The movie was only tangentially based on the book... there is a Johnny Rico (from the Philippines in the book, not Buenos Aires), and there are “Bugs”... but the intent and messages are vastly different between the two media.
“The movie was only tangentially based on the book... there is a Johnny Rico (from the Philippines in the book, not Buenos Aires)”
Correct. And just like Ender’s Game, there are novels that cannot be correctly translated unto the big screen. In hindsight, if people knew how much The Natural was in the novel (full of incest, child molestation), you’d never think it was a baseball movie.