Book better than the movie (no surprise)

[Josh]

It's not really a surprise when someone says that the book is better than the movie, that's usually a given. I absolutely hated the way they ruined the MI's armor. Robert H created this magnificent hulking armored warrior with robotic power armor, in my mind looking an awful lot like Warhammer 40K space marines, and the movie made the armor little more than a vest and helmet. The movie also ducked out on the father/son story line. I cannot overstate how big of a disappointment the movie was comparatively.

[Jon]

Verhoeven is hit or miss as a film maker and this was definitely a miss. He was trying to spoof WWII movies and that's why the invasion of the bug's home world played out like a D Day movie. FTL spaceships to get the troops there, but no armour or high weaponry once they disembark. I sat there thinking "Didn't anyone think to pack a tank"

[Budd]

yet, for some reason, I still like the movie. I get the Vorhoeven was trying to spoof the genre or military, but it doesnt work, because he fails you get this overly cheesy b scifi movie with great special effects (that still hold up, I might add). The movie is a different beast, but looked at seperately from the novel, I think it is enjoyable.

[[deleted user]]

I haven't read the book but I saw the movie and noticed some interested sci-fi elements in it. It's overwhleming obvious nowadays that producers and directors use successful books as a vehicle to make money, nothing more. They also probably made the soldier's armor crappy because they wanted to be cheap. They didnt care about authenticity.

[Josh]

@Budd: The problem is you go in with certain expectations because of the title. There's an implied promise of similarity to the source material. You don't name a movie All Quiet on the Western Front and make it a quirky buddy comedy about two guys trying to start a restaurant in Harlem. I feel like if the title had been different I might have walked away from the movie going,'oh, that was an interesting movie.' But the fact that I came into hoping for a specific experience and leaving with something so far off base it was almost unrecognizable ruined it for me. Same situation with the World War Z movie. The whole time I was watching it all I could think was, 'this might be enjoyable if they weren't sodomizing a wonderful piece of literature.'

[Kevin]

**SPOILERS ALERT**Since I washed the movie before reading the book, I was astonished upon finding out Dizzy Flores was a guy instead of a girl. It blew my mind when I found out the father also enlisted to the mobile infantry. And then Carl dies?! The movie is nothing like the book.

[Brett]

I watched the movie when I was about halfway through with the book, and I actually liked the movie better than the book. In retrospect, though, I should have finished the book before watching the movie. I now have a hard time keeping the stories straight. The movie had much more action and fewer characters, and for me that made it more enjoyable.

[CD]

Kind of wonder what brought this topic up again nearly 20 years after the movie was released??

Even at the time it was first released it was kind of a joke at best. For some reason it has seen its reputation as a SF movie improve. The lead actor Van Dien was then and still is just a budget version of Jean Claude Van Damme and even that isn't saying much! Coupled with Doogie Howser, teenage doctor, Charlie Sheen former (yet to be at the time) wife and one of the worst Bond girls ever, Denise Richard, this was turkey before the opening credits rolled.

Coupled with the directors not so subtle, whether intended or not, fascist/Nazi themes throughout the film it is a disaster. Watchable, yes. Worth watching, no.

Then there are the Sequels!! Yes there are sequels. I've watched a total of maybe 10 minutes of the next two sequels. Wow. Bad doesn't even begin to describe them. I like really bad horror movies. The two Starship Trooper follow ups don't even rate that high.

This whole film grouping just proves that cheese can cost a lot of money if for no reason other than foolish consumers.

[Woflmao]

CD wrote: "Coupled with the directors not so subtle, whether intended or not, fascist/Nazi themes throughout the film it is a disaster. Watchable, yes. Worth watching, no."

The whole movie had a satirical touch to it, especially the political themes. In this sense, the fascist theme of the film was indeed intended. (The book, on the other hand, seems to take itself tragically serious.)

[CD]

Woflmao wrote: "CD wrote: "Coupled with the directors not so subtle, whether intended or not, fascist/Nazi themes throughout the film it is a disaster. Watchable, yes. Worth watching, no."

The whole movie had a ..."

I wouldn't say satirical as much as camp.

[Daniel]

I think the movie's a lot of fun. Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it bears virtually no relationship to the book apart from a few characters' names. But I don't see why someone can't simply like two different things.

Of course, if you went into the movie expecting anything resembling a real movie (well made, good acting, good dialogue, etc) you'd probably be miserable.

[John]

I believe that there is a remake in the pipeline that's planned to be much closer to the book

[Susie]

I loathed the movie not so much for the silly armor and the fact that Dizzy Flores was female, but because of the fascist thing. If anything the book is very pro-democracy, RAH just adds a condition attached to attain full citizenship. The government is not seen to be oppressive in any way, nor is it conducting military adventures, it is just that RAH wanted to stress the idea that citizenship requires some effort as well as just being born and reaching a certain age. I wish I had a teacher like Lt. Col Dubois

[Andrea]

I've to admit. I read the book because when I was in high school I used to like the movie. I found it entertaining, and weird, and then, a couple of months ago, I got to the book and I realized they had basically nothing in common. So I wouldn't say one is better than the other, they're two different things, I'd say even different genres, because the book is really serious and puts a lot of weight in the training, military strategy, ethics and morals.

[S.A.A.]

For those who have read the book, there IS a scene in the film where an older man is seen from behindand a comment passed by Rico about the quality of the new recruits. I suspect the director was considering the father-son meeting.

I hate the film. For one thing, those of you who have read the book

**SPOILER""


will know that it is not about an all-American blue-eyed boy, but a first person tale coming from a Filipino.

[J.D.]

I remember when the movie came out and I have always thought of it as "90210 in Space" and basically being completely unrelated to the book. In fact, I've heard that the movie used to be titled "Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers" but his wife made them take his name off of it. I guess the movie's fun if you're looknig for a high school romp through space with guns, but otherwise... Not a fan.

@ Josh, I've always assumed that Games Workshop got their inspiration for their space marines directly from this book. The jump-pack hopping power armor (if memory serves, all 40K marines used to jump in 1st edition), the flamer, and rocket launcher (all from the first chapter). Just like Genestealers came from the Aliens movies back in 1st edition.

@ S.A.A., it's been a while since I've read it, but wasn't Rico from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)? Either way, you're right, I never imagined him as a blue-eyed kid without an accent. :)

[S.A.A.]

Not so. His parents were, he thought, killed in a Bug attack on Buenos Aires, IIRC. He describes his native language as Tagalog in the book, which is Filipino. That was the thing about the film: it was very much a six-pack WASP world, whereas one of Rico's drill instructors was Zim, a "Finno-Turk".

On the lighter side, I loved the scene at the start of the book where he throws a grenade into a crowded romm and it starts to shout in the native language: "I am a thirty-second bomb! Twenty-nine, twenty-eight..."

Steph Calvert.

[J.D.]

S.A.A. wrote: "Not so. His parents were, he thought, killed in a Bug attack on Buenos Aires, IIRC. He describes his native language as Tagalog in the book, which is Filipino. That was the thing about the film: it..."

Oops, you're right, Steph. Buenos Aires, Rio de Janerio... I knew it was some Spanish-sounding place I'd never been. :)

[Ken]

Verhoeven was trolling. Pure and simple.

[Ryan]

We just reviewed this book and movie in my podcast (No Deodorant in Outer Space). Apparently this movie was originally based on an unrelated script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship...), which Hollywood then tweaked to fit into the better known "Starship Troopers" franchise. Typical.

That said, I gotta say this is one of the odd occasions that I felt that the movie was better then the book. The author brings up a lot of interesting philosophies in the book, but I sort of felt there wasn't a lot of strong conflict going on to keep me glued to the pages while I waited for the bug attacks to happen again.

The movie is sort of touches back on the director's earlier masterpiece "Robocop" with its propaganda interludes.

Even though the book and movie are very different, I would recommend the movie slightly more on this occasion.

[Spiros]

Wow all those years and people still don't get the intention behind the movie adaptation?
Thank you Paul Verhoeven for treating this book with the political satire that it so much deserved.

[Matthew]

I liked both the book and movie, but as very different stories.
It's something that I don't like about big corporation running studios. The idea that you can capitalize on a name by sticking it on something that is unrelated. It's false advertising with loophole. As it was I saw the movie first and then read the book. So what goes around.

Now keep in mind, books are not movie scripts. To make a good movie from a good book requires changes. A good example is Ender's Game. When they made the movie they stayed true to the story, but cut out the entire sub-story of the brother and sister taking over the governments on Earth. If they had kept that it, it would have made the movie twice and long and very boring.
Then there is I-Robot. I picked up the original book at the library, but it had the movie poster as it's cover. Other than the three laws of robotics and a reference to a AI that wants to take over the world, it had nothing in common with the movie. So my opinion on it is if the main characters and story in the movie didn't come from the book, it shouldn't share the same title.

[Brian]

Josh wrote: "@Budd: The problem is you go in with certain expectations because of the title. There's an implied promise of similarity to the source material. You don't name a movie All Quiet on the Western Fron..."

That's exactly my opinion. I find it hard to believe that anyone who has read the book can enjoy the movie as well. They literally changed everything interesting and original into something expected and extremely cliche, doing a great disservice to an interesting book.

I watched the movie quite recently, however all I can recall is about an hour of bullet spraying that made my ears hurt.

My other gripe is that people tend to justify a bad movie in the terms of a satire. Compare the movie to Space Balls and I am sure we can all tell the difference.

[Logan]

Spiros wrote: "Wow all those years and people still don't get the intention behind the movie adaptation?
Thank you Paul Verhoeven for treating this book with the political satire that it so much deserved."

It was a really shitty satire of what verhoeven THOUGHT The book was because he's a no-good leftist and anything that's right of his progressive mind is automatically fascism because that's what post-nazi europeans have been taught.

It's disgusting

[Lizze]

Personally, I thought this was one instance where the movie beat the book! To be fair, I did see the movie years before ever reading Heinlein, and having now read the book, I think the movie is a hilarious juxtaposition to how seriously the book seemed to take itself (can you say 'authorial intrusion'?).

The movie was simple and a little cheesy at the basic plot level, just like cheap old sci-fi films with a 1950's feel...but it had these stylistic and philosophical shockers thrown in here and there that gave it such a satirical edge. The movie had a sense of humor and irony. The book had pages and pages of the author's most authoritarian political views espoused through characters who were used as mere mouthpieces. That was tiresome, though the rest of the book--what little else of it there was anyway--was fantastic.

You've got to admit, the way the movie flipped the bird to the ideas harped on in the book was a little genius. Definitely bold, if nothing else.