Editing Starship Troopers (section)

==The Movie==
Eventually, it came time for Hollywood to do its inevitable movie-of-the-popular-book, and shooting began for a Starship Troopers movie. The movie actually follows the book fairly closely, even repeating some scenes from the book verbatim. There were some changes however. A few of the characters were race swapped or gender swapped, and the power armor was completely erased. In particular, the intelligent planning, objectives, and tactics used during battles were deleted to make the mobile infantry look stupid. The bugs also had all of their technology removed and, most egregiously, their way of destroying Buenos Aires was with an asteroid they supposedly threw. [[wat|From all the way across the galaxy]]. There were also a few dialogue additions that were inserted with the clear intention of making the Federation government look more malevolent (along with the subtle implication that the bugs weren't actually responsible for the asteroid and the Federation just blamed them as an excuse to go to war). Why were these changes made? the answer lies in the previous 60 years of rage surrounding the book, and the director Paul Verhoeven.

Paul Verhoeven had been a child in the Netherlands during WWII and the [[Nazi]] occupation who [[Grimdark|almost died via collateral damage when a bomb from an Allied airstrike landed in his backyard while he was playing there]]. Such an experience could only color his perceptions of war for the worse: Verhoeven only read the first few chapters of Heinlein's book, and he saw the Terrans as [[Imperium of Man|a bunch of Space Nazis]] (ironically so, since Heinlein served the US Navy in the 20s and 30s), between their near-conscription level of military signups and the incredibly heavy use of propaganda enforcing "the individual's obligation to society". As such, he decided to crank the patriotic jingoism up to eleven and make the Terrans a bunch of hot-blooded dumbasses who, aside from a couple of sergeants, had no idea how to do anything more advanced than run at the enemy shooting their guns while looking pretty. The Terran political officers were even dressed up in black Nazi trenchcoats, to really drive the point home how much Verhoeven hated Heinlein's book. The movie is a giant 2-hour "fuck you" disguised as a parody disguised as a sci-fi action movie.

...OK, that's a bit of an exaggeration: Verhoeven was already working on a movie at that time before he had even read Heinlein's book, a dark satire sci-fi film similar to Robocop, except instead of being about capitalism in Detroit, it was about fascism in space. One of the marketers at the production company noticed some similarities to the novel and decided that the movie would sell better as an adaptation of an influential novel than as a new property. So everything was renamed and several aspects rewritten to make the movie into a loose adaptation with as few budget increases as possible. The biggest "fuck you" was mostly Verhoeven agreeing to name his movie ''Starship Troopers''; a lot of what was considered more direct "suck it Heinlein" moments were accidental.

Ironically, for all the Heinlein fans out there bitching about hippie pinko liberal arts majors, Verhoeven was ''also'' a physics and math major, STEM nerd, and naval engineer. He would also go on to be responsible for the ever-beloved ''Robocop'', which gleefully drove a pike up the ass of Reagan-era policing and government-corporate encroachment in a way that would make Judge Dredd proud.

===RAGE II: Electric Boogaloo===
[[File:Skubship troopers.jpg|thumb|right|It's a whole spectrum of skub.]]
The controversy of course continues on 4chan, and comes primarily from three factions who argue with each other every single day on /tv/'s ''Starship Troopers'' troll threads:

* Lefties and [[tumblr|ostensibly left-adjacent]] people who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is bad).
* [[/pol/|Neo-Nazis]] who think the Federation is fascist (and fascism is good).
* [[Neckbeards|Heinlein fans]] who think the Federation is not fascist (and that anyone who disagrees is a retard).

====Leftists====
The book's got ''some'' evidence to support the first viewpoint - the simple fact that the founding of the Federation reads like a classic fascist's wet dream of manly, hard-headed soldiers standing up to reassert social order when a decadent, failing democratic government is in a state of collapse (see the rise of Fascism in Italy and the Freikorps after WW1). However, the people arguing this - including many leftists and those playing at leftism - are also, as a rule, heavily influenced by Verhoeven's movie. Said movie not only threw in a bunch of direct parallels to historical fascist movements (an asteroid attack being a false-flag operation, for instance, as with all those false-flag attacks made by fascist powers during the lead-up to WW II to manufacture casus belli and justify naked aggression), but played up the Nazi fashion of the cast. Additionally, while denying them franchise without civil service, The Federation has a great deal of legal protection for its non-citizen population. In the end, a lot of them end up arguing against the idealized view of stratocratic government the book presents; while they aren't wrong ''historically'', well... it's also a ''book'', and Heinlein isn't supporting that form of government, either.

====Neo-Nazis====
The film also ended up handing ammo to the second group of people, despite wearing its satirical intentions on its sleeve (if not the entire coat - this is Verhoeven we're talking about); it also manages to make the Federation look like a decent place to live with a functional government, because his satire usually consists of letting the people we're supposed to disagree with present their points into the camera without argument. The result is that [[/pol/|real-life fascists]] like to use it as a bad-faith example of how fascism isn't that bad, really. Is this Verhoeven's fault?

''Fuck'' no, they're fascists, and as such are categorically weasels that co-opt any angle they can get their hands on.

If anything could be blamed on the film and/or Verhoeven ''besides'' being too heavy-handed, it's that the satirical approach of "let the villains state what their motives are outright in a way that makes them sound patently bugfuck insane to any rational person" thus assumes a rational audience. Far from an argument for some baby-brained "satire requires clarity of purpose" bullshit, the conclusion is simply that most neo-Nazis and fascists [[/pol/|are not very smart]].

====Heinlein fans====
Heinlein fans tend to be very, ''very'' protective of ''Starship Troopers'', and very defensive about the supposed virtues of the Federation, to the point of inventing things that aren't in the text - which doesn't go into much detail on the inner structure of how the Federation government actually works. Granted, this is in service of of one of the most important writers in the history of science fiction's most seminal works, but even so it can be a bit tardy.

There is something to be said for drawing equivalences between the way the vote works in ''Starship Troopers'' and the way it worked in the classical democracies and republics of the ancient world - and the Federation is not a place that discriminates on the basis of race, class, or sex, virtually all of which are anathema to modern-day fascist movements even if they aren't necessarily requirements for a belief system to be fascist. 

Ultimately, you have people who didn't get the movie, people who thought the movie was great, people who said that the book was better, and people who didn't get the movie, thought it was great and made a 'sequel' with... flashlights, and all of these things are backed up by the intensely political nature of both the books and the parody. At least the third one (''Starship Troopers 3: Marauder'') featured real powered armor, for all of like five minutes.

So yeah... '''''Lotta''''' skub there.

===The Remake?===
Talk circulated in late 2016 of a possible remake of ''Starship Troopers'', supposedly more faithful to the book. Remakes are the vogue in Hollywood in the 2010s, and it would not be difficult to make a more faithful adaptation than Verhoeven's, but "more faithful" doesn't mean "particularly faithful", and it's easy to ''talk'' about movies but much harder to make them. In short: we'll believe it when we see it. 

===Then... the light===
In 2012, Director Shinji Aramaki (the genius behind much a mecha anime, the Gen-1 Transformer toys, and the co-owner of a CG-animation studio) gave us the CGI-animation movie ''Starship Troopers: Invasion''. A Direct-to-DVD movie set after the events of "Starship Troopers 3: Marauder". Featuring a new cast, as well as return of Johnny Rico, now a eye-patch wearing Big Boss clone. It also gave us awesome power armour. The movie revolves around an incident aboard the Starship John A. Warden, and follows two squads of MI troopers as they attempt to stop the Bugs and save Earth. The movie is so much closer to what Heinlein wrote about and envisioned that you can practically feel the fanboying of the creators for the book. Other characters include Carman Ibanez and Carl Jenkins, although none of the original three protagonists from the first movie retain their actors as their voice. 

That changed in the 2017 movie "Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars". Another CG-movie by Shinji Aramaki, and starring Casper Van Dien as the voice of Colonel Johnny Rico; the movie features Rico as the main character again (finally!). Improving on the depiction of power armour from the last film, it is set during a Bug outbreak on the surface of Mars, where Rico leads a team of barely-trained Martian MI recruits against an army of Bugs. The movie was released for the 20th anniversary of the original movie's release, and features the return of Dina Meyer as Dizzy Flores...I can feel your confusion already. Just watch the film. All will be revealed.