Primus1985 said:
Therumancer said:
I'd see a "Kingdom Come" movie, and I think the characters are iconic enough for it to work and for people to identify with them. I would however NOT watch a "Red Son" movie as I am strongly anti-communist, even if I do have some left wing beliefs.
I agree with most that Kingdom Come can be done(and should be done) as an animated movie. DC's animated features are better than their live action films as of late, Bat-franchise excluded of course. The only thing is they need to not pussy out and try and cram it into a 90 minute garbage heap. The "Crisis on Two Worlds" feature proved they can do a big cast picture with great action and depth they just need to really buckle down on it.
As far as "Red Son" goes I said Hollywood wouldnt make it not out of any animosity towards communism itself but because for one most people would see it as a insult to see Superman as un-American(even though techniqually he is an Alien but I digress), and for two it would never pull in enough revenue to make up for even 25% of what it would cost to make, even with DVD sales.
Actual pure communism in its truest form, not the in name only form that China has, is not a bad thing. Ideally its supposed to be everyone in the collective working and sharing for the benefit of all the people. However in practice it hasnt gone over very well. The reason is simply the old adage "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" or to quote Dr. McCoy from Star Trek "If you give anyone that much power they cant help playing God" Communist states in the 20th usually centered around one figure in government, and once they got that power and realized what they could do with that power...Well you can fill in the blanks. Now if you could combine pure communism with the system of Checks and Balances the US has, I think it could work.
No it couldn't. Communism can only work on a very small scale.
The problem is that Communism requires a lot of people to do the grunt work of society more or less willingly. Society needs more labourers and people doing crap jobs than it does leaders and important people doing skilled labour. The problem with Communism is people not wanting to go out there and farm, work the assembly lines, dig the ditches, clean the toilets, and other things.
This is why Communism ultimatly turns into socialism, even if it continues to call itself Communism. Someone, namely a goverment or leader, has to step in and ensure that people do all the needed jobs for the good of the whole. As communism is about the subversion of the individual to the needs of the community, where nobody owns their own property, etc... you wind up with a socialist system where the goverment winds up deciding who does what job, and who is entitled to what share of the society's wealth. Of course the people making the desicians are the most important, take the most wealth, and of course decide who is going to be rich and well off and who is going to be poor and struggling based on personal opinion and give the best jobs to their friends and family and so on.
With a very small group of people it's possible to make communism work, because everyone is already a substinance worker to begin with, and you generally don't have any huge classes of people or need massive factories to produce goods or whatever. A commune can function this way, a major society of hundreds of millions or billions of people cannot.
The reason why Communist societies have turned out the way they have is because you wound up with all of the people who won the glorious revolution wanting a better life. All the oppressed peasants in Russia wanted to stop being farmers and workers and become artists, leaders, and other important people who could live comparitive lives of leisure. Obviously since Russia still needed food this couldn't happen. Stalin is a contreversial figure, and known as "The Steel Angel" because while brutal, he arguably saved Russia. His Gulags were all about re-educating the people into workers suited to serve society. His basic attitude was that even if he killed 99% of the people going through them, that 1% that became productive was worthwhile. His intentions make him a little differant from say Hitler (despite them being lumped together), especially seeing as he did pretty much stop Russia from starving to death, and also was able to forge it into a global super power.
China is a very similar situation to Russia, they had their glorious "people's revolution", only to find out that those people fightint for a better life were going to be just as oppressed under the new regime, because all the same stuff needed to be done. It's just that with China they were more immrdiatly brutal about forcing social order, as opposed to it coming down to something akin to a Stalinist era. The greater ovepopulation in China has also created a bigger disperity between the haves and have nots, where some parts of their country are almost in an entirely differant world from the others. You have the huge, modern cities of the elite, and farms where peoples homes double as their livestock pens (which is how SARS got started).
At any rate, in the end for society to work, someone needs to go out there and mop the floors, farm the food, shovel the manure, and do all the horrible work. Far more of those people are needed at the base of society, acting as a foundation, than above it. No system of goverment can change this basic reality. It all comes down to how you determine who does what. Within a capitalist society it's done through competition, and people own their own property, within a socialist (communist... because communism can't work ona large scale) society people wind up being put into roles based on need, and nobody technically owns their own property but is assigned what they own by the goverment based on their perceived contribution and what the goverment decides the people in that role are worth.
Almost any societal plan sounds great on paper, but only a few come close to doing what they are supposed to in reality. With Capitalism our problem is that without severe enough limitations there is nothing to prevent a few greedy buttheads from ruining everything and sucking the life out of society. Of course it takes a little longer to get to the point of that kind of degeneration than happens with Communism, where the problems are almost immediate when you see people trying to apply it on a large scale.
Ideally, producing a society that would self sustain, maintain order, and let everyone exist with total leisure and choose to do whatever they wanted would be great, unfortunatly that's never likely to happen, and speculative fiction is full of problems that would doubtlessly occur if we were ever able to achieve that goal as it is... most frequently since it would involve developing machines capable of doing everything for us, then questions arise as to who takes care of those machines. Barring the popular "mechanical revolt" idea, issues where the master programmers/mechanics/engineers become god-emperors are common, as are scenarios where the machines break down and people have to learn to survive again after having devolved into being able to actually do very little.
John Ringo wrote a series of books starting with "There Will Be Dragons" which proposed an interesting view of a utopian society, and it's collapse into warfare (when those controlling it wind up squaring off with each other).