Before you get your hopes up: No, this one isn’t going to be a satire. The Hollywood Reporter has the news that Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Elysium) is going to “go back to the source material” for a new adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. As THR politely notes, “While the book won a Hugo Award for best novel and has been quite influential in sci-fi literature, some quarters described the book as fascist.”
The current publisher summary for the novel—which has a great vintage-vibes cover—says:
In Robert A. Heinlein’s controversial Hugo Award-winning bestseller, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe—and into battle against mankind’s most alarming enemy…
Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids.
Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job…
This doesn’t say much. For more context, you could read Jo Walton’s 2009 post, or Alan Brown’s look at the book in his military science fiction column.
One thing is clear: Blomkamp’s take is not going to be anything like Paul Verhoeven’s aggressively violent, satirical, oft-misread 1997 film (pictured above), which turned the novel on its head. Blomkamp is probably best known for District 9, about which I defer to Nnedi Okorafor, but he also made Elysium, a heavy-handed, borderline nonsensical tale of future haves and have-nots. His movies take themselves very seriously, and one can only assume the same will be true of a new Starship Troopers.
