probably move like you were made of Plasticine, after whizzing around Venus a few times with some scared Swabbos and an annoying kid. Sorry. 'Alien' came out two years later, and 'Close Encounters' clearly isn't that kind of film.
Well, your opinions are held by nearly nobody, so it's pointless to say it's overrated. The film is praised even more today than 40 years ago, and represents its period in the development of the Director probably better than almost all Spielberg films since. The effects are still impressive today, and better-utilized than 'Star Wars', which, in 1977, pushed film effects to their limits. Your being 'bored to tears' by the relentless, pounding pace of action of this film says more about your attention span than it does about this film- or are we confusing this with '2001: A Space Odyssey' now'? Because that was quite a different film, and didn't benefit from a John Williams score. In 1977 Spielberg was still riding high on the success of the more down-to-earth 'Jaws', a totally realistic genre film about a rampaging 20-foot long killer fish feasting on quaint maritimers and their kids. The rubber shark looked so bad footage of it was edited down to the point of a metaphor, a fin accompanied by Williams' deathless ostenato figure (once again, the Williams score). Yet Spielberg decided to do his 'Great Sci-Fi' film, an hommage to films he grew up with, like 'The Day The Earth Stood Still', and 'This Island Earth' (had to throw that one in). The film, with its barely-up-to-the-struggle Everyman, this time squaring off against a giant shadow cruelly projecting itself over the countryside outside Muncie, Indiana, scooping up annoying kids as it goes, was a critical and financial success, and I bet if you ask the director, it's STILL on his resume. Definitely not one of his worst movies, that honor belongs to '1941', the film that turned World War II into a screwball comedy... just don't confuse that comedy about WWII with all the hundreds of other films that belong to this genre... they're all in black-and-white, so they're easy to differentiate... unless you're color-blind. It's not wrong to dislike a movie. But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with it.
Women had such hairstyles in the 60s and 70s, believe it or not; go ahead and Google it. They took about half a can of hairspray each morning and look a hell of a lot more complicated than they actually are. Women prided themselves on these hairdos, and often skipped washing for several days so they didn't have to start from square one. Is it any wonder dandruff-control shampoos came into their own then? My own mother had a similar hairstyle during that period, and every afternoon when I came home from school I could smell aerosol and lacquer coming from the Master bedroom. The good news is she's not gone long, by her time. By ours, well.... sorry.
As the director seems to be re-litigating and re-litigating his own parents' breakup it's difficult to say. Roy was damaged from the start, which was probably why the aliens picked him. Does that make him a bad father? Depends on whether or not the aliens finally figure out Relativity, or devise a similarly sentimental attitude to parenting as Homo Sapiens on planet Earth. Is Terri Garr supposed to be a bad wife? Probably not, but in a scared child's mind such mothers bear at least a part share in the breakup of their marriages. Is this fair? Ask the director.