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
I have to admit that I would enjoy an ADULT version of the film that captures the themes he was trying to present through science fiction. It would be awesome.
In that vein I’d also like to see The Forever War put to film.
How about this? Let’s not make any TV shows or movies for the next 10 years?
I love Heinlein even though he had a distinct Oedipus complex.
It’s GOT to have power suits and the book version combat drop.
Homosexual movie? No thanks.
“It’s GOT to have power suits and the book version combat drop.”
Il watch the current movie every time I see it. But one that stays true to the book would be fantastic.
L
There’s no way they’d allow it. The people in control pushing homosexuality and everyone race-mixing? Lol.
Great book!
I must have read it 50+ years ago.
The movie was OK and i would love to a better version.
It’ll be crap, even if it’s a different style of crap from the 1997 movie. I won’t be watching this one either.
They already released it in 97.
Dizz has been on my alibi list ever since……
+10^6
A most favorite book and series. Haldeman is better than Hwinlwin and does not have the weird homo vibe.
The movie doesn't exactly follow the book, true, but you couldn't sell a movie like that.
RAH's target audience was pre-pubescent boys, so his focus was mostly on action/adventure, not co-ed showers and pup-tent quickies.
Later in his career, he wrote some pretty racy stuff, but this wasn't --- not originally.
This!
personally...I just want to know more.
Why would the creator of the totally original ‘District 8’ want sloppy seconds on a 1997 film? Out of ideas like everyone else in Hollyweird? No thanks.
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