RUmours from a remake of Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 incisive satire of American fascism, have abounded for the better part of a decade. The final suggestion is that Joseph Kosinski, director of non-science fiction classics like Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, could be tapped to reimagine the film that pitted Johnny Rico and his merry militaristic friends against all those nasty spatial mistakes. There are so many reasons why this is a terrible idea that it’s hard to know where to start, but let’s start with Hollywood’s previous efforts to take on the Dutchman’s golden catalog.
The original Total Recall, back in 1990, could be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s perfect vehicle, the absurd frame of the Austrian oak, and exaggerated acting that perfectly complements the film’s fondness for cartoonish violence and wonderfully exaggerated sci-fi stereotypes. Along with Blade Runner, it may be the best Hollywood adaptation of Philip K Dick, it is without a doubt the most fun. Len Wiseman’s 2012 remake didn’t even make it to Mars, swapping all those colorful mutants for a tasteless and tasteless Earth-based tale in which the biggest threat is no longer Douglas Quaid’s unreliable internal narrative, but a group of killer robots. It is an instantly forgettable version.
Robocop by José Padilha, from 2014, is a sharp and surprisingly gloomy film that will better resist the original over time, based on the good heart of Joel Kinnaman when the near-dead policeman became a robot to fight crime. However, it lacks the full weight of Verhoeven’s hyper-topical and bombastic satire in the police state, and prefers to focus on Alex Murphy’s pathos of lost humanity. It just doesn’t get any better than the original movie, with its propaganda broadcasts of Trump and corrupt and trashy villains.
Unfortunately, there is nothing on Kosinski’s resume that suggests he has the potential to go differently with Starship Troopers. This is a filmmaker who mistakenly tried to turn Tron into The Matrix and left plot holes and narrative inconsistencies in Oblivion that nearly ruined what might otherwise have been a decent little movie. M83’s beautiful soundtrack deserves to be harnessed for an infinitely superior movie.
Over the years, the initial critical view that Starship Troopers was simply a hollow-headed space movie has been largely reversed. Remarkably, it took so long: Verhoeven is clearly satirizing right-wing militarism from his original material, Robert A Heinlein’s 1959 novel, with propaganda sequences straight out of Leni Riefenstahl’s playbook. The Dutch director even revealed in a 2018 interview with The Guardian that he had put an actor, Neil Patrick Harris, in an SS uniform, adding “but no one noticed.” Sadly they did, Verhoeven also said the Washington Post wrote a withering editorial bizarrely criticizing the filmmaker and his screenwriter as “neo-Nazis,” an article that fueled the movie’s second weekend struggles at the United States box office. He was finally unable to get his money back.
A previous attempt by Sony to restart the series in the middle of the last decade was reported to be closer to Heinlein’s original tone novel, which would certainly help distinguish it from Verhoeven’s work. However, it is Verhoeven’s sharp mockery of the right-wing military mentality: that the enemy is always inhuman, that its destruction has no moral consequences, and that the only thing that really matters is the endless, unrelenting and overwhelming victory, which makes that Starship Soldiers worth seeing first. Otherwise Hollywood could really remake Triumph of the Will with spatial errors.
If Kosinski is considering signing up for a new version, you should ask yourself what the benefits are for your career. If you follow Heinlein’s path, this will be just another violent and militaristic space movie, and if you try to beat Verhoeven, the Dutch master of satire, it is likely to end up as a pitiful and hectic brain bug that has long since been abandoned by your foot soldiers arachnids.
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