Starship Troopers was a huge disappointment for me and my friends - here's a paraphrase of what I wrote in a mini amazon.com review a while back:
My biggest criticism of Starship Troopers is of the way the military of the future is portrayed so wimpily: We're invading another world, and what equipment does our hi-tech army of the future possess? Machine guns. More machine guns. And that's about it. (Except for the occasional large bomb overratingly-called a "mini-nuke"). What is missing? Let's see: No tanks, no rocket launchers, no futuristic weapons, no missiles, no cannons, virturally no air support, almost nothing besides soldiers with pathetic small-caliber weapons getting overrun by millions of bugs. The military of today would put up a far better and more interesting fight than this miltary of the future. The thing is, there's no tanks, fighters, etc in the Starship Troopers novel, either, but that's because all the soldiers wore power armor that essentially removed the need for the tanks, fighters, etc. Where the heck's the power armor in the movie? Missing for some reason, perhaps so they can show the actor's pretty faces, or save money on special effect production costs. I liked Verhoeven's Robocap a LOT. But while Heinlein's political agenda in the book is perhaps a fat target for parody, this story is not well served by the Robocop-like treatment, which gives me the feeling that Verhoeven didn't have much respect for (or understand) the source material, or maybe just the genre in general. Which brings me to my next complaint, which of course is the much-hated 90210-teen heartthrob story stuff. Was this really necessary to add? Honestly, imagine if this movie had been done seriously, it could have touched on Heinlein's themes and still been a fantastic sf action movie with marines in power armor fighting for their lives, facing off against the bugs. Think "Aliens" times 1000. Instead we get a semi-funny movie with lame action and 90210-like teen whining that essentially parodies the book it is based on. I know which movie I'd prefer. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
