If there is a modern day equivalent in Hollywood to Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, he or she must be hiding in the nearest underground space bunker, desperately praying that irony makes a comeback. Verhoeven arrived at a time when transgressive “video nasties” were just fading into irrelevance, a period in which filmgoers were just as likely to head to the cinemas for schlocky thrills as they were for biting sci-fi allegory. With films such as 1987’s RoboCop, 1990’s Total Recall and 1997’s Starship Troopers, Verhoeven managed to combine a high-energy, hyper-kinetic thrust that has rarely been achieved since. He remains one of the most subversive and controversial film-makers of his generation – which is why it’s so depressing that Hollywood keeps churning out substandard remakes of his best work.
Neither José Padilha’s 2014 revamp of RoboCop nor Len Wiseman’s dry and listless 2012 reworking of Total Recall will be remembered by anyone not personally involved in those insipid productions. Which is perhaps why long-gestating plans to remake Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s hyper-stylised and super-satirical adaptation of the fascistic 1950s space war novel by Robert A Heinlein, have so far failed to make it past first star base. Studios have been trying to rework this thing since at least 2016. The latest attempt, according to the Hollywood Reporter, will see District 9’s Neill Blomkamp, once the coming man of sci-fi, taking the reins.
You might think that Blomkamp, with his flair for gritty dystopia and penchant for socially conscious sci-fi carnage, would be the perfect film-maker to reignite the spirit of gleeful nihilism that infected Verhoeven’s best work from the 80s and 90s. And you wouldn’t be far off, except that studio Sony, AKA Columbia Pictures, appears to have decided (according to reports) that the only way to bring this one back to the big screen is to jettison the subversive tone and instead lean in to the Riefenstahlian chest-thumping militarism of the original source novel by Heinlein.
Is this the legacy of Trump’s return to power infecting Hollywood boardrooms in 2025? Have the studios really decided that the smartest way to reboot Starship Troopers is to just go all in on the laser-soaked Nazi space opera vibes? Heinlein’s 1959 novel is all about a society in which people need to get battling the alien space bugs that are threatening Earth quick sharp or face a future without voting rights, basic human dignity or the faintest hint of a social safety net – because nothing says “civic duty” quite like strapping on a flamethrower and mowing down intergalactic cockroaches to prove you’re worthy of democracy. It’s hard not to imagine Verhoeven wondering how his cynical parody of militaristic nationalism ended up being remade as a sincere recruitment video for totalitarian space marines.
Moreover, why get Blomkamp involved if this is the plan? Is he really the right director to helm a fascist fantasy epic when his entire career has been built on scrappy, anti-establishment sci-fi that makes you want to riot against the nearest dystopian overlord? Is Blomkamp just a bit desperate to get back on the Hollywood hype machine after 10 years spent regretting Elysium and Chappie (and making occasional mournful posts about how much he would really really like to make an Alien film)? Or is he just so fed up with being the poster boy for gritty, socially conscious sci-fi that he’s decided to throw caution to the wind and cash the cheque?
We’ll no doubt find out if this latest attempt to remake Verhoeven’s classic actually reaches the stratosphere. In the meantime, let’s all sit back and remind ourselves that the real genius of Starship Troopers was precisely in making a film so dazzlingly dumb on the surface that entire generations of rightwing knuckleheads have apparently watched it without realising they’re the punchline.
