A second try at "Starship Troopers"

Paul Verhoeven's 1997 movie is interesting, but it doesn't have much to do with Heinlein's novel. Now Neill Blomkamp is going to adapt the actual book.

Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven (b. 1938) grew up watching left-behind Nazi movies and fell in love with their master race aesthetic. But … you really aren’t supposed to just indulge yourself in revisiting the Goebbels’ Era style because you like it. So Verhoeven came up with the excuse that, you see, he was satirizing Nazi leanings … everybody else’s Nazi leanings. Not mine, of course!

Verhoeven is a good director (his 2007 Black Book is highly entertaining, for instance), but it’s tiresome to listen to people fall for his shtick.

When he agreed to adopt Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 military science fiction cult novel Starship Troopers, Verhoeven only read a few pages of the book (this is not uncommon among visually creative film directors like Verhoeven and Paul Thomas Anderson, who didn’t read much of the source material for There Will Be Blood so he missed out on several incredible real life plot twists.) Verhoeven then started making the Starship Troopers he wanted to make, no matter what Heinlein’s book was actually about: beautiful blond coed troops, braindead military tactics that would get everybody killed in moments, and on-the-nose propaganda.

Over time, however, Verhoeven’s purported satire of Heinlein’s purported Naziism has become unironically popular with younger generations who get a kick out of Verhoeven’s fascist style.

So, it’s interesting to see today’s announcement that Boer director Neill Blomkamp will be making a Starship Troopers movie based on the original Heinlein novel rather than the Verhoeven film.

New ‘Starship Troopers’ Movie in the Works from ‘District 9’ Filmmaker Neill Blomkamp (Exclusive)

Sony is behind the new adaptation, which is not a remake of Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film, but rather will go back to the 1959 novel as source material.

By Borys Kit

March 14, 2025 1:34pm

Johnny Rico is coming back to kill some more bugs.

Columbia Pictures is plotting a new Starship Troopers movie, setting District 9 filmmaker Neill Blomkamp to write and direct an adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel story by Robert A. Heinlein.

… Published in 1959, Troopers ostensibly told of an interstellar war between Earth and a host of bug-like aliens, and focused on a rise of a military serviceman named Johnny Rico. But the story had other things on its minds, like exploring the strengths of life in a military society and such ideas as having to perform service in order to have voting rights.

While the book won a Hugo Award for best novel and has been quite influential in sci-fi literature, some quarters described the book as fascist. It was that tone that was satirized in the 1997 movie from Paul Verhoeven, the director of Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Verhoeven was over-the-top in his depiction of the military jingoism and propaganda, fetishized costumes, and highlighted Nazi influences.

Rico was played by squared jaw roughneck Casper Van Dien and the cast included Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Ironside. While the movie was not initially a success, and some critics accused Verhoeven of putting a positive spin on fascism, the movie has since developed a reappraisal and a cult following.

Blomkamp’s take is not a remake of the Verhoeven movie, and sources say the goal is to go back to the source material.

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