As for The Phantom Menace, and all the Prequels, yeah the casting stunk. Every time I see Samuel-motherfreaking-Jackson as Windu I weep inside, just a little. The films are just flat and matte all over, they have no bright or dark points, just a grey uniform mass. Talk about CGI crapitude. The dialog is alternatively endlessly expositionary or falsely sentimental. Pointless and annoying crowd-pleasing moments and character cameos. Ridiculous antic characters like Jar Jar. The plot of the second and third is like a Star Wars shopping list. Anakin, just slightly roasted, check , Palpatine, just force ravaged enough for continuity.Old republic swept away, check, check.
So many great designers worked on it, but this might a case of too many cooks in the kitchen when it needed a single solid vision. Too many dumb designs got in. Lucas should have stayed in the boardroom to administer his Empire instead of trying to take the directorial helm again. The fans are now the owners of the Star Wars universe.

Robert Heinlein wrote what was arguably the best science fiction novel ever

(maybe next to “Ender’s Game” which failed to pass Hollywood pre-production because Orson Scott Card wanted them casting less white kids and actually making it “a globally accurate representation of race” , he also wanted Ender to be Hispanic, which he was in the book…. so the studio bailed… nice huh?).

The “Starship Troopers” novel opens with what could have been the most epic sequence in science fiction film history – power armor equipped space marines being fired out of a mother ship in individual capsules and skydiving through a barrage of shrapnel (why they are called capsule-troopers or “cap-troopers”, which they called them in the movie for some reason) and then fighting their way through a hoard of (intelligent) aliens, with well described bad-ass high tech (still to this day) weapons and techniques.. The whole book is packed with unmatched page turning badassness… And no soap opera love triangle crap (Dizzy is a dude, and he dies on page 8 while Ace and Rico have to carry him in his 2 ton armor to the drop ship before the ship takes off and they get left behind)… The notion that the only reason the military wants them to return is because of the price of their armor… the whole book is just… well… in brings a tear to this geek’s eye to think of what might have been (if the director had ever even read the book, which he said he didn’t because he “didn’t want it to interfere with his creative choices”… hmmm….. go Paul V…)

Honestly, if you are a true geek, and like the movie, just read the book, and I promise you will see it (although entertaining) as a massively missed opportunity to make one of the most epic effects supported Sci-Fi movie of our generation (since Star Wars of course).

Anyway, way to stick to your guns.

http://www.digitalmonkeybox.com/dune.htm

No horses though.

I think the main reason it spoke to me is that the movie is what would result if Verhoeven saw me as a boy pitting my GI Joes against giant freakin bugs, and decided to make a live-action movie of it. Although somehow he forgot that it was supposed to be a three-way confrontation with my Transformers too.