Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly.
I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought.
But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both respect and criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting, and necessary.
Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.
Verhoeven may have said that. Whether it's true is another matter; he could have been trolling the book's fans.
For a project that supposedly started as another entirely unrelated movie, by a director who hadn't read the book, it managed to fit in a lot of the book's particular rhetoric and plot points.
I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought.
But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both respect and criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting, and necessary.
Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.