Scifi classic, or classic trash? You have your opinion, we have ours, which we share in this lovely recap of an extremely fun and slightly polarizing movie that came out twenty years ago.
So come on, you apes — do you wanna live forever? Dive into this delightful cheese-fest with us. Would you like to know more?
BEST SHOT OF THE MOVIE:
“Damn, Carmen, when you said big bugs might splatter our windshield I had no idea!”
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If you like the football scenes in STARSHIP TROOPERS, you will love GALACTIC FOOTBALL LEAGUE the series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler. Humor, tragedy, galactic politics, criminal intrigue and hard-hitting alien American Football action all come together in a series described as STAR WARS meets THE GODFATHER meets THE BLINDSIDE. Book one, THE ROOKIE, is the perfect book-report project for your high school or junior high athlete.
Did you just dis one of the masters of scifi? I mean, really, the work of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al., provided an audience from which you make a living.
I waited most of my life for STARSHIP TROOPERS to come to the screen and was woefully disappointed in the result. Thought it focused too much on the politics and society. Wanted way more action, believable action, ie if it takes a dozen Marines with .30cal machine guns to kill one bug, you have a training and equipment problem. Of course, the power suits would have fixed some of that. It was a nice effort, but I prefer the movie that has been in my head since the 60’s.
Ah, I knew scifi orthodoxy would raise its ugly head eventually. HOW DARE one not like works of the founders! Blasphemy!
The Model-T created an audience and marketplace for the automobile, but we don’t see a lot of those suckers on the road these days. Times change, art evolves.
The lack of power suits was a bit of a shocker. We mention in the episode that the screenplay was written as an original before they associated it with the book. That’s right, adding the Starship Troopers milieu was an afterthought for this flick, so it’s not that surprising it deviates significantly from the source material.
I had a flick through a “book of the film” once, and Paul Verhoeven said that he felt he couldn’t include much of the book, in particular the tech, because it had already been used so much in sci-fi movies that he would be accused of plagiarism.
Ben: That’s very interesting. And true, to some extent, but since the screenplay they bought had been written before they optioned the book, I’m guessing that wasn’t the biggest reason. How many powered-armor movies were there before 1997?
I loved this movie and the book, even though they are two completely different things.
Time for a windshield splatter analysis!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19819906
Todd: They are two different things. Aside from settings and character names (and boot camp and bugs, I suppose), they don’t have a lot in common.
The book was better.
Amiko: I really wasn’t that impressed with the book. I’m guessing that’s because the 40 years following its publication has seen scifi grow and mature as a literary form. To me, STARSHIP TROOPERS is a Model-T — without it we might not have today’s cars, but it’s antiquated and couldn’t survive in today’s market.