Apologies, didn’t read the post clearly enough. I was distinguishing between the psi guy working in the front line and somebody who only served back at base.
As you say, the guy mapping the tunnels was an officer and therefore in Federal service but I don’t see why his service is any less hazardous and demanding than that of Carl as a researcher on Pluto or Carmen in her ship - or even Juan in the MI. A quick check in the book shows he was not only on the battlefield without armour but - to do his work - he repeatedly took off his breathing mask in an area knowing the atmosphere was dangerous.
Exactly. And I never suggested it was satirizing Heinlein; I said it was satirizing American imperialism. It’s also satirizing the American political culture, and WWII movies, and pro-military propaganda in general. AFAIK, Verhoeven probably saw it as more of a Neumeier work than a Heinlein work; I doubt he gave Heinlein much thought at all. He worked from the screenplay Neumeier gave him.
All Federal service leading to citizenship was hazardous, whether it was military or not. It was designed that way. You could wind up field-testing survival gear on Titan, or a laborer in the Terranizing of Venus. To quote the recruiting officer - “A term of service isn’t a kiddie camp; it’s either real military service, rough and dangerous even in peacetime…or a most unreasonable facsimile thereof.”
The one thing that floored me that hasn’t been mentioned yet is how Johnny got promoted from private to Lieutenant commanding the Roughnecks on a whim. No promoting the lead sergeant, no bringing in an experienced officer - lets just give the movie star the job. Completely skipped over Johnny attending OCS, and how only experienced soldiers with combat experience were ever promoted to officers, and the whole 3rd Lieutenant business.
Which in the book is the capstone of the whole Father/Son thing. The transition from ignorance to knowledge, from apathy to responsibility is beautifully played out.
Slight hijack: Don’t google Rodger Young. While his story is inspiring, his appearance is much too close to that of a certain company clerk from a certain Korean war based sitcom.
I wish I had a better cite, but all I have is wikipedia, which says:
“A report in an American Cinematographer article around the same time as the film’s release states the Heinlein novel was optioned well into the pre-production period of the film, which had a working title of Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine; most of the writing team reportedly were unaware of the novel at the time. According to the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven never finished reading the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both “bored and depressed.””
Which I think effectively puts paid to lissener’s thesis that it is a parody. An effective parody (Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels come quickly to mind as classic parodies) is founded in a deep knowledge of what is being parodied.
Verhoeven and his screenwriter clearly did not have a clue of what they were doing except make a shoot-em-up-with-beefcake-and-boobs space flic. Just as everyone else’s been maintaining.
I wouldn’t go that far; the satirical element is there as well. It’s just, as others have pointed out, an extraordinarily bad and ill-defined satire. The characters are all presented as Nazis. Is this a satirical dig at Heinlein? Evidently not, as Verhoeven admits he doesn’t know Heinlein from Adam. Is it a dig at militarism? If so, it’s so crude and superficial as to be meaningless (also, I think history would view the Nazis much more favorably if they really had been defending us all from swarms of giant brain-eating tarantulas). Is the entire movie a spoof on the glorification of militarism by Hollywood and the media in general? If so, it fails because it’s effectively indistinguishable from the target it aims to satirize; plenty of other movie soldiers are just as dumb as Verhoeven’s.
In a way, Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers reminds me of the modern slew of “[Genre] Movie” film satires by Friedberg and Seltzer. It operates on the same level of critical thought as a really lazy Mad Magazine spoof.
Look Lissener we get it. You think that Verbhoeven is without a doubt the greatest film director to ever yell CUT! But you can’t blame all the stupidity in Verhoeven’s starship troopers on the screen writer. When a review of the movie (linked above) contains things like
Somebody on the on the set gave the actors Direction as to where to walk, and how far apart to walk and stuff like that that. Now I am not an expert on movie making so maybe someone could tell me who’s job it is to DIRECT actors on the set. Is it the screenwriter’s job? That doesn’t sound right.
Is it the best boy’s job? I have no idea what a best boy does, [del]but I’ll bet some of our[/del] I’ll guess no.
Is it just maybe the director’s job? From what little I know about making movies, he is the guy that says you go here, walk to here and do this and deliver your line. The director is also the guy that tell the special effect department that I want the CGI bug to go here, not over there.
So Verhoeven’s starship troopers doesn’t stand up even if you don’t compare it to Heinlein’s novel.
I don’t remember the brain bugs in the book. I remember two castes of bugs they encountered - workers and warriors. They were indistinguishable, except that workers ran away from you and were totally non-aggressive, while the warriors would attack you with energy weapons.
The bugs in the book were portrayed as a technological society capable of diplomacy - at the beginning of the book they are allied with the skinnies, but by the end of the book the skinnies are allied with the humans. I think they were capable of communication with other races, otherwise they couldn’t be friends with the skinnies. The bugs had bugs, trains, cities, etc.
The crowds of MI and drop ships were a big departure. The MI in the book were described as very rarely being within direct visual range of the other soldiers - they would move in formations where each soldier was at least 1000 meters from the next guy, so they couldn’t all be taken out with one nuke. The MI were fired individually out of tubes on the ships and free fell most of the way into orbit in a shell that was designed to fall apart at lower altitude and fill the enemy radar with false images. I believe there were some chutes to slow descent, but the MI landed under their own powerful and were capable of flying thousands of yards. They were armed with energy weapons and tactical nuke launchers.
Oddly, I really like the movie, but I don’t see it as having anything to do with the book, I just like the bugs and boobs and stupidity and violence. It’s a lot of fun, but a faithful adaptation of the book would be one of the most badass movies ever.
IIRC there was a brain bug in the book, in Johnny’s first drop as a Lieutenant, the brain bug was captured by one man working alone, his name was Zim.* (my book is in storage, so I can’t check, did I get this right?)
*Sgt Zim was Johnny’s drill Sargent in basic training.
Yup, that’s it. The whole drop on Planet P was to capture royalty castes - brains and queens. Normally they’d have just had the fleet render it uninhabitable by Man or Bug.
And in the book, Zim was also Johnny’s platoon Sergeant when he dropped as a 3rd Lieutenant - he was still in OCS. Because the platoon leader who was supposed to be his examining officer got sick, the battalion commander (Blackie’s Blackguards) decided to let Johnny lead the platoon, under his and Zim’s watchful eyes. We don’t get told that his platoon sergeant was Zim until the very end of the battle though. And afterwards, Zim gets a battlefield commission. That probably wouldn’t have worked in the movie, since it would have been difficult to hide the platoon sergeant’s identity.
On the question of whether Federal Service necessarily meant military service: the case that this is so, is made very strongly in this essay (PDF) by James Gifford.
In it, he analyzes every line in the book which provides evidence either way, and concludes that the only reasonable explanation is that all service is indeed military; some of it consists of ‘non-combatant auxiliary services’ but always dangerous and exposed to the enemy. If you were completely unfit for any kind of real military work, you would be given a dangerous make-work task like field-testing experimental space suits. There is no indication anywhere that civil service could include non-military jobs such as working in a geriatric hospital, or delivering mail, or being a government bureaucrat.
To be fair, however, there is one strong argument for the other side:
Neat essay. He did leave out one line that I alluded to above - when Johnny is filling out his preferences form he says (paraphrasing, because I don’t have the book in front of me, but I read through this part last night) “I didn’t care if I wound up (doing something) or a laborer in the Terranizing of Venus. Either one was a booby prize.” It’s hard to justify laboring on the Terranizing of Venus as a military endeavor - it’s no doubt dangerous, brutal, exhausting labor, but has no immediate or long term military application.
Unless, of course, Terraforming Venus includes subduing the hostile underground lifeforms in ways that include lots of visually appealing explosions and nudity.
True to form, Hollywood followed up the financial success of the first movie with a forgettable second movie (which also had a brief topless/nudity shot, which is all I remember about it).
That doesn’t sound right.