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!!!
Well I asked for it--LOL! Thanks for sharing that. I gotta agree with what you say there. I guess I saw it before reading the book, so I just thought the premise of the bug race was a cool idea, and I liked the fx.
To the everlasting glory of the infantry...
Rose... don't hold back like that. You should tell us how you really feel. :-)