Starship Troopers reboot to be less violent and more patriotic—would you like to know more?

By Sean O'Neal | June 27, 2012 | 10:34pm

Aux Features Film

In the previous newsreel regarding the planned reboot of Starship Troopers, we learned that, as with the similar remakes of Total Recall and RoboCop, the new version would strip away nearly all of Paul Verhoeven's subversive irony, something that is, after all, what keeps the Dutch mired in sloth, stuffing their smirking faces with sauerkraut and chuckling about "subtext" in their hash bars and sex clubs. Recently producer Toby Jaffe—who was also partly responsible for cutting the satirical chaff from Total Recall, until he got to the Len Wiseman action movie that was always at its center, apparently—reaffirmed to Empire that his Starship Troopers would be more faithful to both Robert Heinlein's original novel and American values by being less violent, "grounded," and way more patriotic. And not patriotic in an ironic way that the Dutch would like.

"The more expensive a film is, the harder it is now to make it that violent," Jaffe said by way of explaining how the revamped Starship Troopers would eschew the darkly comic, over-the-top gore that arguably made anyone remember Starship Troopers in the first place, instead aiming for a softer PG-13 rating that would make it more marketable and therefore better. And in addition to new technology that will allow them to include the armored exoskeletons known as Jump Suits, new advancements in ignoring irony will also allow Jaffe and Co. to make a straightforward translation of Heinlein's ode to militarism, without getting hung up on those longstanding questions of whether it's an oversimplified glorification of war or an endorsement of fascism. "Y’know, one man’s fascism is another man’s patriotism," Jaffe says with no hint of sarcasm, as that sort of thing isn't done anymore. Anyway, with all the violence and satire finally out of the way, the film can concentrate on the well-rounded characters that Heinlein didn't create.