As much as Rusti hated SS's version of WOTW, is only half as much as I hate Paul Verhoven's travesty called Starship Troopers.
And here is why, (BIG rant)
In November of 1997, TriStar and Touchstone Pictures released Starship Troopers, which was billed as the movie version of Heinlein's book of the same name. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, produced by Alan Marshall and Jon Davison, and written by Ed Neumeier, it opened to harsh criticism concerning their "interpretation" of Heinlein's work. I agree with most -- if not quite all -- of that criticism. Below is my thoughts on the movie, both as a translation of the book, and in its own right.
Note that I will refer to the movie as
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers and the book simply as
Starship Troopers. This is for two reasons. First, some method of differentiating the two is essential to avoid confusion, and since the book came first, it seems fitting to differentiate them in this way. Second, the movie is the vision of Paul Verhoeven and his clique and not the original work;
Paul Verhoeven, Jon Davison, and Ed Neumeier's Twisted Parody of a Book They Claim They Liked But Have Done Everything to Befoul is simply too long for casual use.
As you might have guessed from my introduction, I do not think that
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is an accurate rendition of the book. Verhoeven has said in interviews that he had not read the book ahead of time (so as to not contaminate "his vision" or some such), and this statement, at least, is consistent with all of the evidence. Surprisingly, Ed Neumeier and Jon Davison claimed to be Starship Trooper fans of long standing, which is, at worst, so incredulous as to cast into doubt anything else they have to say, and at best reminiscent of a comment by Mr. Dubois's in Johnny's History and Moral Philosophy course: "One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think." [Heinlein SST:26].
The differences between
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers can be grouped into two major categories: material and philosophical.
Materially, there are several ways in which
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is an inaccurate rendition of
Starship Troopers. First, and most noticeable to anyone who has read the book, is the total absence of powered armor. Verhoeven et al claim that it was left out of the $100 million movie because it would have been too expensive, and because they were unable to "do it right." So, instead of battlesuited MIs dropping from orbit, we have fairly conventionally equipped soldiers landed in contraptions that look an awful lot like freight containers.
Second, great liberties have been taken with the characterizations. Pivotal characters have been left out, unimportant characters have been "promoted" to star status, and new characters have been added. With the possible exception of the recruiting sergeant in the Federal building -- a role diminished in the movie to about three lines of dialogue -- none of the characters are recognizable as their book counterparts.
Third, the plot has been totally rewritten, so much so that only a few scenes here and there are reminiscent of the book, and in most cases even those scenes have been substantially reworked.
Overall, though, I am going to go on record -- against the vast majority of the Heinlein fans who have expressed outrage against the movie -- and say that these changes do not matter. Sure, I would love to have seen troopers with powered armor in a one-for-one translation of the book, but I understand why that couldn't happen. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and
Starship Troopers, as written, makes a better book than it would a movie. Heck, one of the major surprises in the book -- that the fleet sergeant who captures the brain Bug during Johnny's OCS tour is Sergeant Zim -- works only because Heinlein doesn't tell us it's Zim until after the battle is over.
The differences that I think are important, on the other hand -- the differences which turn it from the same story told in a different medium into the book's Evil Twin (tm) -- are philosophical in nature, and are numerous and profound. The group making this movie clearly had their own agenda, and being faithful to their source was not part of it.
To begin with, while the Terran Federation in
Starship Troopers is specifically stated to be a representative democracy, Ed Neumeier decided to make the government into a fascist state. This was not "doing justice to the author," no matter how many times Neumeier and Davison repeat this absurd claim. [Persons 1997; Sammon 1997; Warren 1997]
Second, the book was multi-racial, but not so the movie: all the non-anglo characters from the book have been replaced by characters who look like they stepped out of the Aryan edition of GQ.
Third, there is real element of sadism present in the movie which simply isn't present in the book. There are two examples which seemed especially clear.
The first took place on the first day of boot camp. Sergeant Zim starts things out by asking the assembled recruits if any of them think they can beat him in a fight. One recruit, a good ol' boy named Breckinridge, accepts the challenge. In the process of sparing, Breckinridge is injured.
As presented in the book, the injury is clearly an accident:
The big recruit was sitting on the ground, holding his left wrist in his right hand. He didn't say anything.
Zim bent over him. "Broken?"
"Reckon it might be...suh."
"I'm sorry, you hurried me a little. Do you know where the dispensary is? Never mind -- Jones! Take Breckinridge over to the dispensary." As they left, Zim slapped him on the right shoulder and said quietly, "Let's try it again in a month or so. I'll show you what happened." [Heinlein SST:44]
The same scene in
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers plays out very differently. Zim has Breckenridge pinned by his arm, and he deliberately breaks the recruit's wrist.
The second scene takes place sometime later. Zim and the recruits are practicing with throwing knives, when one of the recruits asks "what possible use" is learning how to use throwing knives when "one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?" In the book, Zim responds (in part):
"If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him...but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing...but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how -- or why -- he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people -- 'older and wiser heads,' as they say -- supply the control. Which is as it should be." [Heinlein SST:63]
Notice the salient points of Zim's response: While surprised that the recruit doesn't know the answer at this stage in his training, he does not discourage the recruit from asking questions or thinking -- he treats it as a serious and reasonable question, which deserves a comprehensive, thoughtful, and respectful response about the role of civilian control of the military, and the necessity for the military to train for something less than all-out high-tech warfare.
In
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, on the other hand, Zim tells the recruit to put his hand flat against a nearby vertical surface, and with a deft throw of the knife pins the recruit's hand in place. While the recruit is screaming with pain, the knife sticking out of the back of his hand, Zim laughs and says something to the effect of "because that professor type can't push that button if there is a knife sticking out of it!"
These are not the only examples, merely the ones that stick out in my mind as scenes originating in the book that were twisted beyond recognition. There are many other examples, but they are more subtle -- and more pervasive. One of the overriding themes in
Starship Troopers, for example, is that MIs take care of their own, and will always attempt to make a pickup on a wounded comrade.
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, on the other hand, substitutes a Kevorkian ethic: when his platoon sergeant is carried off to a ledge a short distance away by a flying Bug, the lieutenant in charge grabs a sniper rifle. Rather than shooting the Bug and attempting a rescue, however, he shoots the sergeant, adding piously, "I would expect any of you to do the same for me." I guess the lieutenant didn't want to be saddled with a wounded trooper.
I believe Robert Heinlein must be turning over in his grave because of this travesty done in his name. Though, I will admit that there was one area where
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers might actually be faithful to Heinlein's original: its treatment of women. In this movie, women and men appear to participate -- in sports, in academic work, and in the military -- on an equal footing. This is to be commended, even if it illustrates exactly how far short the movie falls in most other ways.
So, it's clear I don't think a lot of
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers as a movie rendition of Heinlein's classic. Let's assume for a minute, though, that Neumeier and Davison's original assumption -- that the movie rights to Heinlein's book were not available -- was correct and they went with their original idea, a project called Bug Hunt. Assuming no relationship with
Starship Troopers, was
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers a movie worth seeing?
Maybe. At a dollar theater. If the only alternative on television was reruns of Who's the Boss?. For, not only is
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers a terrible rendition of Heinlein's book, it has a lot of problems as a movie itself.
First, if Paul Verhoeven learned anything during his stint in the Dutch marines, exposure to Hollywood has since leached it from his mind. Verhoeven et al decided to leave out the powered armor, turning the MI into a fairly conventional force, recognizable to any member of today's armed forces -- except of, course, for the complete lack of artillery, mechanized transport, armored fighting vehicles, squad-level automatic weapons and indirect fire weapons such as mortars, other squad-level support systems, or combat medical units. Tactics consist of running towards the enemy in a big mob, running away from the enemy in a big mob, and walking from point A to point B in a big mob. (I especially get a big chuckle over the scene where the MIs form a big circle around a Bug, with fellow troopers in their line of fire, and shoot at the Bug in the center -- I guess they are not as picky about friendly fire casualties in the 22nd century.) A supposedly elite unit, the MIs would have a hard time defeating a unit of Campfire Girls, let alone the Bugs.
Second, the Navy isn't any smarter -- they appear to be fundamentally incapable of preventing their ships from running into each other. On more than one occasion we see ships packed in such tight formations that when a ship is hit and falls out of its assigned spot, the result is the space fleet equivalent of a multi-car pileup. Wet Navy folk are traditionally very concerned with running their ships into things -- especially each other -- and spend a lot of time practicing so that it doesn't happen. It still occasionally does happen, but they take great pains to minimize the likelihood, in part by spreading the formation out sufficiently. I can't think of any reason why their 22nd century space Navy descendants would view things any differently. Depicting them in a formation guaranteed to cause collisions is, at best, sloppy and lazy, and at worst stupid in the extreme.
Note that there was a scene in the book where there was a collision of this sort, but it occurred when a highly complex, over-ambitious maneuver, attempted to gain the advantage of surprise, went awry. Verhoeven's Navy, on the other hand, was engaged in a maneuver about as complicated as an interstate lane change.
Between the Navy and the Army, I spent the entire movie thinking that if this is the best the Federation can do, the Bugs deserve to win.
Third, the characters engage in the sort of showboating that would get real military personnel court-martialed in a heartbeat. I am thinking specifically of Carmen's little shuttle trip inside the framework of the ring station; it was a neat effect in Return of the Jedi, but even a fantasy like Jedi portrayed it as a dangerous move undertaken in desperation, rather than something to be done because you were feeling especially perky that day.
Finally, the movie exhibited the usual contempt for even the rudiments of science in which Hollywood in general and Verhoeven in particular specialize. For example, we have a ship on patrol that encounters an asteroid moving so slowly that the ship is able to survive a glancing impact from said rock, yet moments later the rock is billions of miles away and annihilating Buenos Aires. Perhaps the rock really was moving at billions of miles per second, and the ship was simply made out of the same material as the small escape capsule which later in the film nose-dived into a rock wall and simply punched through it like it was paper.
Overall, with the cute little propaganda clips and SS uniforms, Verhoeven appears to have thought he was making a satire. In reality, though, it was closer to a comedy. I, for one, was laughing at him, not with him.
Perhaps surprisingly, the fact that this movie is so bad doesn't bother me much, either. Of course I would have preferred to see something that at least accurately captured the spirit of Heinlein's book or, failing that, wasn't insulting to both the original work and the audience; given both Verhoeven's past efforts and the traditional fate of science fiction in Hollywood, however, we could hardly have expected anything different than what we got. I expected garbage, so I wasn't surprised when I got it.
More importantly, though, even though
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is tripe, I think it may still be a "win" for fans of the book. Why? Because
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers appeared to sell a lot of copies of
Starship Troopers. After seeing the movie a couple of weeks after it came out, I went looking for a couple of copies of the book to give to friends who hadn't yet read it. Over the course of three days I visited three uberbookstores, one regular mall bookstore, and two used bookstores, and I found precisely ONE copy of the book. Almost a year later, copies of the book were hard to find in used book stores.
I personally think it would be fitting if the sequel loses money (although I recognize the danger to the genre; Hollywood is too dumb to understand the difference between a science fiction movie losing money because it is science fiction, and a science fiction movie losing money because the people responsible made a bad movie), but I take some solace in knowing that a lot of people would discover this book. My prediction is that fifteen years from now,
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers will be a minor footnote in film history (as Vehoeven himself might be -- ever seen Showgirls?), but that
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers will still be going strong.
So, what does bother me about this movie?
"The great mass of people... will more easily
fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
In the case of
Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, the Big Lie is best stated by Verhoeven himself:
The philosophy of Heinlein is certainly in the movie. Whether I adhere to that society myself is something else, but it is the philosophy of the world he described, and we took that from his book. [Warren 1997, p.23]
This is a theme that we see repeated time and again, both by those who made the movie, and some of the writers (such as Dan Persons, Paul Sammon, and Bill Warren) who have written about it: that the sadistic, fascist society in the movie is a Polaroid snapshot of the world Heinlein described, that faithfulness to the first grand master of science fiction was their overriding concern. This is, without question, a bald-faced lie, as the society described bears only the most superficial resemblance to the society described by Heinlein, and philosophically it is its antithesis. Equating the two is the equivalent of saying that, because both countries periodically had "elections," that the United States and the the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were both democracies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite tagging this "the big lie," please note that I am not claiming that any of the people responsible for this film (Neumeier, Verheoven, Marshall, or Davison) are Nazis -- they aren't. Neumeier and Verhoeven come from countries that saw the horrors of the Third Reich up close and, in Verhoeven's case, within his own lifetime; their agenda, if anything, is anti-fascist in nature. What I am accusing them -- and the industry writers who are aiding them, by printing their ridiculous claims unchallenged and making similar statements on their own -- of is repeating a patent falsehood with the hope that, if reiterated enough times, people might begin to believe it. Whether they now believe their own propaganda, I won't hazard to guess.
Sorry for the rant guys, but everytime I see folks say the Verhoeven's travesty is good, something inside me snaps. I am sure Rusti knows the feeling.
;D
Cheers, Þórgrímr
Prepare For The Future
Looking forward to this. Didn't like the second one, but original was top, so I hope they get that winning formula back.
my bad