With the book, the film has little in common - Heinlein's novel unexpectedly turned out to be a leisurely and serious narrative, in which the focus is on the psychology of the characters, the thoughts of the main character and the structure of the army of the future, and the combat episodes are one or two.
The Verhoeven film is an action movie, colorful, epic and brutal. The philosophy of his characters is of little concern, and psychologism here is somewhat of a different order, more tied to interpersonal relations.
Verhoeven played a postmodern game - he made a film not about the universe of "Star landing". He made a film out of this universe. He argues with Heinlein, and quite witty - for all its seriousness, this film leaves a sense of hidden irony. Everything seems to be in place - but it's a bit wrong. Somewhere there is a very small thing missing: too epic feats, too spectacular battles, too pathetic deaths. A little too much. Exactly so that it does not catch the eye and sits a thorn in the subconscious, a kind of twenty-fifth frame. A harsh, brutal and slightly lyrical film is saturated with irony, the feeling that everything that happens on the screen is nothing more than a beautiful and terrible fairy tale.
This is despite the fact that Paul Verhoeven remained himself and managed to show even a fantastic war of the future quite harshly. Which impressed me even at the first viewing after a bloodless muzzle of countless fantasy series and superhero cartoons. The film bribes, among other things, with this realism of battles, where blood is shed and it is not known which of the characters will survive and who will not. I found then in this film something that is rarely found in modern politically correct cinema - a primitive epic, related to ancient myths. It is this mythological, almost mystical sensation, capable of stupefying the people, Verkhoven and crystallized from the Nazi film agitations, putting it in the basis of the alchemy of the “Star landing”. A dangerous flirtation with archetypes, which once drove almost half of Europe crazy.
The film in the film: a pathetic legend about Starship Troopers, shown to the wrong people and at the wrong time and turned from a guide to action into a fairy tale. Myth breaks down simply - it's not a myth of our world, but just too similar.
However, for anti-fascist agitation, the film turned out to be somewhat toothless, it fails the same as the book - the war is with monsters, which means that only one side shows cruelty here. If this detail allowed Heinlein not to destroy the humanistic pathos of his book, then Verhoeven’s film she turns from a harsh mockery of Nazism into a friendly, harmless parody of the American military. The Nazis should have been tougher: apparently, the director is not attacking the Third Reich, but fascism in the broad political sense of the word, the signs of which are visible in US politics. References to Hitler’s propaganda, here, rather a fig in his pocket, an invitation to build analogies.
What can I say about all this? Heinlein’s novel is very ambiguous, and although the accusations of fascism are absolutely groundless (there is no totalitarianism or racial intolerance in the world of the Starship Troops), his militarism comes to a dangerous point, and the romanticization of the army borders on naivety. Does this world deserve such an incarnation? Probably, I still want to perceive the film adaptation as a mockery of militarism in general, and not a long-suffering book, which has already been getting from critics for more than sixty years.
And you can just not load and watch a spectacular action movie, perfectly directed and with wonderful special effects. Fans of combat NF are guaranteed pleasure.
The only drawback of the film is that, unlike the book, which is very well worked out in tactical terms, the world of the film seems to have never heard of military science. I'm not going to explain, because spoiler, you have to see that. And fur here you will not see – mechs are found only in the anime of 1988, which I have not yet seen (most, judging by the reviews, the film adaptation of Heinlein close to the text: Huge Combat Humanoid Robots, drama and philosophy).
The result: a beautiful, brutal, epic and a little ironic film. It is necessary to watch, but if you like the literary source, be prepared for a very critical interpretation of it.
10 out of 10
Original