Reposter's note: this review was written by SF writer David Gerrold, and was originally posted on his web site at http://www.gerrold.com or http://www.gerrold.com/people/gerrold/ (the URL is a little glitchy). It is reposted to Usenet (rec.arts.sf.movies, rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.movies.current-films, follow-ups to rec.arts.sf.movies; and separately to rec.arts.movies.reviews and rec.arts.sf.reviews) with Gerrold's permission.
For those who are unfamiliar with David Gerrold's work, he's a nine- time Hugo and Nebula nominee whose novella "The Martian Child" won him one of each. His works include the alien invasion series WAR AGAINST THE CHTORR, the time-travel novel THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF, the analysis/criticism THE WORLD OF STAR TREK, and a whole bunch more fiction and non-. He'll always be stuck with the label of "the guy who wrote 'The Trouble With Tribbles.'" (Yes, *that* episode of STAR TREK.) He is one of only a handful of writers to have been nominated for the Hugo award for prose and screen work.
He was also a friend of the late Robert A. Heinlein.
*Please,* if anyone follows up to this article, make sure the attributions are correct: that is, "David Gerrold wrote:"
STARSHIP TROOPERS
review by David Gerrold
In 1962, Robert A. Heinlein, the undeniable "dean of science fiction," published the best novel of his career: STARSHIP TROOPERS.
Many critics regard this novel as the single most influential novel ever published in the science fiction field. Other authors wrote some of their best works in response to it -- either in agreement, or as an argument against. There's no question that STARSHIP TROOPERS is not only Heinlein's best novel, it's also his most controversial. In many ways it is far superior to his philosophically flawed STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. (But that's a different discussion.)
The novel details the adventures of Juan (Johnnie) Rico, a wealthy Filipino youth who graduates from high school and joins the Mobile Infantry to earn his citizenship. In this particular Heinlein future, citizenship is earned by a term of service to the nation. Only citizens get to vote. This carries with it the implied assumption that only graduates of federal service are qualified to know what's good for society, that those who have not served are parasites who have made no other valuable contribution to society, and who are therefore not entitled to a voice.
On the surface, the novel is structured like BATTLE CRY, the post-WWII recruiting movie, following the adventures of several young men and women through their training and through their various battlefields -- but first it stops to takes a few pages from ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. If you'll remember that novel, it starts with a teacher extolling the glories of war and defending the fatherland to a classroom of eager German youth. In Heinlein's classroom however, Dubois, the instructor is far more realistic and charismatic. Instead he talks about personal responsibility, morality, and ethics -- the obligation one owes one's society for accepting its protection. The class is a required course, part of the necessary preparation for the choice presented to every high school graduate -- whether or not to earn citizenship through service.
Juan Rico's parents are shown as shallow non-citizens, who oppose his military service; but Juan enters the service over their objections because his best friend, Carl, and his girlfriend, Carmen, are also signing up. Carl is going into strategy and tactics, and Carmen wants to be a starship pilot. Unfortunately, Juan's aptitudes show that the only thing he's good for is "cannon fodder," the Mobile Infantry. Uh- oh. It is obvious from the text that the Mobile Infantry has already been involved in quite a few wars -- and at least two of the veterans we meet (Dubois and the enlistment officer) are missing limbs. But Heinlein is making a point here -- ultimately all wars are won by the infantry, the guys who go in on the ground.
Heinlein's portrayal of boot camp shows that military training in the future will remain essentially the same -- drill the trainees to exhaustion, break down their identities, and rebuild them with unflinching commitment to the task at hand. Rico makes a couple of mistakes along the way, earns some lashes (flogging is legal in this society), learns his lessons, and gets over the hump. He becomes a soldier.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is Heinlein's projection of future military ordnance and equipment. The Mobile Infantry are equipped with "Power Armor" -- nuclear powered suits which greatly expands the ability and strength of the individual. The armor makes each and every soldier a one-person tank, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, faster than a speeding locomotive... etc. etc. Juan Rico in his power armor has enough ordnance to topple a small government.
It's just about this time (of course) that war breaks out with the bug-world Klendathu. The bugs start it by dropping a large rock on Buenos Aires, wiping out the entire city and killing Rico's mother who is visiting at the time. (This is the first of several interesting oversights in the book. If the bugs can drop a small asteroid on a single city to wipe it out, why not drop a very large asteroid and destroy ALL life on the planet?)
So Juan and his fellow soldiers are off to battle. As with BATTLE CRY and ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, we see Rico changed by his experiences in actual combat. The death rate is distressingly high. This one buys the farm, then that one buys the farm. Sooner or later, everyone buys a farm. You learn to stop caring so much about the characters....
The bugs are a particularly interesting alien species. They are evolved from hive-dwelling insects. The soldiers are mindless warriors, bred for only one purpose -- kill and keep on killing. The Klendathoids(?) breed different types of workers for different kinds of jobs; only the warriors are dangerous. There are probably queen- bugs and brain-bugs too, but we don't see them in the book.
And it is here, in the design of the aliens that Heinlein reveals what his book is really about -- what kind of a species are we? What does it mean to be a human being? He has begun his book with several pertinent discussions of personal responsibility; then he demonstrates how it works. Everything that Heinlein portrays here is about taking a large bite of responsibility and then growing the jaws to chew it. As Rico gnaws his way up the food chain, to squad leader, to corporal, to sergeant, and finally to lieutenant, we see that what is really happening is the expansion of his domain of responsibility.
This is contrasted with the bugs, whose individuals are mindless. They are bred for a single task only. They are not adaptable and they are not capable of operating outside of the specific domain for which they were bred. A warrior will kill and do nothing else; it cannot negotiate,it cannot surrender, it cannot even honor a truce. A worker can only work, it cannot fight. Etc. etc. There is no responsibility among the bugs.
(While this makes for a particularly horrifying enemy, it actually presents a serious story problem that Heinlein has conveniently glossed over by simply not addressing it. How does an essentially mindless species achieve faster-than-light travel? Heinlein postulates brain-bugs, but we never really see any bug technology. There is a hint that there is some bug technology, but we don't see it in the warriors. Heinlein also postulates that the bugs have an alliance with the "skinnies," a humanoid species who later switch their allegiance to our side, but ...again, the question of bug technology is still not addressed.
Never mind. Heinlein isn't world-building here. He's trying to make a different point.)
Heinlein is using the contrast between human and bug to force us to focus on the question at hand -- are we mindless bugs? Or are we reasoning beings? And if we are reasoning beings, then what is our responsibility in the matter? If we are capable of individual rational thought, then how can we justify behaving like mindless bugs?
Regardless of the military setting for the story, Heinlein is asking a very pertinent question. It is the same question he asks in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. In both books, he stacks the deck for the answer he prefers. But that is always the prerogative of the author, and the questions that Heinlein has asked have proven to be more important for the asking than for the particular answers that Heinlein has offered. Thirty-five years later the arguments are still raging.
Now, Paul Verhoeven, director of ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL, has adapted STARSHIP TROOPERS into a movie...and I feel confident in predicting that it will trigger a new round of even more intense arguments.
There's no question that STARSHIP TROOPERS is one of the most intensely anticipated movies of the year, perhaps the decade. Millions of Heinlein's readers are waiting for this one. In one respect, they will not be disappointed. The picture has some of the finest action sequences ever seen in a science fiction movie. The battles with the bugs are astonishing. The movie is undoubtedly going to be a big hit -- especially among 13-year old boys. My son thought it was the best movie he'd ever seen. It's big, it's long, it's loud, it's gory. What more could a boy ask for? The special effects are truly this picture's strength.
That's the bad news. There is little good news.
To start with, the scriptwriter should probably be taken out and given ten lashes for presumption, and another ten for doing a lousy job. The dialogue is uniformly unimaginative, jingoistic, and in some places downright stupid. The story structure is sloppy. The character of Dubois is dropped/combined with Lieutenant Rasczak. Juan's family lives in Buenos Aires, so both of his parents are killed when the bugs attack; this eliminates the reconciliation scene between Rico and his father so important to the book. A new female character, Dizzy, is added. She joins the M.I. because she's in love with Rico. And for someone native to Argentina (in the movie), Johnny Rico has a decidedly anglo look. Hmmm.
Heinlein's greatest strength -- his thought-provoking conversations -- have been reduced to jingoistic one-liners. The picture is punctuated with satirical newscasts from the future. This is a device that worked very well in both Robocop and Total Recall; it doesn'twork here. Because so many of the news stories are laugh-out-loud caricatures, they send an implied message: Don't take this movie seriously. But then we cut back to the classroom or the training ground or the Lieutenant and what we're hearing is something else entirely: take this very seriously, it's about your humanity.
The really bad news is that much of the best of Heinlein's novel has been gutted in the script. The power armor is gone. Instead, our brave young men and women are outfitted as if (the late) Gianni Versacci were sending them off to take the beach at Normandy. The technology portrayed is already obsolete in 1997. This is a humanity that has faster-than-light starships, and is still sending the troops in armed only with gunpowder and grenades -- and the occasional hand- held nuke. Huh?
We saw napalm carpets laid down in Vietnam. Why not on Klendathu? We've seen our soldiers using flame-throwers in the Mekong Delta, why not on Klendathu? We've seen our planes dropping "daisy-cutter" bombs (fuel-air explosives, they work like baby nukes), in Vietnam (and in the opening sequence of OUTBREAK), why not on Klendathu? We've seen how snipers can use laser-beams for precision targeting, why not our infantry on Klendathu? Our local motorcycle police have their radios built in to their helmets, why do our troops on Klendathu have to use hand-held flip-open communicators? Where is the weaponry? In the next three hundred years, will we not see development of beam weapons, improved flame-throwers, rail-guns, and other technologies of mayhem?
Even more disturbing is the portrayal of the military mind-set here, from the cowardly general, all the way down to the hard-assed Sergeant Zim, the D.I. There isn't a single one of these folks who isn't a caricature of something we've seen in six other movies. And everywhere else, we've seen it better. This script needed a John Milius or even an Oliver Stone -- someone who's seen actual combat. There's nothing on the screen to suggest real knowledge of military situations or the people who have been trained to deal with them. The troops are not spread out properly, they don't move through the terrain properly, and in fact they walk unconcernedly through canyons where they KNOW bugs are watching from above.
The biggest failure is that the picture makes little attempt to address the central issue of Heinlein's book -- personal responsibility. Instead, the last act turns into a melodramatic mishmash with Juan Rico violating orders to go running off down a bug- tunnel to rescue his long-lost love Carmen Ibanez (Dizzy having been conveniently disposed of earlier). It's here that we finally get to meet a brain bug, with a face that looks something like a hyperactive rectum with teeth. Our retreat back up the tunnel is covered by the courageous wounded fellow with theportable nuke -- just like Ripley's escape in ALIENS was covered by Vasquez and the Lieutenant triggering a grenade as those bugs came down the tunnel too.
The directing is spectacular during the battle scenes -- and barely adequate almost everywhere else. The cast is also adequate with no one bumping into the furniture. Casper Van Dien is a likable (although anglicized) Johnny Rico. Fortunately, none of these attractive young people are too hard on the eyes. And just to make sure we get an eyeful, there's a coed shower scene that is enjoyably gratuitous. Rico's best buddy, Carl, is played by Doogie Howser all grown up now -- who shows up at the end of the movie in Gestapo trenchcoat and cap, just like Halloween. Are we supposed to like him or not? Even the director isn't sure. He careens between cynicism and affection, leaving us emotionally adrift, so most of the deaths here are meaningless.
While I'm at it, I don't want to overlook the other cheesy production values. Too many of the sets and props look like painted cardboard, hastily-designed and unconvincing. They flash by too fast for examination, nothing registers on the viewer's consciousness with the kind of A-ha! experience we had when we first saw the Pan-Am flight boots in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
Oh yes, and let's talk about the space technology. We see Carmen Ibanez piloting a shuttle boat recklessly through a space station that is built as a ring around the moon. We see her backing a starship out of its moorings like a teenage driver who has forgotten to release the emergency brake, and she damn near but not quite collides with everything she gets near. And they say she's one of the BEST pilots?! I'll walk, thanks.
When the starships arrive on site... ohboy, there's almost too many errors here to deal with. First of all, they're all in formation so tightly packed that you couldn't set off a cherry bomb without destroying at least six of them. Didn't anybody learn their lesson at Pearl Harbor? You NEVER put your planes, ships, tanks, whatever so close together that they make a terrific target for the enemy. Even during WWII (the big one), our convoys were never this closely grouped. So of course, it's a disaster. We get to see these monstrous starships, bursting into flame -- FLAMES in space?!! -- bumping and colliding into each other like drunken elephants, and finally SINKING downward out of frame like the Titanic. Excuse me? It doesn't work that way in space.
There's also an error of serious orbital mechanics. The starships are shown in a stationary position over a single spot on the planet -- which makes them a terrific target, but is so wrong it's ridiculous. A geosynchronous position is approximately three planetary diameters out. For an Earth-sized planet, that's 24,000 miles above sea level. That's impractical for a military mission. What's wanted and needed here is a very low, very fast orbit which lets the mother ship drop its landing craft and be in position to pick them up again at two-hour intervals; it also makes the mother ship an extremely difficult target to hit from the ground. But again, the filmmakers went for big, loud, and inaccurate because they assumed it would look better on the screen, and who would notice the difference anyway?
The bugs are interesting -- but other than the six legs, it's hard to figure out how the rest of the critter is put together. And when we get to Klendathu, or any other bug planet,we're left with two questions: 1) Nothing's growing here. What do these things eat? And 2) How are these critters throwing rocks at the Earth from half a galaxy away? Faster-than-light rocks? What are these bugs using for technology? (And again, if the bugs can throw a small rock, then why can't they throw a large rock and wipe out the Earth altogether?)
The strength of STARSHIP TROOPERS is its digital effects, which are employed on an epic scale never seen before. There is Oscar-winning work in this movie (which makes the failures of the script all the more depressing.) As I said above, the battle sequences are unmatched. It's the use of the technology that fails, not the technology. For example, there is no dust on Klendathu. No matter how much you blow up, every shot is clear all the way out to the horizon. You would think with all those house-sized critters stamping their way across the landscape, you'd see some dust clouds rising on the other side of the hills...?
Despite all this, I suspect audiences are going to enjoy themselves enormously. There's room for a sequel, and as the second hundred million bucks rolls in at the box office, I'm sure the producers will begin planning STARSHIP TROOPERS II: THE REVENGE OF THE BUGS.
There's a lot to admire in STARSHIP TROOPERS, the movie. Unfortunately, there's not a lot to like. STARSHIP TROOPERS, the book, was written with passion. STARSHIP TROOPERS the movie has sacrificed passion and thoughtfulness for big digital bugs.
dg
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