Another week another reboot.
Sony Pictures announced this week their plans to reboot 1997's Starship Troopers. Now in an era where Hollywood feels like they have to reboot every film ever made, this news actually comes as a pleasant surprise. Why? Because the original starred Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, and Neil Patrick Harris. Do I really need to say more than that? The movie was a convoluted, special effects saturated, vapid dialogue nightmare that was essentially the visual equivalent of receiving oral sex from a piranha for two hours.
Starship Troopers is actually based on the 1959 Hugo Award winning novel by Robert A. Heinlein who, along with Frank Herbert and Arthur C. Clarke, is regarded one of the three best science fiction writers of all time. Next to Stranger in a Strange Land it's Heinlein's most well regarded and recognized work, and I might offer his best. Heinlein received a firestorm of criticism regarding the novel. Politicians, professors, and literary critics alike bombarded Heinlein with allegations of militarism, racism, fascism, and utopianism. (If you can figure out how those last two are supposed to co-exist in the same novel you are a more intelligent person than I.)
The original novel was a first person narrative told through the eyes of Juan "Johnnie" Rico, a soldier from the Phillipines who joins the Mobile Infantry to fight Earth's alien enemies, a spider-like species referred to only as "Bugs." Starship Troopers examined everything from civic virtue to capital punishment, as well as the moral aspects of war.
1997's film adaptation was heavy on camp and as deep as Kim Kardashian's personality. It is my sincere wish that the producers of the reboot will do this novel justice and do a straight adaptation. While no director or actors have been attached to the film thus far, Zack Stentz and Edward Miller who wrote X-Men: First Class and Thor will be penning the script. Since both of those films were not only box offices hits but well reviewed, it bodes well for the future of Starship Troopers. HOO-RAH!
The 1997 version was God-awful, I'd like to say this new one can't be worse but we all know that's possible. Still, I have hopes. It almost makes me angry to think about how such a good book was turned into such a terrible movie. But that happens a lot in Hollywood.
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