When I heard that Starship Troopers was being made into a film, I was initially doubtful. You see, I've long known that Hollywood usually takes a novel, throws out the story, and replaces it with another one. And the Hollywood story is almost always lesser in all senses (except, perhaps, visual imagary). I was afraid that this would happen to Starship Troopers. And it did.
I don't mind a "'90s update" to Heinlien's work, so long as it is an update of the same story. But this film wasn't. From the website, HBO and E! TV's preview shows, I could immediately tell two points:
1. The "Mobile Infantry" isn't particularly mobile. Starship Troopers pretty much intruduced the idea of "powered armor" to the science fiction community. The opening chapter shows Johnny Rico charging through walls, jumping over 3- and 4-story buildings, and generally spreading terror through a Skinny city. One of my favorite scenes is when he crashes through a wall and finds himself surrounded by about 50 Skinnies. He throws a special grenade that says, in the native's tongue: "I'm a 30 second bomb! I'm a 30 second bomb! 29! 28! 27! . . ."
What does the movie have? Instead of Robocop without the lower jaw showing, we have a uniform that you could assemble from any Army Surplus store. A helmet that looks like a cross between motocross and a helicopter pilot's; a vest that looks like someone broke the kevlar up into chunks, and sewed each chunk on separately; and pants and boots that look like they came from a mail-order SWAT catalog. Unlike Heinlien's "flamers", the standard hand weapon looks like current-issue French Army weapons. In Heinlien's work, the "drop capsule" was an individual cocoon, and a ship fired each trooper individually; in the movie, a "drop capsule" is a 50-soldier metal box. I could continue, but you get the idea: the movie's "mobile infantry" loses the reason they were called "mobile", while preserving the name. And it's a far weaker fighting force.
2. The movie also trashes Heinlien's politics. In the novel, as in the movie, you need to earn citizenship by two years of Federal service. Punishment of criminals is harsher, swifter, and public. From there, the two part company.
In the novel, most "Federal service" is the kind of thing that we call Civil Service today. Only a small fraction of it is actually military. We get a greater view of the military only because that's what Johnny Rico winds up in. He starts out with a pretty long list of things he'd like to do, in order, and most of it is military; starship pilot is at the top of it, with Military Intelligence and K-9 Corps in the middle. He's tested for each item in his preferred order. Mobile Infantry is at the bottom: ". . . if I didn't qualify for Mobile Infantry, I didn't care whether they put me to testing survival equipment on Mercury or Pluto."
In the movie, things are very different. The government is a military dictatorship, with the Sky Marshall as the dictator. All "Federal service" is military. The Mobile Infantry is the only ground combat force. And the rights that civilians lack are far more than just the right to vote and hold public office.
The director, Paul Verhoven, no doubt derived his view of Heinlien's future from his two years in the Dutch Marines. I derive mine from ten years in the U.S. Army, nearly all of it in what the Pentagon calls "joint and combined forces." When I served on a NATO staff, I found that U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel actually had more in common with my world-view than my counterparts in the British, Italian, and Turkish armies. I submit that as partial evidence that my view of Heinlien's future is likely closer to the original than Verhoven's.