Posted on 03/23/2025 3:49:43 PM PDT by Angelino97
Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoeven tried and failed to satirize the subject matter. He denounced Heinlein’s novel as a “very right-wing book,” and claims to only have read two chapters “because it was so boring.” The result was something perhaps even more Heinleinian than a sober adaptation and a spectacular piece of propaganda for the author, with one of the most memorable movie scores to boot.
Now, Blomkamp is giving it a go.
On March 14, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the South African filmmaker will write and direct a new movie that stays true to the source material—at least that’s what the magazine’s sources say.
I’m optimistic about it—anxiously optimistic. On the one hand, Blomkamp is a talented creative with a gift for painting compelling science fiction pictures, using documentary-style filmmaking to drop audiences into not-so-distant futures. On the other hand, Blomkamp has a habit of using his work as a vehicle for commenting on human prejudices. That is fine and good and works well with District 9. But there isn’t much wiggle room for sentimentality in Heinlein’s 1959 classic, at least not with regard to the bugs.
Heinlein explicitly compared the bugs to communists, with whom he was utterly unsympathetic in real life. As a species akin to very dangerous ants or termites, the author could think of no more perfect physical expression of that ideology, no greater threat to human freedom and individualism:
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.
Indeed, the first chapter is prefaced with a quote attributed to an unknown platoon sergeant from 1918: “Come on, you apes! You wanta to live forever?” Probably the closest real source for that exhortation is Daniel Joseph Daly, a Marine who won a medal of honor during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 after single-handedly holding off an all-night assault and reportedly leaving 200 dead or dying Chinese fighters on the other side of his barricade. Years later, at the Battle of Belleau Wood, Daly is said to have cried out to his men: “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”
Daly would have been the ideal citizen in the world of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The Terran Federation is structured along extremely hierarchical and militaristic lines out of necessity. It’s ancient Sparta gone interstellar. This is a world in which full citizenship is restricted to those who earn it. Johnnie Rico, the main character, recalls the words of a colonel who may as well be speaking for Heinlein: “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part … and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”
Unlike Verhoeven, Heinlein was not doing satire in his Starship Troopers. He meant what he wrote; the novel was an exposition of his social and political views. That is why people find it—and him—so controversial. Blomkamp has the opportunity to present these things in good faith, rather than merely attempting to mock them, as Verhoeven tried to do. There are other significant differences between Verhoeven’s adaptation and the novel that could appear in Blomkamp’s take.
Heinlein did not have a blue-eyed, Dutch-extracted Casper Van Dien in mind when he created Johnnie Rico. His real name is Juan, and he’s Filipino. Verhoeven likely didn’t know that, because he didn’t study the material carefully before making his movie.
Van Dien’s friend and eventual love interest in Verhoeven’s film, Isabelle “Dizzy” Flores (Dina Meyer), is a man in Heinlein’s original story, with a small part. Nevertheless, I liked Verhoeven’s improvisation in this case, as her death marks Rico’s transition into a hardened member of the Mobile Infantry—his one true bride.
Blomkamp might also explore the “Skinnies,” another race of humanoid aliens who appear in the book but are totally absent from Verhoeven’s film, and a variety of other sci-fi crowd-pleasers that were missing, like the capsules the Mobile Infantry troopers used to deploy from orbit in a rain of falling steel.
I’m rooting for Blomkamp. With the end of “wokeness” and the resurgence of interest in right-wing thought, there hasn’t been a better time in recent memory for a film that takes Heinlein seriously. Getting it right would make a blockbuster that has something to say. Previous PostMuch Ado About Nothing in Kennedy Center ‘Booing’ Incident
The movie was CRAP
Yes he tried and failed to satirize the book.
A good satirization would have been funny.
His movie was sad and incoherent.
Sign me up! I loved District 9 and Chappie.
Kind of hard to spring something on the movie goers as was done in the last paragraph in the book. As for the movie, all that shooting when a little dab of DDT would have done the trick.
ISWYDT!
Trying to remember the books ending....
Was it a realization that the PTB were keeping the wars going?
I read Heinlein’s books about 50 years ago. The “we can throw rocks at them” sequence from the Moon is a Harsh Mistress still resonates the best with me. I seem to recall there being no good governments in Troopers. The Earth government was only counting contract time while they were thawed out, if I recall correctly. As I said, it has been a long time.
Not even close.
And it is not even "structured along extremely hierarchical and militaristic lines".
The basic concept of the society was if you want to be a voter you need to show first that you were willing to serve the community. And while the book follows someone who joined the military (because most other options would have made for a boring book) the military was not the only path.
One of the early chapters talks about this and how they would find a way for anyone who wanted to do their (I think it was two years) of service to do it. I believe the example used was a deaf and blind guy who was in a wheelchair and if he wanted to serve they would find a job for him. Once he had completed his service he was just as much a voting citizen as the greatest military hero.
Because it was not what you did but that you were willing to give of yourself to do it.
If you want to do the book justice you need to get the world building right.
The 60s kind of unhinged him.
Maybe he dropped acid, I don't know.
To the everlasting glory of the infantry
Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!
Johnnie is pretty much presented as a gee-whiz (but naive only to how the military works), “All-American” young man. The twist is he’s ethnically Filipino and can speak Tagalog: the native language of the Phillipines.
Zackly. Well-said!
…It’s also easy to forget that he grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Everyone else, "Ohhhh, fight bugs in space!"
Me: "The principle for weeding out people who are not willing to serve the community and therefore would not have given much thought to how certain actions would impact the community at large is basically sound."
:Encyclopedias are thrown in my general direction:
The big titties version was still pretty good.
You can’t faithfully do justice to the book in a 2 hour movie.
The best book adaptations are in the form of a multi-part miniseries. Lonesome Dove is a perfect example.
I loved the book; I loved the movie.
They were two different tellings of the same story.
It is the classic example.
Although, there are some excellent stand-alone movies based upon books. Jurassic Park, for instance.
It was a good sci-fi "B" movie, with a thin patina of Starship Troopers.
I have read that the it was pretty far along in development as just that, when the producers got the movie rights to Starship Troopers, and decided to just dress up their bug killing movie with themes from Heinlein, without spending the money to do the power suits.
Which is why you get a not terrible presentation of the franchise, and personal responsibility, combined with "action" scenes straight out the Jar-Jar Binks school of infantry tactics.
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