Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel and Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film share a title and a war against alien bugs. Readers have been comparing the two ever since.
The Book
Starship Troopers
by Robert A. Heinlein
The Film
Starship Troopers
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, 1997
🔀 What Changed
The most visible change is the armor. In the novel, Johnny Rico fights as a mobile infantryman in powered suits, one of the book's best-known ideas. The film leaves the suits out entirely and sends its soldiers into battle in standard gear. The tone shifts as well. The novel is an earnest first-person account of military service and citizenship, while the film filters its world through satirical propaganda newsreels, a device that does not appear in the book. The structure of the military differs too. The film places men and women side by side in the same infantry units, while the novel's women serve mainly in other roles, such as starship pilots. Taken together, these changes turn a novel that argues its ideas sincerely into a film that invites viewers to question the world it shows.
🎙️ What the Author Said
There is no documented reaction from the author. Robert A. Heinlein died in 1988, nine years before the film's 1997 release, so he never saw it or commented on it. The film's director has spoken about his own relationship with the source material. Paul Verhoeven has said in interviews that he did not finish the novel, which is part of why his film departs from it. Any judgment about what Heinlein would have thought is left to readers, because nothing reliable records it.
“Heinlein wrote a manifesto about duty and citizenship; Verhoeven filmed a satire about the machinery that sells both.”
Two versions of the same war, built on very different ideas of how to tell it. Which one gets your vote?
