IIRC the reason that the pilots were female was that they had better reactions than the men.
Another thing I disliked about the movie (aside from all the other good points listed upthread) was that the Bugs main weapon in space, or against planets, is…they shit rocks. That’s it. They literally poop hunks of granite into space. I mean, on the ground they were fearsome enough and believable foes but as an interstellar force I wasn’t buying it. No spaceships. No technology.
Everyone has covered the main points pretty well but the thing that bothered me (once you get past the fact that Verhoeven essentially pissed lighter fluid all over the book and threw a match) is the tactics. Starship Troopers the book is the prototypical military sf; the concepts that Heinlein introduced would be mimicked by just about everyone to follow in his footsteps. The movie on the other hand has characters attack a planet by dropping thousands of people down in the middle of no where with no briefing, no intelligence, no artillery, and no air support. They then mill around until the enemy shows up where they plan consists of “Get them!” And this is done repeatedly.
I also think Verhoeven did a bad job with the concepts he tried to strap on to Starship Troopers but that’s not the question you asked so I’ll let that pass.
Stranger On A Train, I stand corrected.
Let me take a shot at the other two things An Gadaí asked about:
Johnny Rico is a youngster, just out of school. Throughout the book he has various relationships with various father-figures.
His enlistment is, among other things, a rebellion against his father, who would have preferred that he join the family business. He says at one point, “if I didn’t, I would spend the rest of my life wondering if I was anything but the boss’s son.” (Later in the book, they meet and are reconciled.)
Various teachers: his schoolteacher, his drill sergeant, the commandant of the boot camp, the commandant of the Officer Candidate School.
Various superiors: Sgt Jelal and Lt Raczac when he is a private, his sergeant and his captain when he is becomes a lieutenant.
Mostly it’s biology. Heinlein views the conflicts between nations as a darwinian struggle for survival.
He also gives you his views of the psychology of soldiers and their comrades, the relationship between commander and subordiate. And the sociology of a military unit, and the nation that supports it. This also tends to generate pavlovian responses, and gets him accused of fascism.
By the way: In the movie, the Bugs use asteroids as weapons. Verhoven took this idea from Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But Verhoven neglected to do the math.
In the book, the Mobile Infantry were specifically compared to fighter pilots - highly trained specialists who might only see a few hours of actual combat in their entire career. They were normally dropped into combat from orbit in reentry capsules, carried assortments of sensors and heavy weaponry, and were very maneuverable.
In the movie, well, I guess they at least had better aim than Imperial Storm Troopers.
Another major departure from the book was the movie’s treatment of the bugs. In the book, they were never portrayed as dumb. The were a space faring species controlling many worlds, and used spaceships and beam weapons.
Which is a near-capital offense when adapting Heinlein.
Yeah, one of the things that the movie got almost completely backwards is that in the book, the Mobile Infantry is an elite force. In a fight between advanced interstellar forces, most military engagements take place at distances measured in light-minutes, and are generally nuclear in nature. Only when there’s a reason for a surgical strike do you send in individual soldiers, so those guys are some of the best you have.
In the movie, the infantry was the worst kind of cannon fodder. Totally backwards.
And the jumpsuits would have been such a cinematic spectacle. I hope someone, someday, adapts the book a tad closer to the text, just so I can see the Mobile Infantry working like it was supposed to.
I just wanted to elaborate on the points raised here. RAH, in Starship Troopers was giving his own answer to the age-old question: What does the State owe the individual and vice-versa? His answer in Troopers was to say that unless the individual was willing to give something for the State, he/she has no right in deciding policy for the State. As was noted in the book, people who cannot vote aren’t really discriminated against, they simply have no say in formulating policy. It’s a very effective check against the “bread and circuses” mentality that RAH often railed against throughout his writing career.
I cannot say if I fully agree with this or not, but it is certainly and unique and fascinating answer. One which the movie completely glosses over.
Despite their Hugo awards, I have no love for Stranger, Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, or any of his sf that came after them.
But, ya know, Heinlein was still the greatest sf writer of the 40s and 50s. So give his earlier stuff a try if you get a chance, including the juveniles such as Tunnel in the Sky.
And here’s bit of rambling…
Starship Troopers I haven’t read in 30 years, but…
I remember that ultimately his philosophical justifications for his militaristic society were based on two analogies that contradicted each other and were spaced far enough apart that you might not notice the conflict.
Hopefully, I won’t be asked for a cite but in one chapter he needed to justify independent action, and he did that by pointing out that humans weren’t unthinking creatures (such as insects).
And then later when he had to justify hierarchy he declared that even insects understood the need to subordinate themselves to the hive.
One of the analogies was pretty good and he prefaced it with the character saying that analogies were tricky. The other analogy was weak and he tried to slip it through unnoticed.
I would just like to point out that Johnny did not know that his instructor in H&MP was ex-military, he just knew he was a citizen. He did not find out that his instructor was ex-infantry until he got a letter from the Col. while in basic and his drill Sargent asked him about the return address.
Also to Echo what Stranger said above, the infantry was Johnny’s very last choice. He wanted to be a pilot, didn’t get that and on his wish list was a bunch of stuff, the last two being dog handler and infantry. He didn’t get dog handler.
In the book the Mobile Infantry was well mobile. They were highly trained, and highly motivated. In the movie they were cannon fodder. The movie tactics were Hey diddle diddle, right up the middle. Add to that weapons that took an entire clip to kill one bug.
Whereas the marauder suits could carry nukes. 
“Of course we had known that he must be a veteran since History & Moral Philosophy must be taught by a citizen. But an M.I.? He didn’t look it. Prissy, faintly scorned, a dancing-master type – not one of us apes.” pg 74
An impossibility that glaring makes me think that he’s flat-out incapable of doing the math.
If you let him in the house, make sure that he wipes off his boots first.
Definitely two different things. A clarification: Verhoeven didn’t write the screenplay. He was given the completed screenplay by Edward Neumeier, and took his ideas and starting points from that. He had no particular “loyalty” to the book, because he hadn’t read it; it was strictly a screenplay as far as he was concerned. So many of the departures are Neumeier’s; Verhoeven was actually pretty faithful to the material he was working with. That said, Neumeier obviously saw the germs of some political ideas in the source novel that Heinlein had not, of course, intended. The movie is not really an adaptation of a book; it’s a satire about war, which takes the bare bones of Heinlein’s novel as a starting point. The movie is more “about” American military imperialism, than it is “about” the book. Obviously, people who love the book were disappointed that the movie didn’t duplicate the experience that the book gave them. But judged on its own merits, as a political satire, it’s a pretty flawless piece of work.
As to the scientific criticism, it’s about as much a hard SF movie as the early Flash Gordon serials. The practical validity of the science is not nearly as important as the story or effect.
As I understand it, the original script had nothing to do with the book at all - but because the legal department recognized some similarities between “Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine” and the novel, they bought the title from Heinlein’s estate, and changed the names of the characters in the script. A similar sequence of events led to the movie called “I, Robot”
Huh, I’d never heard that. Do you have a cite? I’d be interested to see it.
Then Neumeier is the one that must be hunted down and dealt with. Verhoeven will merely be…re-educated.
Does the Book have any reference to Psi-Ops and Brain Bugs or is that entirely a movie creation?
FWIW, Neumeier’s the one who’s made a franchise out of it: he’s written both sequels, and directed the latest one. Verhoeven was only marginally involved; i.e., he allowed his name to be used for marketing.
In case you haven’t seen it, a review of the movie. Well worth the click.
Brain Bugs - yes. Psi-Ops - no.
This is entirely too big a topic to be handled in even a couple of posts. You really do have to read the book to appreciate how fully screwed over it was by the movie. As I’ve said before, in several threads (including one currently up), the movie has talen so many of Heinlein’s things – philosophy, scientiofic accuracy, story, position of the military – and flipped them by 1890 degrees that this is the hugest mismatch between the original source and the resulting film. And I include everything you wanted to know about sex in that blanket statement.
Heinlein’s novel was, he claims, originally intended as a juvenile, although I kinda suspect he didn’t really mean it. He was having lots of disagreements with his publisher of many years, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he consciously or unconsciously wrote this in a way to piss them off and end the relationship. Nothing extant supports that interpretation, AFAIK, but there’s little doubt that he knew of the explosive nature of his book. He’d covered the same sort of ground earlier with his (definitely juvenile) novel Space Cadet, with his story of the raw recruit who becomes a soldier, but there’s a difference between the two.
Heinlein has also liked playing with models of government (and of economies), throughout his career – look at Tunnel in the Sky, or the essays in Expanded Universe, or the various proposals in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – but the system he came up with for Starship Troopers is, I strongly suspect, one dear to his heart. For one thing it’s the only one of his proposed polities that he subsequently argued about and defended. Requiring your prospective voters to pay for the privilege, or to solve a quadriatic equation sounds like a fun exercise, but requiring public service has a practical ring to it that, I suspect, really appealed to Heinlein the military man.
The novel isn’t perfect – it’s gotten plenty of criticism through the years, and you can find some of it on the Net. Heck, just look up Alexei Panshin’s website. James Blish and Alexei Panshin took Heinlein to task over his story, and you can read their comments. I suspect screenwriter Neumeier did, because he plays the opening exactly as Panshin describes it – like a Recruiting Film.
I agree that there are problems with Heinlein’s book, but I also agree that it’s an incredible piece of writing. I’ve got it on audiodisc in my car. Heinlein writes about his “mobile infantry” as if it’s real, and his descriptions not only of the weapons and the way they work convincing, so are the strategy and tactics of using them.
So when Veerhoeven has the MI go down with its non-Power-Suited soldiers to a planet literally crawling with tank-like armored Bugs that require multiple shots to disable, you know that he’s severely misrepresenting the book. That would require a monumental death-wish among the military commanders, or a desire for pointless human massacre. The bugs in Heinlein’s book are about 6’ in size, both workers and soldiers, and the Brain Bugs (which don’t have brain-sucking appendages coming out of suspiciously sex-organ shaped openings) are about the same size. The MI really does have a fighting chance. If they encountered anything like the movie shows, they really would have nuked the site from orbit.
Heinlein’s instructors are a lot less brutal than what was onscreen – Instructor Zim in the film is shgwn deliberately breaking the recruit’s arm, and putting a throwing knife through another’s hand to illustrate a point. These are downright perversions of the events described in the book – as bad as having Harry Gondorf in The Sting making a point by pulling out a gun and blowing away Ray Walston, say.
Lastly, the scientific illiteracy of the film really rankles, seeing as Heinlein was one of the best writers for keeping to scientific accuracy (within the limita allowed by the “imaginary science” that made the story possible in the first place), without being heavy-handed about it. Heinlein himself said in one of his books about how it’s easy to tell in space if you’re on a collision course with something (its relative bearing doesn’t change) and what you can do to prevent a collision (practicall any course shift, provided it’s made early enough). So when they have the Rodger Young just barely avoiding a massive collision with a Bug Asteroid it’s adding insult to injury. Carmen Ibanez, rather than being one of the best up-and-coming pilots, should be seen as a rank amateur for allowing such a situation to develop. Her captain, Deladier, ought to be up for review herself for letting such an incompetant run the ship. And the damned asteroid – shot out by mechancal forces a third of a galaxy from Earth – ought never to be a danger to the solar system within human lifetimes. That this took out their communications tower, preventing them from cmmunicating with Earth about the approaching asteroid, is so unbelievably clumsy an explanation for how this could have come upon mankind without warning that these guys ought never to make another science fiction film. (Gee, you don’t think that the forces involved in bouncing off a starship, multiplied by distances measured in light years, would result in the asteroid missing not merely the earth, but also the entire solar system, do you?)
It’s jusy mind-bogglingly unbelievably stupid. Worse, it’s insultingly stupid. It’s as if, in the movie Master and Commander, the screenwriter and director had Captain Aubrey cleverly make his ship go faster by having his men exhaling into the sails, and fanning them. It’s as if they had Maturin performing surgery with acupuncture and magic, and hypnotizing the men to make them more obedient to Aubrey. And then, to top it off, it’s as if they had these military men of the sea making up their own orders, and using their ship to storm Denver, Colorado. You’d be a bit peeved about a film like that, and who could blame you? And if somebody asked you where it diverged from Patrick O’Brien’s books, you’d say “Where do I begin?”