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Originally Posted by AlbertaCowboy
Starship Troopers is one of my all time favorite novels. It's one that I reread every year at leat once.
I saw the movie before I'd read the book, and I hated it. It was because of that experience that I refused to read what I thought was drivel.
I wish wish wish that I would have read the novel years earlier, and had never seen the movie.
I'm not one of those fortunate souls that are able to clear my mind of the book before watching the movies. Sometimes, as with LotR, and The Hunger Games, one is pleasantly surprised. Other times, as with Congo and Sahara it feels like a bout of food poisoning in my brain!
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At the time Heinlein wrote "Starship Troopers" he was well into his conservative phase. If you have a chance, read his first written (1939) but last published (posthumously) novel "For Us, The Living". He was originally quite far leftist. Into the 1970's he'd gone very much Libertarian.
"Starship Troopers" the movie is what happens when a studio allows a far leftist director to make a movie loosely based on a decades old novel written by a conservative who used to be so far left wing it'd make the movie director look conservative - all while said director and much of the rest of the industry falsely claims the book is "fascist" and have never even read it.
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Verhoeven stated in 1997 that the first scene of the film (an advertisement for the mobile infantry) was adapted shot-for-shot from a scene from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, specifically an outdoor rally for the Reichsarbeitsdienst.
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It also doesn't help that the movie was already into pre-production as "Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine" before someone 'discovered' that the book was 'similar' to the movie and bought the movie rights.
So, take a lame C-or-worse grade movie, change character names and lift a few bits and bobs from a famous book and Tada! you have a "Based on the Best Selling Novel" movie. Take that to the bank and they give you $$$ to plump up the effects and hire Neil Patrick Harris for a bit part.
To add insult to insulting cinematic drivel, there are three direct to video sequels. "Starship Troopers: Hero of the Federation" 2004, "Starship Troopers: Marauder" 2008 and "Starship Troopers: Invasion" 2012.
There was also a FPS video game released in 2005 but looks like it is the height of 1997 technology with enemy "AI" so bad you can just sit there and do nothing while the bugs mill around aimlessly instead of swarming up the wall to overrun your outpost. Shoot'em at your leisure. It was reviewed on "X-Play" on G4-TV and one of the hosts called the book "fascist". I never watched that show again.
*more research* Ack! *Another* video game, a Real Time Tactics one released in 2000.
Starship Troopers is never going to get a decent break in mass entertainment media.
See also the horrid "adaptation" of "A Princess of Mars" committed by Disney. They get a 100%+ grade on style but a -1000% on story. It has about as much in common with the books as the Dresden files TV series has with those books.
Why was the Disney movie title "John Carter"? Because those low-rent bottom scrapers at "The Asylum" had already squeezed out their own even farther off version and nailed down the "Princess of Mars" title first - starring (oh fer gawds' sake)
Traci Lords.