\n\t\t\t\u00a0\u00a0
\n\t\t\tPosted by\t\t\tJohn Scalzi<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a0\u00a0
\n\t\t\t\t \u00a0\n\t<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Screenshot-2025-12-18-191826.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
If you should ever want to wind up an old-school Robert Heinlein fan \u2014 which, by the way, you shouldn\u2019t do, they\u2019re all clocking seventy-plus years now, and you should respect your elders \u2014 tell them you enjoy the movie version of Starship Troopers more than the Heinlein novel on which it was (somewhat loosely) based. Then move fast, because if you don\u2019t, you\u2019re gonna get whacked upside the head with a cane. Those OG Heinlein fans may be older now, but they\u2019re spry, and if there is one heresy remaining for them, a preference for the film over the novel would be it. <\/p>\n
And in many respects they are not wrong. The movie version of Starship Troopers wasn\u2019t originally based (directly) on the novel; screenwriter Ed Neumeier wrote up a sci-fi action movie treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 that did not reference the novel at all. It was only later in the development process that Neumeier and producer Jon Davidson learned the rights to the novel were available and optioned them, and started grafting elements of Heinlein\u2019s tale onto the spine of Outpost 7. Add in director Paul Verhoeven, who legend has it couldn\u2019t even get through the novel but knew he wanted to satirize fascism in the film, and you end up a final cinematic product that is to Heinlein\u2019s novel like grape soda is to an actual grape.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, however, a lot of people like the taste of grape soda. I happen to be one of them.<\/p>\n
Nor do I think it\u2019s a particular heresy to enjoy the movie, even if one prefers the novel. Very few movies adapted from novels are scrupulously faithful to their source material, and the few that are, are usually weirdly paced and unwieldly (looking at you, Watchmen, and even that changed the ending). The things that make for a great novel are not often the things that make for a great cinematic experience, and vice-versa, as some of the greatest films in history are made from mediocre books (looking at you, The Godfather). <\/p>\n
Whenever I mention to people that my novel Old Man\u2019s War is under option, there\u2019s someone who inevitably tells me, I hope they keep it true to the novel. I can assure you they probably will not. As just one example, at one point Chris Hemsworth was attached to star in the movie. Do you think they would pay Hemsworth $20 million (or whatever) to be in the movie, and then paint him green, to match the description of his character in the novel? I do not. Nor do I think a star on the level of Hemsworth would have wanted to be that color. It\u2019s not easy being green, by which I mean that he (and many many other characters) would have to spend hours in makeup every morning. They\u2019d save time and money letting him be his original hue.<\/p>\n
I was a movie critic for years and now for years I\u2019ve been having works optioned for film and television. So I am here to tell you, with some authority: Movies always deviate from the novels. The question is less, why aren\u2019t they being faithful to the source material. The question: Is what they\u2019re doing to the source material interesting? That\u2019s the question I ask when I watch a movie based on a novel.<\/p>\n
What Paul Verhoeven is doing in Starship Troopers is very interesting. No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a mediation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Do you want to know more?<\/p>\n
The story at least initially follows the novel\u2019s outline: Johnny Rico (the impossibly square-jawed Casper Van Dien) is a callow, rich pretty boy who is not too smart, but is also vaguely dissatisfied with the cushy life being laid out for him. So when his pals Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) sign up for Federal Service to fight against a bug-like alien race called the Arachnids, he sort of goes along, too, annoying his parents in the process. Boot camp is hard for Johnny, and he almost calls it quits, but then his home town of Buenos Aires gets smooshed by an Arachnid-guided meteorite, and then, well, it is on. <\/p>\n
Nearly everything up to this point in the film, save for a brief intro battle sequence, has the flat and brightly-lit affect of 90s teen television: it all looks like Starship Troopers 90210, up to and including absolutely beautiful \u201cteenagers\u201d who are clearly well into their 20s, if not older (of the main trio Van Dien was 27 when filming started, Richards was 24 and Harris was the baby at 22). And this is the point: Verhoeven wants to seduce you with hot kids in a nice clean world that seems great as long as you ignore the public executions, the denial of voting status for most people, the military dictatorship, and, you know, the war out there in space. <\/p>\n
But then you get to that war out in space, and you know what happens to all those really hot kids? Nothing good! And that\u2019s where Verhoeven springs his trap. All the physical beauty in the world won\u2019t save you in battle! All those really cool, vaguely-nazi-looking uniforms don\u2019t look nearly as good shredded and covered in blood! And all the training and\/or indoctrination you might get means nothing when the military command tells you little and sends you to die by the shipload. Verhoeven, who has never been shy about gouts of blood, severed limbs and gore, paints his masterpiece here in the viscera of the young, who ten seconds before looked like they should be in a Gap ad. The director holds up the fascistic perfection of a Leni Riefenstahl film, specifically to gleefully dash, slash, and splash it into the dirt.<\/p>\n
Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, because this is the US and we don\u2019t do irony especially well), lots of folks didn\u2019t clue into what Verhoeven was up to, accusing the famously anti-fascist director of glorifying Nazism, an accusation which Verhoeven was flabbergasted by. It would take years, long after the movie was out of the theaters and into home video, for most people to fully get what he was up to. Some people still don\u2019t like it; many old school Heinlein fans continue to be enraged that Verhoeven\u2019s lardering his story with fascistic imagery painted their favorite writer with the authoritarian brush. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think Heinlein ever landed on the \u201cfascist\u201d square at any point in his life. It\u2019s certainly true, however, that Heinlein was moving target, politics-wise; how else can you describe someone who worked on the campaigns of both Upton Sinclair, a socialist and Democrat (who ran for governor of California in the 1930s) and the uberconservative Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964? Heinlein\u2019s politics started left and sauntered right and added in a dollop of free-love weirdness (to, uhhhhh, say the least) in there to confuse everybody. The dynamic range of his politics over his life (and how that leaked into his fiction) means that if one wants to, one can cobble together an image of him through his work that these days gives off an authoritarian odor. Starship Troopers, the novel, is the prime source for that. The blatantly fascist imagery of the movie, satire or not, doesn\u2019t help his fans make an argument against that. <\/p>\n
I\u2019ve gone into the weeds with the politics of Starship Troopers, so let me note that aside from the design of the movie, it\u2019s also a sharply-paced action film, where the bug-killin\u2019s both varied and plentiful: if you\u2019re looking to see a bunch of alien bugs get ripped up by humans as much as the humans get ripped up by the aliens, this is your film. The CGI in film remains immaculate; thirty years on, it\u2019s wild how good and how threatening the arachnids look. This film doesn\u2019t have just one or two of them, sneaking about ala the Alien films; no, it piles them on in the hundreds, and they very much look like they are going to fuck everyone up. As Carl points out, \u201cIt\u2019s a numbers game. They have more.\u201d Boy, do they ever. There are very few scenes in the film where it ever feels like the humans have the upper hand, and even when they do, they\u2019re as likely to lose a few fingers than not. Whatever else this movie is, it\u2019s a good action-adventure film, if not, exactly, a feel-good action-adventure film.<\/p>\n
Like so many other Paul Verhoeven films, Starship Troopers is a chaotic mess of tones; all those action scenes and pointed imagery and pretty, pretty people, tossed into a stylistic blender and sent a-whirlin\u2019 at the highest speed setting. Almost thirty years ago now I wrote a review of this film that started with \u201cPaul Verhoeven is a director who can give you everything you want in a movie, as long as you want too much of it.\u201d You know what? I stand behind that sentence. Verhoeven thinks subtlety is for cowards, and he\u2019s having none of it here, and you\u2019re not getting of it, either. You either accept this is going to be a firehose of a movie, or you get out of the way.<\/p>\n
To get back to those old school Heinlein fans, many of whom I like very much as humans, I can only offer the following advice to them, in terms of how to think about their beloved book, and this heretical film Hey! There\u2019s a novel called Starship Troopers! It\u2019s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there\u2019s a movie called Starship Troopers! It\u2019s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good. You can\u2019t copyright titles, you know. It was inevitable there would be a movie and novel with the same name, otherwise having little to do with each other. These things happen. And that\u2019s okay. <\/p>\n
Also, wait until I tell you about the remarkable coincidence that happened with I, Robot.<\/p>\n
\u2014 JS<\/p>\n
Like this:<\/p>\n
Like Loading…<\/p>\n