MoonShadow and SunKitten's journal

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eighteen-starship-troopers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58786

If you should ever want to wind up an old-school Robert Heinlein fan — which, by the way, you shouldn’t do, they’re all clocking seventy-plus years now, and you should respect your elders — tell them you enjoy the movie version of Starship Troopers more than the Heinlein novel on which it was (somewhat loosely) based. Then move fast, because if you don’t, you’re gonna get whacked upside the head with a cane. Those OG Heinlein fans may be older now, but they’re spry, and if there is one heresy remaining for them, a preference for the film over the novel would be it.

And in many respects they are not wrong. The movie version of Starship Troopers wasn’t originally based (directly) on the novel; screenwriter Ed Neumeier wrote up a sci-fi action movie treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 that did not reference the novel at all. It was only later in the development process that Neumeier and producer Jon Davidson learned the rights to the novel were available and optioned them, and started grafting elements of Heinlein’s tale onto the spine of Outpost 7. Add in director Paul Verhoeven, who legend has it couldn’t even get through the novel but knew he wanted to satirize fascism in the film, and you end up a final cinematic product that is to Heinlein’s novel like grape soda is to an actual grape.

As it turns out, however, a lot of people like the taste of grape soda. I happen to be one of them.

Nor do I think it’s a particular heresy to enjoy the movie, even if one prefers the novel. Very few movies adapted from novels are scrupulously faithful to their source material, and the few that are, are usually weirdly paced and unwieldly (looking at you, Watchmen, and even that changed the ending). The things that make for a great novel are not often the things that make for a great cinematic experience, and vice-versa, as some of the greatest films in history are made from mediocre books (looking at you, The Godfather).

Whenever I mention to people that my novel Old Man’s War is under option, there’s someone who inevitably tells me, I hope they keep it true to the novel. I can assure you they probably will not. As just one example, at one point Chris Hemsworth was attached to star in the movie. Do you think they would pay Hemsworth $20 million (or whatever) to be in the movie, and then paint him green, to match the description of his character in the novel? I do not. Nor do I think a star on the level of Hemsworth would have wanted to be that color. It’s not easy being green, by which I mean that he (and many many other characters) would have to spend hours in makeup every morning. They’d save time and money letting him be his original hue.

I was a movie critic for years and now for years I’ve been having works optioned for film and television. So I am here to tell you, with some authority: Movies always deviate from the novels. The question is less, why aren’t they being faithful to the source material. The question: Is what they’re doing to the source material interesting? That’s the question I ask when I watch a movie based on a novel.

What Paul Verhoeven is doing inStarship Troopers is very interesting. No one was asking for a pop art scifi movie that was ostensibly about shooting big damn alien bugs but was really a mediation about the quiet mainstreaming of fascistic thought and imagery into everyday life, and how all that glossy, idealized ubermensch aesthetic and thinking falls apart once it meets the chaos of war. But surprise! Here it is! Would you like to know more?

The story at least initially follows the novel’s outline: Johnny Rico (the impossibly square-jawed Casper Van Dien) is a callow, rich pretty boy who is not too smart, but is also vaguely dissatisfied with the cushy life being laid out for him. So when his pals Carmen (Denise Richards) and Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) sign up for Federal Service to fight against a bug-like alien race called the Arachnids, he sort of goes along, too, annoying his parents in the process. Boot camp is hard for Johnny, and he almost calls it quits, but then his home town of Buenos Aires gets smooshed by an Arachnid-guided meteorite, and then, well, it is on.

Nearly everything up to this point in the film, save for a brief intro battle sequence, has the flat and brightly-lit affect of 90s teen television: it all looks like Starship Troopers 90210, up to and including absolutely beautiful “teenagers” who are clearly well into their 20s, if not older (of the main trio Van Dien was 27 when filming started, Richards was 24 and Harris was the baby at 22). And this is the point: Verhoeven wants to seduce you with hot kids in a nice clean world that seems great as long as you ignore the public executions, the denial of voting status for most people, the military dictatorship, and, you know, the war out there in space.

But then you get to that war out in space, and you know what happens to all those really hot kids? Nothing good! And that’s where Verhoeven springs his trap. All the physical beauty in the world won’t save you in battle! All those really cool, vaguely-nazi-looking uniforms don’t look nearly as good shredded and covered in blood! And all the training and/or indoctrination you might get means nothing when the military command tells you little and sends you to die by the shipload. Verhoeven, who has never been shy about gouts of blood, severed limbs and gore, paints his masterpiece here in the viscera of the young, who ten seconds before looked like they should be in a Gap ad. The director holds up the fascistic perfection of a Leni Riefenstahl film, specifically to gleefully dash, slash, and splash it into the dirt.

Ironically (or perhaps not so ironically, because this is the US and we don’t do irony especially well), lots of folks didn’t clue into what Verhoeven was up to, accusing the famously anti-fascist director of glorifying Nazism, an accusation which Verhoeven was flabbergasted by. It would take years, long after the movie was out of the theaters and into home video, for most people to fully get what he was up to. Some people still don’t like it; many old school Heinlein fans continue to be enraged that Verhoeven’s lardering his story with fascistic imagery painted their favorite writer with the authoritarian brush.

I don’t think Heinlein ever landed on the “fascist” square at any point in his life. It’s certainly true, however, that Heinlein was moving target, politics-wise; how else can you describe someone who worked on the campaigns of both Upton Sinclair, a socialist and Democrat (who ran for governor of California in the 1930s) and the uberconservative Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964? Heinlein’s politics started left and sauntered right and added in a dollop of free-love weirdness (to, uhhhhh, say the least) in there to confuse everybody. The dynamic range of his politics over his life (and how that leaked into his fiction) means that if one wants to, one can cobble together an image of him through his work that these days gives off an authoritarian odor. Starship Troopers, the novel, is the prime source for that. The blatantly fascist imagery of the movie, satire or not, doesn’t help his fans make an argument against that.

I’ve gone into the weeds with the politics of Starship Troopers, so let me note that aside from the design of the movie, it’s also a sharply-paced action film, where the bug-killin’s both varied and plentiful: if you’re looking to see a bunch of alien bugs get ripped up by humans as much as the humans get ripped up by the aliens, this is your film. The CGI in film remains immaculate; thirty years on, it’s wild how good and how threatening the arachnids look. This film doesn’t have just one or two of them, sneaking about ala the Alien films; no, it piles them on in the hundreds, and they very much look like they are going to fuck everyone up. As Carl points out, “It’s a numbers game. They have more.” Boy, do they ever. There are very few scenes in the film where it ever feels like the humans have the upper hand, and even when they do, they’re as likely to lose a few fingers than not. Whatever else this movie is, it’s a good action-adventure film, if not, exactly, a feel-good action-adventure film.

Like so many other Paul Verhoeven films, Starship Troopers is a chaotic mess of tones; all those action scenes and pointed imagery and pretty, pretty people, tossed into a stylistic blender and sent a-whirlin’ at the highest speed setting. Almost thirty years ago now I wrote a review of this film that started with “Paul Verhoeven is a director who can give you everything you want in a movie, as long as you want too much of it.” You know what? I stand behind that sentence. Verhoeven thinks subtlety is for cowards, and he’s having none of it here, and you’re not getting of it, either. You either accept this is going to be a firehose of a movie, or you get out of the way.

To get back to those old school Heinlein fans, many of whom I like very much as humans, I can only offer the following advice to them, in terms of how to think about their beloved book, and this heretical film Hey! There’s a novel called Starship Troopers! It’s pretty good! Coincidentally and unrelated, there’s a movie called Starship Troopers! It’s also pretty good! Not the same, but pretty good. You can’t copyright titles, you know. It was inevitable there would be a movie and novel with the same name, otherwise having little to do with each other. These things happen. And that’s okay.

Also, wait until I tell you about the remarkable coincidence that happened with I, Robot.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/18/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-eighteen-starship-troopers/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58786

Posted by John Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743

Nostalgia is a trap. The people who indulge in it do so with selective memory, either their own or someone else’s. When I was a kid in the 80s, people looked back yearningly at the 50s as a simpler and better time, when families were nuclear, entertainment was wholesome and a slice of pie was just a nickel, conveniently eliding the segregation of black citizens, the communist witch hunts, and the fact that women couldn’t get things like credit cards or mortgages without a husband or some other male authority. Later people started looking at the 80s the way the 80s looked at the 50s, and they enjoyed the dayglo colors and the cheeky music and forgot apartheid, the cold war, leaded gas and smoking everywhere, or the fact that gay men were dying of AIDS and the US government (for one) couldn’t be persuaded to give a shit. I don’t feel nostalgia for the 80s; I lived in it. A whole lot of things about it were better left behind.

And still, nostalgia persists, because being an adult is complicated, and that time when you were a kid (or frankly, didn’t even exist yet) was uncomplicated. You didn’t have make any decisions yet, and all the awful things about the era existed in a realm you didn’t really have to consider. The golden age of anything is twelve, old enough to see what’s going on and not old enough to understand it.

Pleasantville is all about the trap of nostalgia and how its surface pleasures require an unexamined life. Tobey Maguire, in one of his first big roles, plays David, a high school student with a sucky home life who is obsessed with the 50s TV show Pleasantville, a sort of Father Knows Best knock-off where there patriarchy is swell and there is no problem that can’t be resolved in a half hour. For a kid from a broken home, whose mom is about to sneak off for a weekend assignation in a moderately-priced hotel, Pleasantville sounds like paradise.

That is, until David and his twin sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are, by way of a magical remote control, whisked away to Pleasantville itself, in all its monochromatic 50s glory, and forced to take on the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, the two kids of the series’ main family. For Jennifer, who is a Thoroughly Modern Millennial, this is a fate worse than death; she had plans for the weekend, and they didn’t involve dressing up like a square. David, on the other hand, is initially delighted. He knows the series inside and out, is excited to be in the highly delineated world of his favorite show, and assures his perturbed sister that as long as they play the roles assigned to them, everything will be fine until they find their way back to the 90s.

You don’t have to be a devotee of 50s sitcoms to guess how long it takes until things start going awry. David and Jennifer, whether they intend to or not, are now the proverbial snakes in the garden, bringing knowledge into a formerly innocent world, sometimes literally (David tells other teens what’s in the formerly blank library books, and the words magically fill in) and sometimes also literally, but not using words (Jennifer introduces the concept of orgasms, and boy howdy, is that a game changer). As things get more complicated, some people get unhappy. And when some people get unhappy, they start looking for someone to blame.

Pleasantville is not a subtle film by any stretch: when people start deviating from their assigned roles, they change from monochrome to color, which allows the film to label part of its uniformly Caucasian cast as “colored,” which… well, I know what extremely obvious allusion writer/director Gary Ross was trying to make here, and the best I can say about it is that it is not how I would have done it. Also, any film where a nice girl character offers a nice boy character an apple right off the tree is not trying to sneak anything past you. The movie wears its lessons and motivations right on its sleeve, and in neon.

What are subtle, though, are the performances. With the exception of J.T. Walsh, who plays the mayor of Pleasantville with big smiling back-slapping friendly menace, no one in this movie is overplaying their hand. We notice this first with David/Bud and Maguire’s bemused way of getting both of them through the world, both ours and Pleasantville’s. But then there’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the malt shop Bud works in, who is initially befuddled when things are out of sequence, but gets progressively delighted the more improvisation gets added into his life. Bud’s dad George (William H. Macy) finds his role as paterfamilias slipping away and is befuddled rather than angry about it. Even Jennifer, who initially comes in as a wrecking ball, finds a lower gear.

But the true heart of Pleasantville is Betty, Bud and Mary Sue’s mom, played by the always tremendous Joan Allen. Like everyone else in Pleasantville, Betty starts off as a naïf, who only knows what’s been written for her. But the more she strays from what she’s supposed to be doing and saying, the more she understands that what she’s “supposed” to be doing and saying stands in total opposition to what she actually needs — when, that is, she finds the wherewithal to both understand and act on those needs. Her transformation is bumpy, not without backtracks, and deeply affecting. Joan Allen did not get any awards for this film, but it is an award-worthy performance.

(Also award-worthy: Randy Newman’s score, which was in fact nominated for an Oscar.)

It’s this dichotomy — high concept, deeply ridiculous premise, and heartfelt, committed character performances — that fuels Pleasantville and makes it work better than it has any right to. It would have been so easy just to play this film as farce, and you know what? If the film had been played as farce, it would have been perfectly entertaining. Watch the latter-day Jumanji films, the ones with Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black (and Karen Gillan! Whose comedic talents are underrated!) and you’ll see how playing a ridiculous concept almost purely as farce can be both amusing and profitable. There is a world where Pleasantville is one of those 90s comedy movies whose titles on the movie posters were big chunky red letters. It’s just not this world, and the film is better for it.

By now at least some of you may have figured out why I find Pleasantville so compelling and watchable. What Ross is doing in this movie is the same sort of thing I do in a lot of my writing: Take a truly ridiculous, almost risibly farcical concept, and then make characters have real lives in the middle of it. You’ll see me doing it in Redshirts and Starter Villain and especially in When the Moon Hits Your Eye, in which, you’ll recall, I turned the moon into cheese. A lot of people think doing this sort of thing is easy, which, one, good, I try to make it look like that, and two, if you actually think it’s easy to do, try it. It takes skill, and not everyone has it, and not every book or play or TV show or movie that attempts it gets it right.

Pleasantville gets it right. It looks at the pleasures of nostalgia and says, you know what, it’s not actually all that great when you think about it. It’s no better than the real world and the modern day.

It’s hard to believe it just now, but there will come a time when someone looks back at 2025 and thinks, what a simpler, better time that was. Not because their world is that much worse (I mean, shit, I hope not), but because by then all of this will be rubbed smooth and easy and someone who is twelve now will remember it as carefree. Those of us over twelve will know better what lies underneath pleasant nostalgia. So does this film. Nostalgia is never as great as you remember it.

— JS

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/17/the-december-comfort-watches-2025-day-seventeen-pleasantville/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=58743