Rumours of a remake of Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 incisive satire of American fascism, have abounded for the best part of a decade. The latest suggestion is that Joseph Kosinski, director of such sci-fi non-classics as Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, could be tapped to reimagine the movie that set Johnny Rico and his cheerful militaristic pals against all those nasty space bugs. There are so many reasons that this is a terrible idea that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with Hollywood’s previous efforts to take on the Dutchman’s gilded back catalogue.
The original Total Recall, in 1990, might just be the perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, the Austrian oak’s preposterous frame and over-the-top acting perfectly complementing the movie’s fondness for cartoonish violence and wonderfully over-the-top, psychedelic sci-fi stereotypes. Next to Blade Runner, it may be the finest Hollywood adaptation of Philip K Dick – it is certainly the most fun. Len Wiseman’s 2012 remake did not even make it to Mars, swapping all those colourful mutants for a bland and insipid Earth-based tale in which the biggest threat is no longer Douglas Quaid’s own unreliable inner narrative but a bunch of killer robots. It’s an instantly forgettable version.
José Padilha’s Robocop, from 2014, is a crisply shot and surprisingly grim movie that will stand up better to the original over time, grounded nicely by Joel Kinnaman’s big-hearted performance as the near-dead cop turned crime-fighting robot. Yet it is missing the full weight of Verhoeven’s hyper-topical and bombastic satire on the police state, preferring to focus on the pathos of Alex Murphy’s lost humanity. There is simply nothing better than the original film, with its Trumpian propaganda broadcasts and trashy, corrupt villains.
Sadly, there is nothing in Kosinski’s CV to suggest he has the potential to go a different way with Starship Troopers. This is a film-maker who misguidedly tried to turn Tron into The Matrix and left gaping plot holes and narrative inconsistencies in Oblivion that almost ruined what might otherwise have been a decent little movie. The gorgeous M83 soundtrack deserves to be harnessed to an infinitely superior film.
Over the years, early critical opinion that Starship Troopers was simply a knuckle-headed space flick has largely been reversed. It’s remarkable that it took this long: Verhoeven is clearly satirising the rightwing militarism of his source material, the 1959 novel by Robert A Heinlein, with propaganda sequences that are straight out of the Leni Riefenstahl playbook. The Dutch director even revealed in a 2018 interview with the Guardian that he had put one actor – Neil Patrick Harris – in an SS uniform, adding “but no one noticed”. Sadly they did – Verhoeven also said that the Washington Post wrote a withering editorial bizarrely criticising the film-maker and his screen-writer as “neo-Nazis”, an article that fed into the movie’s second weekend struggles at the US box office. It ultimately failed to make its money back.
A previous attempt by Sony to reboot the series in the middle of the last decade was reported to be closer to Heinlein’s original novel in tone, which would certainly help to distinguish it from Verhoeven’s work. Yet it is Verhoeven’s razor-sharp mockery of the hawkish rightwing military mindset – that the enemy is always inhuman, that its destruction has no moral fallout, and that the only thing that ever really matters is endless, relentless, crushing victory – that makes Starship Troopers worth watching in the first place. Otherwise, Hollywood really might as well just be remaking Triumph of the Will with space bugs.
If Kosinski is thinking of signing up to a remake, you have to wonder what the benefits are career-wise. If he follows the Heinlein path, this will be just another violent and militaristic space movie, and if he tries to out-Verhoeven the Dutch maestro in satire, he’s likely to wind up as done for as a pitiful, flailing brain bug that’s long since been abandoned by its arachnid foot soldiers.
