No I haven’t. I just happen to think that making changes like that is okay. Think of it as getting the same sort of treatment that Spike Jones gave to serious songs.
(Mind you, I still think the movie is lousy; I just don’t have an “OMG IT IS AN AFFRONT TO TEH ARTISTIC VISION!!!11!!” issue with it.)
It’s one thing to change some aspects of a creative work, in order to accentuate other aspects. Sometimes that can work very well: Apocalypse Now, for instance, was very true to the essence of Heart of Darkness, despite a completely different setting and pretext. But that’s not what happened here: Rather, we have a director who made the conscious and deliberate decision to make a movie that had absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with the book whose title he used. I’m not too familiar with what Spike Jones did with songs, but I’m willing to bet that he at least listened to the original before doing his versions.
The interesting thing - and something no one here seems to realise - is that Verhoeven didn’t write the screenplay and thus he simply made a film of the screenplay he was supplied with.
If anything, blame the guy that actually wrote it.
I would tend to agree that making changes to what amounts to the scenery is fine in an adaptation. However, there are two changes in the movie which make it a horrible adaptation - one of which makes it pretty much not an adaptation of the book, and the other of which makes it just generally bad.
First, the book is an exploration of what sort of result you’d get if you organized a state as a limited democracy where only those willing to make a sacrifice for the state got the franchise. Heinlein apparently thought the result would be pretty good. Verhoeven, on charitable interpretations of the movie, thinks you’d get Space Nazis. This makes the movie akin to a film adaptation of 1984 in which Winston demonstrates the triumph of the indomitable human spirit by retaining his rebellious will throughout all the torture, and at the end of the movie re-unites with Julia and the pair escapes to join the Oceania Liberation Front. In short, it’s not really an adaptation anymore. It’s based on the story, but it’s pushing a diametrically opposed conclusion.
Second, in Heinlein’s book the military is ruthlessly results-oriented. They do what works. Tactical doctrine is tested and revised and tested again. Training is harsh, long, and effective, and that goes triple for officers. In the movie, the military is made up of morons, run by morons, and behaves in the most moronic fashion imaginable. This is where the power armor comes in. The infantry can drop without support in the book because they’re their own support. Without the armor in the movie, dropping unsupported is worse than Pickett’s Charge, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and invading Russia in autumn combined.
The results of this change are dramatic - the degree of idiocy in the tactical doctrine of the Mobile Infantry in the movie is difficult to overstate, which takes a viewer with an appreciation of military tactics right out of the movie. Since fans of the book are quite likely to have some understanding of military tactical doctrine, they’re not going to give Verhoeven a pass here. This doesn’t mean that there had to be power armor in the movie, or that having power armor in the movie would eliminate criticism. Power armor coupled with more idiotic tactics would still have people complaining. Smart tactics without power armor (artillery and air support at a minimum) would still have grumbling that power armor would have been cooler, but it would have been grumbling. Of course, there’d still be outrage over the first point discussed above. But the key point here is that having the protagonists suffer defeats because they’re a bunch of fucking idiots makes the movie both a bad adaptation of the book and just a plain bad movie. It also undermines the legitimacy of the criticism of Heinlein if you take the charitable interpretation route with regards to the first point.
Oh, there’s a circle of Hell waiting for him too. But the Director bears the brunt of the blame. It’s his movie. Verhoeven did everything in his power to warp Heinlein’s book into total garbage. Therefore he must die.
Well said, Gorsnak.
That’s not precisely accurate. The movie did roughly follow the plot of the book. Johnny Rico goes from high school to Infantry training, interacts with characters of the same name and roles, nearly drops out except for the surprise attack on Earth by the Bugs, then ends up going into battle against the Bugs. They deploy, and get ass-hammered by the bugs, and then there is the mission into the catacombs and the eventual capture of the Bug Brain by Sgt Zim. There’s even the friendship with the hot pilot chick and the guy who goes off to science (though they make him a psi guy, which while there is a strange “psi” guy in the book, it is suggested what he has is uncanny hearing and pinpoints the underground Bug activity that way.)
It’s just that Verhoeven twisted what the society was like and about, made a mockery of what Heinlein’s message was, then continues to use Heinlein’s name and title.
It would be like telling the story of World War II where the NAZIs are the good guys and win in the end.
This gets into the “auteur” theory of film-making, and who as the “creative voice” in a film. In modern cinema, the director holds the largest chunk of the creative voice. Sure, the studios get some control over what happens, largely in who they sign as director and sometimes selecting screenwriters and screenplay. But the look and feel of a film largely fall to the director.
I’m willing to point the blame where the blame is due. If you can identify the parties responsible for deciding that *Starship Troopers * was a story about fascism and militarism and that is what he film should be about, then go for it. But from what I have uncovered so far (admittedly not much), that person is largely Verhoeven.
And while I don’t know for certain, I would bet you that Neumeier wrote the screenplay based upon the story Verhoeven wanted to tell, rather than Verhoeven shot a film based upon a script he was given. Just because Neumeier wrote the screenplay doesn’t mean the film started with a screenplay and then picked a director to film it.
Also from wiki Starship Troopers (film) - Wikipedia
Unfortunately that is uncited as I’d be interested in seeing more details. However, just because the book was optioned late doesn’t mean it wasn’t intended all along. Negotiations for book rights can be involved processes. I suspect that the studio greenlighted the project based upon getting the rights to Heinlein’s work, but couldn’t officially call it such until they actually secured the rights, so gave it a working title for legal reasons. Once they finally secured the rights they then rolled it in for marketing. Frankly, I’m not convinced this started as a completely unrelated project that later had elements from Heinlein worked in. The story is just too straightforward a plot adaptation of the novel for it to be otherwise. I’ve seem movies use a novel’s title and not much else. This movie clearly was built on the premise of the novel, just twisted to make a different point.
Hunter Hawk, there are things that get a pass from me, even though they are differences. For instance, in Heinlein’s version, women are pilots only and all infantry are male. Heinlein would have freaked over a fully integrated military as the movie showed. But I had no complaint with the military as the film depicted, men and women totally integrated (well, other than the oddness of the mixed-sex showers). I see no reason why only men can be infantry when the infantry consists of pilots for machines. The whole point of powered armor is that the machinery amplifies the wearer’s strength and abilities, so there’s no real reason why a woman couldn’t be just as effective as a male. It’s not like they’re expected to haul the crap around by themselves. Individual strength just isn’t a factor.
But I do react to someone distorting and misrepresenting a work from an author I respect while pretending that the completed version has any sort of relevance to the original. Heinlein would have kicked Verhoeven in the nuts for that abuse of his legacy. Or at least lamented that dueling is illegal.
Same way I feel about I, Robot. The movie might have been a fun adventure of bad robots, and a morality tale about responsibility, but what ruins it for me is the message is exactly opposite of Asimov’s message. Asimov wrote his Robot stories to demonstrate that robots are tools, not evil. He envisioned a future where more and more authority was given to sophisticated computer systems precisely because they eliminated the biases, hatreds, and jealosies that humans fall prey to. But the movie turned it on its head, and the villain was the computer system, and the hero was the “robot with a soul”. Gack!
Oh so the whiners here are all armchair generals? Confirms my thoughts.
BTW, if I remember right, in the book, the assault on Klendathu is a disaster and Earth loses half its fighting force and has to pull out.
Seems like their tactics dont work much better than those of Verhoeven’s…
A stopped clock is right twice a day, too. Any similarities almost had to be accidental, given that Verhooeven didn’t read the book, and was proud of that fact.
I’m gonna speak out in defense of the movie. I rather liked it. It is also very very loosely based on the book, mostly only drawing the basic premise and some character names. As long as you don’t think of it as being the same as the book, and if you aren’t above smirking at the hilariously poor military tactics, it’s still an entertaining movie with very good special effects and freaking outstanding music (done by the same guy who did the soundtracks for Flight Of The Intruder, Red Dawn, and The Hunt For Red October).
The second movie? I maintain that there are exactly two really good scenes in the movie, both of them in the final act. Otherwise, “Hero Of The Federation” is horrible, with only a very few redeeming qualities (although it was originally supposed to star Clancy Brown as a disgraced Sergeant Zim, instead of the other guy they got to play the character they replaced Zim with, which would have made the movie a little more interesting, if not much better).
The third movie… the cheese to ham ratio was all off from where it should have been. It was actually worse because it honestly COULD have been good, but it fell on its face so hard it made me cover my mouth in sympathy pains for that movie’s poor teeth (ouch!). They had the SFX! They had the Marauder Armor! They even had Casper Van Diem reprising his role as Johnny Rico! Hell, the troopers in the film even show a basic grasp of combined-arms tactics and using the terrain and their firepower to their advantage.
Sadly, the movie is not about the troopers, who only get to do anything for a total of about 10 minutes, including the last five minutes of the film where we actually see the Marauders get used (they don’t get mentioned until the last half of the film). Also, there’s a musical number, which somehow still almost manages to make sense in the context of the film. The song is cheezy and glurgy and OH GOD ITS IN MY HEAD AGAIN GET IT OUT!
Also, if you want a relatively faithful adaptation of Starship Troopers for the screen, check out Roughnecks: The Starship Trooper Chronicles. Cartoon that took elements from both the books and the movies. One of my favorite shows from when I was in high school.
And here’s a trailer! (Which I didn’t know existed until now)
I would prefer student of military history to armchair general, but whatever label makes you feel good.
However, there is a huge difference between getting your butt handed to you by a superior enemy in spite of using sound tactics and getting your butt handed to you by an inferior enemy because you’re behaving like a moron. They’re supposed to be an army of the future, but as depicted they’d get shredded by the army depicted in Saving Private Ryan. I’m happy to suspend disbelief about some things, but this I can’t.
Also, the Bugs were just a more credible enemy in the books, having their own technology and weapons and ships and everything, rather than their evident space travel being rocks flung across space (as described in the movie). The book does freely admit that the reason they got hosed so badly at Klendathu was because they bit off too much: Launching a huge coordinated simultaneous assault with a huge number of ships at high speed trying to use the same limited amount of space in orbit over Klendathu.
Things basically went pear-shaped because they didn’t actually have the capability for such an operation, at least not without more preparation, and mass confusion ensued as each screw-up made things progressively worse.
Interestingly enough, one of the few things to happen in both the book and the movie are the two starships colliding over Klendathu.
Which resembles galleons at sea bumping into each other as opposed to the high speed dropping ships in the book.
I enjoyed Roughnecks as it more faithful to the books although the plot was designed to be serial. But still they had the Skinnies and something resembling a power suit.
The only trouble is at times the series got a bit repetitive. I think the water planet episodes were nothing but ski boat chases.
Very good points and you are right, it is doubtful he is blameless. However I was replying to someone who clearly thought Verhoeven had written it as the quote I used from that poster was:
The point being, that he didn’t actually write it.
I retain an element of doubt though, mainly due to the fact that they had previously worked on ‘Robocop’ together and for that film the script was written and sold to a production company before it was assigned to Verhoeven.
Again, it is arguable that Verhoeven didn’t need to. He didn’t write the screenplay and no-one here (including me) has come up with a source saying who came up with the idea to differ from the plot of the book.
But it was clearly just showing that sheer strength of numbers can overrun a technically superior enemy. There are clear references to the film ‘Zulu’, which was based on the real-world events of Rorke’s Drift.
Surely a “student of military history” would know this?
I actually can’t think of any Jewish characters offhand. Johnny Rico is, of course, Filipino. It’s hinted in Tunnel In The Sky (and explicit in Heinlein’s letters) that the protagonist is black. At least one of the officers in Space Cadet is black, something that no one mentions until most of the way through the book.
Love the bit about how “Heinlein’s way of fighting prejudice was to demonstrate that anyone, regardless of nationality or ethnicity or creed, could think and speak exactly like a middle-class WASP American male.” That hits the nail on the head, I think. Still extremely progressive for his time, and no worse than average today.
Me too. Had Campbell not gone so nutty at the end of his career, I think we’d award the “Campbells” instead of the “Hugos”.
To be fair, you might read a few of his pre-1970 works, then a few after, and be aware that they change drastically. Stranger In A Strange Land is kind of a bridge between the two.
I recall a story about this that the ST writers wrote TTWT and only after writing it realized that someone had unconsciously ripped off RAH. They called him up and he was very gracious about it, noting that he’d stolen the idea himself from a much earlier story called Pigs is Pigs where guinea pigs overrun a town. He didn’t want any financial compensation or credit, just a copy of the script signed by the authors. Since these authors had grown up reading Heinlein’s juvies, they felt that was the highest praise he could have given.
WHAT? How can you possibly put Red Planet and Space Cadet entirely at the bottom? That’s madness!
And yes, this starts fights like crazy. Shows the level of love and nostalgia about the books that people feel so strongly about it.
There’s a work entitled Grumbles from the Grave that has a number of unpublished or uncollected Heinlein works* alongside essays written about him by the likes of Larry Niven and Spider Robinson. There was a whole generation of science-fiction writers who grew up on his juveniles, and there will be more; my dad (b. 1959) got started on Tunnel In The Sky, he got me (b. 1988) started on Red Planet, Space Cadet, and Orphans in the Sky, and I recently bought a couple cheap paperbacks of The Rolling Stones and Red Planet for my mother’s (a third grade teacher) classroom bookshelf.
*Including A Tenderfoot in Space, a juvenile novella about a Scout and his dog on Venus. If you loved the juveniles and you haven’t read this, do yourself a favor.
While I don’t think I’d use Asimov as an example of someone who learned to write slowly (first published at 19, and wrote Nightfall just two years later), you’re absolutely right that Heinlein’s earliest work is excellent. Life-Line reads like the work of an experienced author, not a first-timer.
Technically superior? Give me a break. This is a large part of the problem. The Mobile Infantry in the movie has barely more firepower than the defenders at Rourke’s Drift. They can travel through interstellar space, but their army doesn’t sport any weapons heavier than assault rifles. It’s ridiculous.
One of my favorite moments in Heinlen’s books was when Number of the Beast got rather meta when the characters ended up making a list of books that they had read, and whether they liked them or not (it makes sense in context). One of the characters reads the list and says “I won’t embarrass the two of you who liked Stranger in a Strange Land by asking you to name yourselves.” Then the characters got into a discussion as to whether or not Heinlen had lost his sense when he wrote it, and considered tracking him down and asking him. 
For what it’s worth, my dad loved Stranger in a Strange Land. I didn’t. My dad claimed it was because I was “Too Catholic” 