Starship Troopers

The movie gets it completely wrong. But seriously, read the book. Then see the movie.

"A suit isn't a space suit - although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor - although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are... A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little - on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in."

Starship Troopers is a science fiction book by Robert Heinlein, later adapted into a series of movies, a cartoon, and several board and wargames. It influenced the look and feel of science fiction militaries that came after -- and it influences real-world militaries as well, as it is on the required reading lists of the United States Marine Corps and Navy.

The basic storyline is that humanity is fighting a war against an implacable species of insectoid aliens called "Bugs" or "Arachnids". The actual front-line combatants are the Mobile Infantry, an elite, all-volunteer force equipped with devastating weapons and powered armor. Life for the average human is not bad, but the only way to attain citizenship and the perks that go with it, such as suffrage, is to do a term of public service. Military service is only one of the possible avenues to citizenship mentioned in the book, a point often overlooked due to the heavy emphasis placed on the armed forces by the viewpoint character and his comrades.

Does any of this sound familiar? Would you like to know more?

Frankly, the only reason that Starship Troopers avoids falling into a pit of cliches is because it did them all first -- the Alien films, Warhammer 40,000, Starcraft, and essentially all military science-fiction since the 1950's owe a lot to Mr. Heinlein. For example, Starship Troopers is credited with the invention of power armor.

Worth noting, Heinlein's Bugs (not the movie Arachnids) are like the only hivemind-insectoid race in the fiction capable of using actual tech (like metal-made spaceships, electromagnetic guns and good-old nukes) instead of biotech.

The Movie

So come the 1980s, Heinlein's idealization of the soldier is less compatible with the post-Vietnam counterculture (and the hippies therein). Heinlein said he based this future society off of Switzerland (which has a longstanding tradition of national service) but made voluntary as he was not a fan of conscription (he also stated the Bugs' hivemind was there because one of the book's themes was to critique communism). However the glorification of the military's role in society and the use of war to strengthen the nation (along with common corporal punishment) means that the Terran Federation often comes off as being somewhat fascist to a modern audience, to the point that some people accused Heinlein himself of being fascist (which he wasn't, he was sort of a proto-libertarian).

Eventually, it came time for Hollywood to do its inevitable movie-of-the-popular-book, and shooting began for a Starship Troopers movie. The above paragraph of skub might have been quietly swept under the rug were it not for one thing: the director, Paul Verhoeven, was a holocaust survivor.

When Verhoeven read Heinlein's book, he couldn't help but see the Terrans as a bunch of Space Nazis (ironically, since Heinlein served in World War 2), 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 guns. 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.

The problem is that with that much disguising, quite a lot of people still didn't get the satire. So 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.

So yeah... Lotta skub there.

External Links

• Klendathu Drop, from the first movie's soundtrack, and one of the features of the movie that everyone agrees is awesome. Very useful in Deathwatch and Only War games.

• This article suggests that the movie may have been a parable for the War on Terror before the war began.