Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Recently, I saw a video on YouTube, Starship Troopers Part I: Heinlein [Brows Held High], which discussed Robert Heinlein and his creation of the novel, Starship Troopers . It discussed how the movie adaptation, directed by Paul Verhoeven was almost a complete bastardization of the original novel. They said that the philosophy that made the original novel great was almost absent in the movie. At one point the video did a parody of a scene in the movie where the Michael Ironside character finds a general with his brain sucked out. In the YouTube video they show Ironside with a copy of Heinlein’s classic novel before exclaiming, “They sucked out his brains!”

My own experiences with Starship Troopers began when I saw the movie when I was seventeen. I know that they are some of you who have been reading Heinlein’s works since grammar school, but I was a late bloomer when it came to Heinlein. I didn’t start reading his works until I was well into my twenties. When I first saw the movie, I thought it was far from great. It was a vast improvement from Verhoeven’s Showgirls blunder, but I thought it was still far inferior from some of his other greats, such as Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct. Surprising enough, I did find myself liking the movie the more I saw it. Though once I finally read the book, I realized that the movie was only a shell of the original Heinlein classic.

I would later find out that Paul Verhoeven didn’t really understand Heinlein’s philosophy and instead decided to create a parody of fascism. It was then that I find myself scratching my head in bewilderment. Fascism? Really? In all the times that I have seen the movie I never would have guessed that it was a bash on fascism. If I thought it was a parody of anything, I would have thought it would be on sci-fi movies from the fifties. Afterall, the idea of having soldiers fight giant bugs would seem like something out of the 1950’s. I know that there are some who would point to the Federation propaganda videos shown in between the movie’s major plot points. I originally thought that they were spoofs of the newsreels that were shown in American theaters during the Second World War. The videos had the same hokey, overly patriotic feel to them as those old newsreels did.

I especially can’t see how anybody would mistake the Federation in the novel of being fascist. Heinlein was inspired to write the novel because he felt that young people in in post-WWII America didn’t have any sense of duty or responsibility (imagine what he would think of today’s youth). He decided to create a fictional society that encouraged duty and responsibility by giving people full citizenship by serving in the armed forces. The government in the novel was far from democratic, since it was run by war veterans who took over when they got tired of being pawns in the affairs of their leaders. They are still far from fascist, since they don’t really make anybody do anything. They just believe that if you want to have any say in the way that the government is run, you have to earn citizenship through military service. The noncitizens don’t seem all that oppressed in the novel and for that matter they don’t seem all that oppressed in Verhoeven’s version either.

This actually prompted me to dig the movie out of my DVD collection, which I hadn’t done in nearly ten-years. It was then that I was able to find some hints of fascism, such as the broadcasting of public executions. There was also a reference made to needing a license to have babies, which is somewhat reminiscent of China’s limitations on the number kids that their citizens are allowed to have. Then there are uniforms worn by intelligence officers that resemble those of Hitler’s SS men. Yet, for the most part these references seemed relatively subtle. In the third installment (yes, the movie actually had sequels) they practically beat us over the head with how fascist the Federation is with the way they murder dissenters of any form. At one point the Federation is even willing to execute Rico, one of their best soldiers, just because he restrained a superior officer from hurting civilians who were disgruntled about the state of the war. No, I do not recommend this movie. I would honestly recommend Verhoeven’s Showgirls because as bad as it was, it is always good for a laugh.

Now before angry Heinlein fans show up to my house with torches and pitchforks, I want to point out that the book is far superior to the movie. That being said, I still find the movie entertaining in the way that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are movies that strayed from their original source material, such as Stanley Kubrick’s adaption of The Shinning and The Omega Man, which only bears a passing resemblance to Richard Matheson’s I am Legend, that are good in their own right. I think Starship Troopers is one of those movies.