From SF to sci-fi: Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers

With its giant Bugs, ultraviolent special effects and a script that even admirers might regard as cheesy, Starship Troopers (1997) is undeniably a state of the art 'sci-fi' action movie. ¹ Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it belongs to the period of science-fiction cinema's greatest commercial success. Whereas the majority of recent sci-fi films, from Independence Day (1996) to Men in Black (1997), drew on either mainstream novels, comic books or old movies, Starship Troopers was adapted from the classic SF novel written in 1959 by Robert Heinlein, ² one of the genre's most distinguished practitioners. The film has a tone of irony that, while not unique among contemporary blockbusters, is unusually complex and ambiguous. As a case study it allows comments not only on the relation between science fiction film and literature, but also on the specific thrills of that most disdained and, to many critics, ideologically transparent genre, the big-budget action movie.