No need to take this to the Pit, Yondan, unless that’s what you want. I was intending to engage in an intellectual dicussion.
1.) Sexuality – The big H had no problem with embracing sexuality, or in portraying his characters as sexually active and pro-sex. In fact, I complain in another thread that his female characters are too unbelievable, and it’s partly because of their extremely high and easy sex drive – not that I don’t thoink women are as pro-sex as men, but because his women too often rsemble male sex fantasies rather than real people.
No, the problem is that Heinlein had a very definite sexual structure in mind, and that required a very disciplined sexual separation in the armed forces, with ritualized behavior between the when on active duty that the movie tossed out the window.
2.) Military Stupidity – Heinlein was an active Navy man before WWII and a reservist the rest of his life. His second wife as military, too. Although he clearly thought that there could be stupidity in the military (stupidity is ubiquitous), he didn’t feel the military was inrinsically dumb an made consistently stupid policies. Bt the movies seems to show a military that is consistently and criminally stupid and selfserving. I can understand the movie’s doing away with the body armor (It lets you show the actrs emoting, smething hard to do in a metal can. Aso, it givs you an imression of danger and menace when they’re o the battlefield – if you show the soldiers wrapped up in their own private tanks it’s ard to feel that sense. Finally, they didnt need still more CGI effects hadaches.) But it doesn’t make any sense to then throw such poorly protected, highly trained and expensively equipped soldiers again verwhelming hordes of enemy soldiers th don’t cost the enemy anything at all. That sort of calls for carpet bombing. They d this at one point in the film, but they don’t do it enough. And what was the point of such flimsy, open forts? Or sending more soldiers into them once they fail? Or the lack of aerial support (They don’t have any!) Or the criminl stupidity of that over-crowded space-drop barrage in when they attack the planet?
3.) But the worst offense is Heinlein’s mind-set of the military and the government. They re shown as deliberately choosing to ignore any sort of non-military solution or settlement (this is, in fact, the point of Joe Haldeman’s book The Forever War, which has always seemed to me to be the post-Vietnam answer to Starship Troopers. And if Verhoeven and company wanted to tell that story, they should’ve bought the rights to that book.). The soldiers and the leaders are driven bythoughts of revenge and visceral emotio, rather than rational thought. Read the book again, that’s the diametric opposite of Heinlein’s ideal military. The leadership’s lack of thought for the footsoldier is also directly against sections in the book that explicitly show the leader’s need to consider their soldier’s best interests. Finally, there is a considered and deliberate tendency to assciate the military with the worst sort of fascism – those nazi-like uniforms, attitudes, and grey and black uniforms are very deliberate invocation of the Nazis. If you could ever doubt such a thing (It’s incredibly heavy-handed symbolism), Verhoeven dispels any doubts on the DVD commentary. Yet Heinlein’s political system in the book is neither fascist nr military. It’s ne that has never been tried, ad one which Heinlein depicts as a plausible development from a real historical possibility. Heinlein has “constructed” lots of posible political systems in his books (in most of them, in fact, although they’re uncommonly heavy in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and ** Expanded Universe**), but that doesn’t mean he advocates any of these. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that thi one was closest to his own feelings. The system shown in the film most certainly would not have been.
By th way, this point has been argued a lot on the SDMB. Do a search through past columns (and you don’t hav to go that ar into the past), and you’ll find plenty of arguments about ST. Almost all of it condemnng the film as a very poor interpretation of Heinlein’s book.
