Okay, every time I bring that movie up you guys display an urge to bash it but restrain yourselves, so I can tell you're just itching to bash it, which piques my curiosity on what you find so bashable about it :) So out with it! What am I supposed to find bashable about the adaptation? :)
Emm... well... it had nothing in common with the novel other than the title and a couple character names? Maybe that was it.
Ok, embarrassing moment... we have about three copies of all the "Harry Potter" books - hardcover, softcover, whatever, but we also have a complete set of "English" editions. That is, the version they sell in England. There are some minor differences... anyway, I was looking for the English copy of one of them, ransacking my siblings' shelves... only to recall that it was on my own shelf. Heh.
But, even if the movie was named something other then "Starship Troopers", and claimed no relationship with the novel, I still wouldn't like it. The military training, weapons, and tactics portrayed in the movie are just so unbelievable to me that I can't stand it. Some examples:
1. Training: Twice, the drill sergeant deliberately injures a trainee; I just don't think it would happen in reality. The government spends too much money training recruits to allow them to be deliberately injured in training!
2. Weapons: The humans seem to have no weapons other than rifles, hand-thrown grenades, and mini-nukes. No tanks, or armored vehicles of any kind are shown. Close air support is non-existent; in fact, the only aircraft shown are the shuttles that ferry troops from the spaceships to the surface, and back. In terms of firepower and weaponry, our troops in Iraq right now would outclass what was shown in the movie!
3. Tactics: Several times, the humans are shown confronting bug warriors, standing in line in the open and firing with their automatic rifles; that sort of tactic went out with the introduction of the machine gun in World War I. At one point, a squad of soldiers is making their way down a valley when they're attacked by flying bugs; no one thought to send some scouts up to the top of the valley walls. Later, the same squad makes it to an open-air fortress, just four walls in the middle of nowhere. The mounted guns are ignored in favor of the troopers standing on top of the walls and firing their rifles at the hordes of advancing bugs; despite the evidence of flying bugs, the fortress doesn't even have a roof!
I won't go into the stupid decisions made by the squadron leader, such as shooting and killing a trooper picked up by a flying bug ("It's what I would want if it happened to me!" he yells). Oops, I just did go into it... oh well, there is much more to hate in the movie, what I've listed is just a start.
I hear Rose typing away behind me; I suspect you're about to get another earful of things to hate about the movie....
What's good about it?
To begin with, the society Heinlein envisioned had nothing to do with the Aryan wet dream depicted in the Bug Hunt movie. Rico was Philippino; Jelly was a Turk, and remember the Asian martial arts instructor at boot camp?
And Johnny is wrong. Johnny was a slacker, a Fifties version of the rich kid with too much money and no ambition. Remember, in the book Mrs. Rico thought Carmen was a good influence (unlike the nasty way she talks about Carmen in the bug hunt movie). In the movie, Johnny is an Aryan poster child, rarely just being a lazy bum. And Carmen and Johnny were never involved, and Johnny knew this. "Love of a good woman," bull!
Women were pilots, and they were damn good at it: remember Yvette Deladrier, who recalculated the rendezvous by eye and touch, something that had apparently never been done before? Women were excellent at math; Carmen was a math tutor in high school, and the female Captain of another ship tutored Johnny in math.
Women, however, were not MI! They didn't get in the suits, they didn't get in the launcher, they didn't go down and slog in mud.
Carl was an electron pusher, not a sensitive, and he got killed off-scene in the book, 'cause war sucks, and good people get killed, too.
Where were the powered suits? "Oh, we couldn't do the suits; it would cover up the actor's faces." All of the actors in that movie could have had their faces covered, and we wouldn't missed a thing!
Zim did break Breckenridge's arm, but it wasn't intentional; he apologized, as I recall, by saying "You hurried me a bit." And Zim would never, never, NEVER have nailed Breckenridge's hand with a knife. Why would he? Why did he do that?
Johnny didn't go through a crisis, as he did in the book, where he had to decide to stay in the MI. G'nad would know better than I, but that hump, that crisis, sounds a lot like the Crucible exercise the Marines use to tear a person down and put a Marine together from the component parts.
And that's just some of the wrong stuff from before the bug hunt part. Oh, my stars and garters, that was STUPID. Full auto machine guns with, what, 9mm ammo against bugs that big? No energy weapons, but we have spaceships? Don't kill the bug, kill the man, 'cause "it's what I would want." Bugs fly, but there are no humans in the air?
AAAAAAAARGH!!!