I understand that fans of the novel didn't like it. But director Paul Verhoweven is a satirist. The whole thing was made in the form of a fascist propaganda movie. It's a big goof. The characters were played by blond blue eyed bleached Aryan types. All by design. It's also a formally adept piece of filmmaking. Remember the same director made Robocop.
And while I'm at it, what the hell does "hollywood elite" mean, anyway?
Once again: Bill the Galactic Hero was a satire of Starship Troopers. Bored of the Rings was a satire of The Lord of the Rings. Note that in these actual satires, the satirists had the intellectual honesty to at least give their derivative work a different name and did not try to pass their parodies off as the original. No such case with the Starship Troopers movie. It wasn't a satire. It was an insult.
And even if your point were actually true, it still begs my original question: Why is it that when hollywood makes a movie based on a work of a libertarian like R.A. Heinlein, they allow a hacky scriptwriter to butcher it, but when they base a movie off a work of a socialist like H.G. Wells, nothing is so important as "staying true to the book"?