The Antichristian Phenomenon

This past weekend, Cleric and I decided to relax and watch a couple movies… something fun, maybe kind of bad, with lots of explosions.  We’re both Sci-fi buffs, as was his friend D., who was over, so we decided to whip out the Starship Troopers Trilogy.  The first one was great; the second was a botched attempt at making the series into horror, and the third… a catastrophe—acting, lips, and special effects aside.

When religion and cinema mix, it must be a tasteful blend, or one risks alienating part of the intended audience.  It is clear that there was a distinct purpose for mixing religion into SSTIII, but it was done so distastefully that I felt the need to get up several times to get more popsicles.  Not that I was particularly hungry, or too warm, I just couldn’t stand what I was seeing… and I sat through Expelled.  What went wrong?  Lets start from the top. **Severe Spoilers ahead.  Not like you’d actually want to watch anyway, but if you do for some bizarre reason, watch before reading.**

For those unfamiliar with the premise, basically there’s some sort of space war between “bugs” and humans.  The “bugs” are just that; cool insectoid special-effects creatures that impale infantry and bite them in half.  Humans encountered this hostile species while colonizing the galaxy, and now there must be a species-wide war effort to keep them from destroying the human race.  This is based on a book, but admittedly, I have not read it yet.

In the first movie, we have a group of friends who go into the service, beat up bugs, have relationship issues, rescue each other, and ultimately capture a “brain bug”; one that is intelligent and can communicate telepathically.  The humans contain the creature to use for special intelligence and the main characters are hailed as heroes.  The second movie has nothing to do with either of the other movies so I won’t waste my time with that.

The third movie starts out on a planet where we have a compound where the main character, Rico, from the first movie is in command.  The bugs are kept out by a sort of bug-zapper fence while the humans inside dig trenches and do war-type-things with plastic guns.  A ship carrying the Sky Marshall and several friends of Rico lands in the compound.  The Sky Marshall (SM) is some sort of pop star in conjunction with the leader of their society, and Rico’s friends are a Ship Captain, Lola Beck, and General Dix Hauser.  They have a bit of falling out, then the power flips off and the bugs start pouring in.  So far so good, right?  There are some decent special effects as the infantry is mutilated and Lola Beck and SM escape.  After the massacre, Rico is blamed for the problem and is scheduled to be executed for punching the Dix in the face.  That’s when the “good” part of the movie is over.

Lola Beck’s ship crashes on a bug planet.  In the middle of the desert.  Only five or six crew members are alive, and she can’t get a distress call out. Her call is actually being blocked by the current second-in-command, Admiral Enolo Phid.  Dix finds out about this, stops Rico’s execution, and has him and a crew suit up to go rescue them with mechs, then that plotline disappears for close to an hour as we watch Beck and the SM wander around the desert.  First annoyance, there’s this blonde chick who was a flight attendant as a survivor who is super-religious.  As they’re trying to figure out what to do outside their escape pod, she starts praying.  Beck more or less tells her to shut up because she’s being annoying, then gets assaulted by the SM telling her that she should allow blondie-flight-attendant to believe.  Her reply was more or less along the lines of “I don’t care what she believes, as long as she keeps it to herself”.  The Flight Attendant continues to be obnoxious, until the SM takes her by the hand and tells her that he’s religious too.  It starts to get all warm and fuzzy, “OOH you believe too, I had no idea, Oh that’s so wonderful” <3 <3

Then Beck grabs guns and tells everyone to start walking so they can make it to an old base 100 “clicks” away and be safe.  No one is happy about this, and everyone’s pissed at Beck, who begins to take on the stereotypical village-atheist role.  While they’re walking, the Flight Attendant begins singing Jesus-songs and pissing the hell out of both Beck and us viewers.  Beck expresses her frustration again and is shot down by the SM, who fully supports the idea and begins preaching/flirting with the fight attendant for the rest of the walk, or at least until they’re attacked by bugs and forced to run, then some people die and the rest of the party gets MORE angry with Beck.  Atheists are all assholes who ruin all the theist’s fun and happiness, after all, so she’s got to fit that bill.  Now, its dinner time.

As everyone sits around the fire (how did they make it in the desert…?) with their cans of rations, flight attendant suggests that they all pray before the meal.  SM thinks this is a great idea, and Beck snorts and heads off to “patrol the perimeter.”  After we get to hear their entire prayer, they begin talking over dinner.  First of all, where are the ‘Mechs!  We’ve been told they were coming, and this is getting absurd.  Second, for a bug planet, they certainly get a lot of chances to chit chat about religion and not a lot of chances to be swarmed and die.  And third, their dinner discussion revolves around… religion.  They go around in a circle, asking whether or not the other members of the party are “believers.”  The last marine left, who’s obviously got a crush on the flight attendant, says he’d like to be one, at which she gets all happy and they flirt a bunch, then she tells him they can get married “only in a church”.  The last one is the doctor-scientist type who’s been on Becks’ side this whole time.  As it approaches his turn, it cuts to Beck eating her food alone and cold on the hill (because atheists have no friends and hate religious people), then she senses some sort of danger.  As she becomes clearly unnerved and starts heading back to camp, it cuts back to the doctor saying “I believe in YOU, Sky Marshall,” clearly avoiding stating his view openly, and the earth cracks open under his feet.  He falls down and dies, and they all get moving because of the earthquake, which is actually a huge bug, which you see when the SM looks down the crevasse.

After the death of the doctor, Beck recites a few common Atheist stock lines: “Where is your God now?” (He’s always there blah blah bah) “How do you know he’s listening?” (we believe!!1!!1 <3 <3) etc.  I’ll go on about Beck’s character later, but at this point it cuts to the Admiral Enolo Phid and Dix, who have found out something disturbing.  While it is obvious the religion being toted overall is Christianity, the SM actually has been communing with the bugs through the brain bug caught in the first movie and regards some great bug as “god”.  They kill the brain bug and go about their business.  Rico is almost ready to go off with his Mechs, FINALLY, and we’re almost done with the movie.

Now we’re back with the religious nuts walking around the desert, one of several biblical allusions present in the movie, including Rico in the middle of two other criminals at his execution, then “coming back from the dead”… I wonder what THAT’S alluding to… They finally reach the safe base, and the SM gets all happy that they’ll soon get to meet with the one true god –Behemecoatyl!  Eh, what?  Flight Attendant girl freaks out because he’s talking about the “wrong God”, and they descend towards the base, all disturbed.  Soon after, they’re attacked by spiky legs that come out of the ground and kill the marine guy.  SM gets excited because this is Behemecoatyl (Brain of Brains), and they’re going to work out some sort of peace treaty, or so he thinks.  The massive bug suspends the three dead people so they can speak for him and he “communes with” (read as: eats) the SM, then the two women are surrounded by bugs!  Oh no, it seems there’s no escape, so the Flight Attendant gets to her knees and starts reciting Our Father, and Beck gets frustrated at her for praying instead of doing something useful.  In explanation, the Flight Attendant gets teary-eyed and desperate; “When you’ve got nothing left, God is all you have, you must pray blah blah blah O GOD SEND US ANGELS WITH YOUR FIREEEE”.  At this moment, the Mech team FINALLY gets their act together and rocket down to the planet, the light from their suits forming a sort of halo around Flight Attendant’s head.  Beck has a miraculous conversion when she sees this and gets down on her knees to recite the Our Father with the Flight Attendant while the ‘Mechs lay waste to the bugs for about… 20 seconds, or at least as long as it took to say the prayer.  Aaaand that’s it for the ass-kicking robot suits, which the movie was titled for.  20 seconds of bullets to the tune of Our Father as recited by a recently converted atheist.  Time for another popsicle.

Now everything is happy-ending; the planet gets blown up, Beck and Dix get married in a church, and Admiral Enolo Phid converts to Christianity and makes it the official religion of the Federation.  Part of the closing “commercial” states: “Across the federation, federation experts agree that: A: God exists, B: He’s on our side, C: He wants us to win.”
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So that’s the synopsis.  About half an hour total of bug smashing, and the rest was religious garbage and wandering aimlessly in a desert.  This movie could have kept the same overall plot, and been awesome if it had more mechs and less praying.  And I heard a rumor that the religious half was supposed to be satire!  Where did it fail?

First, there was an underlying purpose for including religion, but it was largely masked by the preachy-ness of characters and the stereotyping.  This was essentially the theme that religion can be a powerful driving force behind war when it turns to zealotry and fanaticism can be used by leaders to control their subjects.  However, if you missed a key sentence in dialogue throughout the course of the movie, you would miss this theme.

When Dix and Phid are with the Brain Bug, Phid shows Dix the video of the Sky Marshall “communing” with the it/god.  Phid makes a few brief comments about the single-minded determination of the bugs as a result of their hive mind; akin to the religion the SM was now infected with.  She mumbles under her breath: “We should consider getting some of that.”  If you miss that single sentence, you miss the entire satirical theme, and the commercial at the end and Phid’s “conversion” of the state makes no sense, especially in light of her discouraging faith in the beginning.  If you miss this SINGLE SENTENCE, the intended “satire” falls flat.

I have seen this theme in a number of books and movies carried out effectively, and in a way that it did not alienate an irreligious audience or a religious one.  Lets face it, when Beck gets on her knees with the Flight Attendant, the movie is just OVER for most of us, and the religious viewers were probably repulsed at having their religion portrayed inadequately by a giggling, flirty blonde flight attendant.  But ultimately, one of the largest problems with the whole setup is the use of Christianity as the religion of choice.  Had the writers just made up a religion, much of it might have been admissible and the overall statement about religion and war might have been easier to discern, and the satire might have shown through.  Instead what I heard was a lot of preaching with nothing but a failed stereotypical “atheist” to counter it, and one sentence explaining the purpose of the whole charade.  Sometimes satire fails, and this is one of those cases.

We’re also looking at a case where character stereotypes were supposed to help carry the satire, specifically through the rational doctor, militant atheist Beck, fanatic zealot SM, blind believer Flight Attendant, and the scheming Admiral Phid.  All of the stereotypes were overdone in a way to be frustrating and unbelievable, and insulting to those who they were supposed to represent.  I can’t speak for the Christian end, but the depiction of non-believers was incredibly poor, specifically Beck.  The doctor was a much more reasonable example, but he died too early to state much more than the fact he did not believe the SM was fit for duty with his state of fanaticism.  He also found ways to work around the absurd religious nature of his group while remaining neutral, but the irreligious had to either die or convert to hold the premise, and his fate was death.

Beck on the other hand, embodied every false atheist stereotype the Christians have came up with.  She hated, HATED the religious, she asked questions that no sensible atheist would waste breath on, but that Christians think we wonder about (“Why do you pray?”), and found every moment to insult the Flight Attendant (“Where is your god now?”).  She also fell into the No-Atheists-in-Foxholes assumption, as the going got rough, she broke, and at the same time fit the cliché that atheists are not *really* atheists and will turn to God in times of need.  She was also an asshole, pushy, and overly pragmatic.  There was no real irreligious character to act as a foil, and the closest thing was Beck.  This completely alienates the entire irreligious audience—even those of us who were aware beforehand or caught on that the movie was supposed to be satire.

There are highly effective ways to pull of satire.  There are also highly ineffective ways.  SSTIII ranks highly among the most ineffective satires I have ever experienced.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Culture, Religion, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.