Yeah but that would require them to pay attention to the story and reflect on it so they understand the consequences. For a lot of people, they never make those connections, and anything on the screen being depicted is also being encouraged and glorified in their minds.
People think Heinlein was 110% onboard with the society he was writing about, yet he wrote many other novels where the protagonists fought back against authoritarianism and/or were communist economically. Beyond this Horizon, for example. Or “If this goes on-”
Assuming one of a writer’s works displays their exact like of thinking is reductionist and infantile unless they came out at some point and specifically stated that it’s how they believed.
I think that is exactly why that problem persists. Among a certain subset of the population, there is no need to look further. Why assume that there's a deeper message there?
Which is why it's always so frustrating when you see someone arguing that you should only be able to vote if you serve. (Yes, this really happened to me.)
Unfortunately regardless of your political stance you most certainly acknowledge that there are dumbasses capable of voting purely on the merit that they were born here, even if they couldn’t tell you a lick about how the system works.
While I don’t know how I’d feel about my government attempting such a thing, if the service was just public sector (not exclusively the military like in the movie) and available to all regardless of ablement (as in the novel), and the only differences in rights being that you’re now able to vote and run for elected office, then I could see the merits of reducing voting to the portion of the population that served the public in some capacity.
While you can’t guarantee they’ll be better off at the end, their experience would at least inform them of the greater picture on how things are done and why. Which might increase the voting/electoral population’s ability to come up with new solutions or see the flaws they would have missed by just voting whatever they grew up with.
The book maybe but the movie definitely glorifies the violence without direct context for why it’s wrong. At least to a degree that can be easily understood by the target audience of teenage boys.
So, the director hid a swastika in one of the shadows to indicate that he thought the society was evil, among a ton of other things. He talked about it in the director’s commentary. But yeah, it’s actually super easy to miss unless you know it’s actually a warning (which, like you said, the teenage boys it’s marketed to wouldn’t understand)… Which is kind of the problem with a lot of media, like the entire genre of cyberpunk.
I mean he had read the recently released novel and started asking around for someone to pay for him to make it into a movie. So maybe you are making a “clever” quip about how he must not have read the ending to get it that wrong but that’s not how your message sounded with that wording.
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