I just finally got around to reading Starship Troopers.
And my conclusion is: excellent book, but would be really hard to make into any kind of a decent film anyway, because…
Whole lotta Troopers before you get to the Starship.
Most of the book comprises Rico’s musing and monologue about what military service is and what it means. It’s great stuff and eminently readable, but how could you faithfully film it?
It would be One Guy Talking for nearly the whole movie, then the action (which nearly all happens in the last 20% or so of the book) would be actually quite similar to the Starship Troopers movie we already have (OK, it would actually still be better, because: Orbital Drops and Powered Suits).
Relevant points, but I don’t think you have proven what you think you have proven.
What you have actually proven is that it is not possible to film an accurate adaptation of the book and have it be a good movie. This is not the same thing as “you cannot take the concepts in the book and make a good movie ‘based on’ the book.” Because, as you say, Orbital Drops and Powered Suits.
I think an excellent movie could be made from the book, more or less as written. It would not be a tentpole blockbuster full of 'splosions nor please the mechwar fanboys. But I know that the philosophical basis could be blended with the main character’s POV and the training and battle sequences because I wrote the treatment that way a decade ago, to prove it could be done.
Yes, it could have been a much better movie, but people would still be disappointed. It’s too thoughtful a work to be faithfully represented in film that would be worth watching
It’s been a while since I’ve read the book, but couldn’t you film it by turning One Guy Talking into Several Guys Talking? In other words, rewrite the musings and thoughts and monologue of the one character as dialogue and conversation and argument among several characters?
As noted, it would still be a lot talkier than a straight-up action movie, and it might well be a hard sell because of that.
You’ve got to be kidding. That, or unable to think past tentpole 'splosionfests on your scale of “good,” “worth doing” or “worth watching.”
You’ve seen, say… 2001? Moon? Even the George Clooney Solaris? Blade Runner, fa chrissakes? Gravity isn’t even a bad one to add to the list - the haters seem to hate it because it’s not a Spielberg-Bay-Bruckheimerfest and overlook that it’s a magnificent and subtle character study.
Yeah, to be honest, I get quite a bit of pleasure watching the movie as it was made, no matter how silly it is. I don’t come away with any sort of enlightenment, though.
Conversely, I agree with this. Successful thoughtful sci-fi has been done, which means that one could have made something thoughtful out of Starship Troopers. They just didn’t do that at all.
What I like about books is the give you the ability to get inside another persons head and to see the world they way they do. The more different that point of view than your own the better. That is why Starship Troopers was a good book. It let you into the head of someone doing something utterly alien but at the same time the point of view was very real and relatable.
Movies on the other hand are all exterior, and you get to know the characters by their actions and the interactions with other characters. A book like Starship Troopers is very hard to adapt for that reason. I liked Starship Troopers the movie because of the way it worked on two different levels, each one playing off the other, while neither really won. The movie was a commentary on the book’s point of view, but the plot of the book was a commentary on the movie’s point of view and the movie kept enough of the plot to make that clear.
I just wish the book was longer and the movie shorter.
Then don’t. But find someone who will be faithful to the spirit of the book, and the things we like about the book. Find someone who thinks powered armour is awesome, and likes the idea of Heinlein’s noble soldier even if they don’t think it could happen in real life. Verhoeven let his contempt for the source material get in the way of making a good movie, and that’s why his movie is shit.
I was going to say more or less the same thing. I think the existing movie was a good movie made from the Starship Troopers book. It certainly wasn’t a faithful adaptation, but faithful adaptations are over-rated anyways.
Lots of great movies have used voiceovers as a substitute for internal dialog. Goodfellas, Full Metal Jacket, Blade Runner…
Full Metal Jacket is interesting as it also had a long ‘boot camp’ sequence complete with a voiceover narration describing what was going on. I could easily see a good Starship Troopers movie using that technique.
It doesn’t have to be completely true to the book, but it shouldn’t turn the entire premise of the book upside down. If you don’t like the themes in a book, make a satire of it but don’t make a movie that claims to be based on the book, using the author’s good name and reputation to sell it while simultaneously mocking everything the author was trying to say.
If Heinlein had been alive, he would have stopped that production. He probably could have sued on moral copyright grounds.
One of the reasons Ayn Rand’s books never made it to the big screen until long after her death was that she kept very tight control over any script to make sure that Hollywood wouldn’t do to her works what they did to ‘Starship Troopers’ - buy the rights to a book and then use the movie to mock it.
