I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.\u00a0 And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.\u00a0 Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.\u00a0 If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn\u2019t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein\u2019s book.\u00a0 In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.\u00a0 Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein\u2019s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.\u00a0 He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.<\/p>\n
And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.\u00a0 Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein\u2019s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein\u2019s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.\u00a0 This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.<\/p>\n
Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven\u2019s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book\u2019s interpretation of the story.\u00a0 I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein\u2019s story.\u00a0 This seems a wildly absurd idea.\u00a0 If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?<\/p>\n
Now I can\u2019t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.\u00a0 His original fans have aged pretty radically.\u00a0 And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.\u00a0 So, I wouldn\u2019t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.<\/p>\n
But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn\u2019t be shocked if it was extremely popular.\u00a0 There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.\u00a0 If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.<\/p>\n
Honestly, I\u2019m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.\u00a0 Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I\u2019m sure they\u2019re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.\u00a0 But I guess I\u2019m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.\u00a0 Fingers crossed.<\/p>\n