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Hey, let’s do a fun experiment: Does the following sentence make your spine crawl so hard it wants to exit through the mouth and start a better life elsewhere, or is that just an us thing? “Neill Blomkamp is making a new Starship Troopers movie that promises to be more faithful to the original book.”
Blomkamp has had a pretty rough decade-and-a-half at the box office since garnering international acclaim with his 2009 film District 9; his most recent effort, 2023 racing movie Gran Turismo, was basically noteworthy for a) actually getting completed, and b) not being a Chappie-level embarrassment, neither of which has become a guarantee for Blomkamp in recent years. In the past, he’s tried to get some franchise action going, developing an Alien movie and a remake of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, but neither ever came of anything. Now he’s apparently interested in working on a film franchise that Verhoeven made an indelible mark on—but apparently without any of the Dutch director’s satirical interests.
Which is going to be tricky, because Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers is a book that probably needs at least a bit of satirizing for modern audiences to consume it. Heinlein used his story of humanity locked into a war with alien bugs as way to basically invite a whole generation to get off his lawn, writing odes to the effectiveness of corporal punishment, the concept that only military service qualifies people for voting rights, and other details that had a lot of people calling him a wannabe fascist back in the day. Verhoeven, who grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, then opted to take those elements to the over-the-top extreme when he adapted the book for film in 1997, creating his most blatantly satirical movie since Robocop. There have been adaptations of Starship Troopers that have tried to hew closer to Heinlein’s original novel (the CG-animated series Roughnecks that Verhoeven executive produced in 1999 might actually be the straightest putt, albeit stripped of 99 percent of the book’s politics), but Verhoeven’s is the one that’s lodged in the cultural consciousness: Loud, campy, and aggressively taking the piss out of Heinlein’s stolid tale of military sacrifice and honor.
The point is, Starship Troopers is a tone tightrope, and Blomkamp’s track record is not one we’d associate with that kind of cinematic footwork. Even his better movies have all the subtlety of an exploding junkyard, and his worst barrel through their concepts with significantly less finesse. Anyway: Blomkamp is working on the film with his wife and frequent creative partner, Terri Tatchell, while the film is being developed at Columbia Pictures.
[via Deadline]
