> I actually thought it was quite fun. True, it was a terrible adaptation, but that's a different story altogether.

I think that, in some ways, the Starship Troopers movie functions as a *critique* of what some think of as Heinlein's worst moment.

Now, as I hear the knives coming out, please bear in mind, I personally loved Heinlein's books - he was my philosophical father as I grew up - but tho he was groundbreaking in some ways and certainly told a good yarn, he was also a product of his time and reflected some of the weaknesses of that time. Spider Robinson, a younger writer who was compared to him a lot, wrote about this with better clarity than I can here. I forget the name of the essay - "The Trouble with Heinlein" or something like that.

anyway, the ST movie kept/emphasized all the most embarrassing things
- the "oh at least I lived long enough to do you, Johnny" death scene, and similar violent-hero-worship melodrama.
- the 50s-xenophobia bug-eyed-alien-paranoia kitsch that was brought to its logical conclusion in invading somebody else's planet and trying to kill everything in sight (metaphor for imperialism/colonialism)
- the WW2-fascist-like crisp-creased-uniform scenes that seem to represent the society the characters inhabit.

I think a lot of it was very tongue-in-cheek - possibly without even the producers' awareness of it (tho it might've been simple incompetence & I'm reading in too much - we'll prolly never know). Significantly, the director was Dutch. For historical reasons, no one hates militarist-fascism -nor is more qualified to critique it from up close -than the Dutch. Its probably even more relevent in the Bush era.