Hey, it followed me home from school!
One of the sad things about cinema is when it tries and utterly fails to translate a good book into a movie. I don’t know how many folks realized that happened with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (Jackson, it was all about temptation, not killing orcs!), but I think anyone familiar with the source material knows it happened with Starship Troopers (1997) as compared to the eponymous book by Robert Heinlein. True, there are characters by the same name in book & movie, and most of those that die in the book also die in the movie – albeit in differing ways.
Hey, they even briefly touched on the primary theme of the book, which had to do with the idea of making service, be it military or otherwise, be a necessary condition of receiving the right to vote.
But that’s really the heart of the book, the reason Heinlein wrote it. The movie? Not so much. The movie’s really all about anger and killing orcs monstrous bugs and all the nasty ways bugs can kill humans.
Oh, and sex. And getting brains sucked out.
I understand, the book was written in the 1950s, and certainly some of the cultural mores in the book are jarring to modern audiences. Sort of like The Odyssey, ya know? But add in the erratic characters and scant characterizations, and in the end this was really a disappointment.
But the special effects are great on the big screen.
While looking for a picture, I see some folks laud it as a great anti-militarism movie, a satire. It may, in fact, be such a thing. But it doesn’t help the cause of this particular sect of critics that the movie essentially ignores the intellectual subject that Heinlein was deftly introducing to the 12 year old boys who probably made up the initial fandom for this book, and substitution is hardly a valid intellectual approach. If you’re gonna satirize something, please don’t steal someone else’s intellectual property in order to do so.
I still see it as a splashy, poorly done mess. If I want well done satire, gimme Buckaroo Banzai!
