r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Morr4Seiya • 8d ago

Hated Tropes An adaptation completely botches the original theme and message

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Mulan(2020)-They give Mulan superpowers which is not only lame it goes against the message of the original about equality and struggle,plus they removes Shang because apparently having Mulan date her superior was "problematic" even though Shang genuienely respected Mulan and their rank was never brought up

I am Legend(2007)-You know why the story is called "I am legend"? SPOILER ALERT the protagonist is the actual monster,humanity is gone and the vampires have a actual society and the protagonist kills and terrorize them

Animal Farm(2026)-On the very slim chance that Andy Serkis ever sees this,here's the thing Andy,Animal Farm was not a children work it was not supposed to have a happy ending,you never heard of cautionary tales before?

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u/NarmHull 8d ago edited 8d ago

Starship Troopers was intentionally going against what Paul Verhoeven thought was a pro-fascist book to be far more satirical.

Edit- NOT Super Troopers unless there's a crazy copaganda book I missed haha

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u/xanderfloyd001 8d ago edited 8d ago

I'm hoping you meant Starship Troopers, because this is Super Troopers:

ETR(Edit To Respond): lmao all good; it was a funny but understandable mix-up.

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u/buttplug-tester 8d ago

I assume you mean Starship Troopers but it's funnier this way

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u/Credit-Financial 8d ago

Did you mean Starship Troopers?

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u/NoChairGaming 8d ago

Did you mean... nah, that's been done already.

But was the book really that fascist? It was a military society but from what I remember from almost twenty years ago: they only discriminate against people who didn't serve by not letting them run for office (and voting?) while also not really showing the society as some wonderful utopia. And having politicians actually participate in the society before running it instead of professional broilers is a discussion we can all have.

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u/HustlinInTheHall 8d ago

It's pretty dismissive of the ability of a multi-cultural society to thrive without a strong centralized rule that effectively subjugates people who haven't served, there are lots of direct passages discussing how soft power, social democracy, etc. are dead ends and will inevitably end in violence.

The movie takes a broader view that humanity is mostly the cause of its own ills and the inevitable endpoint of a militaristic rule is going to end in fascism, because people who cling to the perception of strength are narrowminded and ignorant. I think the movie and book just talk past each other and they're products of their time.

The book is a pretty clear dismissal of the idea of a multicultural social democracy being able to survive without the military to clean things up and it is vehemently anti communist. The movie is anti-fascist and examines how a society made of hammers just treats every problem like a nail needing to be smashed.

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u/Imperium_Dragon 8d ago

It's also not exactly a military society, it's based around any type of government service.

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u/NoChairGaming 8d ago

Well I do believe that they fought against "the bugs" just for conquest and to have a unifying goal while knowing that they weren't some mindless hive but I could be wrong about that part. Should probably reread the book.

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u/hammererofglass 8d ago

Yeah there's zero pretense about that. They're both expanding imperial powers and they need the same kinds of worlds to make colonies, that's it.

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u/HustlinInTheHall 8d ago

The book is pretty clearly using bugs as an analogy for the creep of communism. The movie treats them as a typical foil for a fascist society in need of an outgroup to target to maintain control, undermined mostly by its own hubris.

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u/Smart-Response9881 7d ago

In the book it is more civil service rather than just military service. The militarism an elite core, a lot of people who sign up for the service just get janitor duty.

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u/FifteenEchoes 8d ago

Not really.

Verhoeven didn’t even read the book

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u/Archaon0103 8d ago

While he didn't read the book, he did have someone else read it for him and he specifically dislike the pro-military stand of the book because he had experienced the result of such ideology from WW2.

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u/YossarianWWII 8d ago

The book's only pro-military if you take Rico's perspective as God's honest truth, which it isn't. It's the perspective of someone conditioned from birth to aspire to military service and whose personality is rebuilt from the ground up in boot camp. He goes from being deeply traumatized by his mother's death to readily moving past the death of his closest childhood friend. He's a kid who was desperate for a sense of purpose being constantly barraged with the message that the highest purpose is citizenship and, through that, military service.

His father's fate reflects this too. When his life is shattered by the sudden death of his wife and his son's departure for the infantry, where does he end up? The infantry.

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u/sgtGiggsy 7d ago

It's the perspective of someone conditioned from birth to aspire to military service

Nope. That's the whole thing. The book doesn't have the brainwashing propaganda. That was entirely Verhoeven's addition. The book treats citizenship as an additional possible to earn privilege, but not as a thing you can't live a full life without. Heinlein's idea was practically that people should earn their right to vote, instead of giving it to every halfwit that has never done anything for anyone.

AND!

In the book military was just one of the way one could earn citizenship. ANY kind of public service qualified people to this.

Verhoeven is a dumb fuck, who had an accidental good run with three instant classics in a row, then never again created anything good. Yeah, Starship Troopers included. I've seen absolutely butchered adaptations before, but up until the 2020s, I've never hated one nearly as much as his Starship Troopers.

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u/YossarianWWII 7d ago

Nope. That's the whole thing. The book doesn't have the brainwashing propaganda. That was entirely Verhoeven's addition.

You don't need engineered propaganda to condition people. Their society is built around elevating those who've served in the military above others, even those who've been in "non-frontline" roles like a group of merchant marines. Basically, it only counts if your service was about fighting against "the enemy." That's part of why research posts like his friend's are off in other parts of the galaxy, isolated from civil society. There's also the process of going through boot camp, which has always been designed with an element of deconstructing a person's identity and rebuilding it in the image of the soldier. You can go read about that if you want. It's a well-studied phenomenon.

Heinlein's idea was practically that people should earn their right to vote, instead of giving it to every halfwit that has never done anything for anyone.

In the book military was just one of the way one could earn citizenship. ANY kind of public service qualified people to this.

Neither is true, as illustrated by case of the merchant marines.

See, this is the thing. You're relaying Rico's perspective, the perspective from which the story is told, but you have to also look at the things that he breezes over and the contradictions that he fails to see. It displays how Rico's missing or devaluing things that I (and people generally from my cultural background - values are relative, after all) would consider fucked up and how the way in which he's been reshaped by his experience in the military, the experience of a Mobile Infantryman and one shared in similar form by all members of the military, creates a system in which those who can vote prize military service and perpetuate militarism.

Again, this phenomenon as it occurs in real life is well-studied. Heinlein wasn't inventing it out of thin air, he was telling a story of a militaristic society where "the other" were not just other humans but the fundamentally unrecognizable "bugs," as contrasted with the "skinnies" in the introduction.

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u/sgtGiggsy 7d ago

Their society is built around elevating those who've served in the military above others

No, it isn't. It elevates people who served the society. Military is just one form of service.

I won't waste my time reacting to anything else you wrote, because the whole thing was built on an attrocious lie, so nothing else is relevant.

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u/YossarianWWII 6d ago

Really? No response to the fact that merchant marines are not granted citizenship? It's in the same sentence that you partially quoted, so I imagine you read it.

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u/sgtGiggsy 5d ago

Merchant marines are not public servants by any means. They work for private companies, so you are still lying.

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u/FifteenEchoes 8d ago

Ah yes, he had someone else read it for him, that makes it all better. Why not have someone else do the directing too? Hopefully someone who actually respects the source material.

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u/pyrhus626 8d ago

Because it wasn’t supposed to be Starship Troopers movie. It was originally its own IP with a script called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 which is very, very similar to the movie we got. The script had the comedic / satirical undertones against xenophobia and jingoism with the teen romance subplot baked in. They couldn’t get any studio to pick it up, as usually happens to new ideas in Hollywood, until someone noticed vague similarities to Starship Troopers. When the rights to the book were bought and they pitched Bug Hunt as an adaptation it finally got the green light.

The original writers and producers still wanted to make their movie, not Starship Troopers. Verhoeven was their preferred choice for director back in the Bug Hunt days even if he wasn’t hired until after it became Starship Troopers in name. Verhoeven liked the script and the message of Bug Hunt, so took the job and made the movie the way its creators envisioned. During production he learned more about what the book Starship Troopers entailed and hated it, but that didn’t particularly matter because he wasn’t really hired to make an adaptation. He knocked it out of the park making Bug Hunt, but it all got messed up by sticking the name of another IP over top of it with a handful of name changes.

It’s a really instructive example of why and how film adaptations wind up so radically different. Nobody involved creatively on the movie wanted to make an adaptation, they made the movie they wanted to make with enough names borrowed from Heinlein to keep the studio happy.

I also think it gets misrepresented as Verhoeven disrespecting and satirizing the source material, but the satire against militarism and such was baked into it well before he was hired or the book was attached. He wasn’t attacking the book like a lot of Heinlein fans think.

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u/bryan_from_heck 8d ago

Well, we got a cult classic film out of it that's actually preferable to the message of the books, so why be upset about it?

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u/Archaon0103 8d ago

He understood the theme completely, doesn't mean he need to like the theme. Also of he was faithful to the work, it would be a film take up mostly by civil classes.

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u/pyrhus626 8d ago

Well it wasn’t supposed to be based on the book and he wasn’t really hired to make an adaptation, it was an original project they were forced to stick the Starship Troopers name on in a farce to get the movie made.

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u/SomeKindofTreeWizard 8d ago

I'd make the case that it's not PRO fascist, since Heinlein was ... kind of an iconoclastic libertarian nutjob. But the book is demonstrably fascist. The marines are psychologically and hypnotically conditioned to do unquestioning genocide.

If you can program them to do atrocities while they sleep, I don't think they're going to be a bunch of independent thinkers when they run for office...

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u/OneCatch 8d ago

The marines are psychologically and hypnotically conditioned to do unquestioning genocide.

That's the Forever War (written as a critique to Starship Troopers and a better book).

In Starship Troopers there is battle hypnosis, but it's mainly for mental clarity and calm - the troopers aren't berserkers and are shown to be clinically obeying their ROE in the fights against the humanoid aliens (ROE which is explicitly non-genocidal, though the justification of the overall war is unknown). Against the bugs it doesn't matter how they behave given that no quarter is asked nor given by the bugs either.

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u/Wonderful_Discount59 7d ago

The fights against the Skinnies do involve a lot of acts that (by modern standards) would be explicit war crimes (e.g. destroying water-treatment plants in order to render a city uninhabitable and force the population to leave).

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u/OneCatch 7d ago

By modern standards, yes. It's also the type of thing that even every major western power was engaging in when the book was written, either overtly or by proxy. Even in relatively clean wars today, often the first act is knocking out the power grid.

But the point I'm making is that if their intent was straightforwardly genocidal then they'd just drop a hydrogen bomb on the city and be done with it. The employment of the MI is definitionally a more nuanced approach. And, even within the use of infantry, there are degrees. Rico isn't yoloing a-bombs into high density housing or killing every skinny he sees, he's hitting specific targets of military or strategic value and only fighting individual adversaries when strictly necessary.

Even if the strategic decision-making is questionable by modern standards, the execution is scrupulously clean - cleaner than modern combat is in practice.

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u/SomeKindofTreeWizard 7d ago

they receive their orders hypnotically as well.

"No quarter is given or asked from the bugs" according to our very reliable (BRAINWASHED) narrator.

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u/OneCatch 7d ago

I mean; the very first, quite well known, line of the book - "I always get the shakes before a drop" - pretty firmly characterises the hypnotic suggestions as being only partially effective. They take the edge off of normal human reactions to combat, but don't eliminate them.

And the combat narratives are straightforward - against the humanoid adversaries Rico is perfectly willing to acknowledge that they have variable morale, self preservation instincts, and so on - and that tangibly affects the course of the engagements with them.

With the bugs, tangible occurrences during the battle demonstrate that they can't be reasoned with or understand ROE as we'd define them. And, of course, in that first engagement Rico belatedly realises and narrates that the worker caste are non-aggressive - were he as hypnosis-addled as you suggest, he'd never have even realised that.

Battle hypnosis is a pretty common science fiction trope - no-one questions the entire narrative structure of Armor or Forever War or whatever on the basis of a passing mentions of hypnosis, but for some reason everyone freaks the fuck out about Starship Troopers. It's infantile.

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u/SomeKindofTreeWizard 7d ago

Man, you got a cliffnotes version of that?

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u/OneCatch 6d ago

What do you mean, sorry?

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u/AgathysAllAlong 8d ago

That's not what fascism is. It's about how the military is definitely authoritarian, but fascism isn't just "war crimes".

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u/SomeKindofTreeWizard 7d ago

Neat. When did I say it was?

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u/just-letmereadyacunt 8d ago edited 8d ago

There's absolutely nothing fascist about the Starship troopers society.

Theirs is a liberal democracy that takes the idea of the citizen soldier into its natural ending, a principle all early democracies had but got phased out when democracies devolved into bureaucracies.

Fascism is a totalitarian system where eveyone belongs to the state for the state to use them as they consider fit.

In the Starship troopers world the state can't even draft you to ensure its own survival.

If people don't want to fight for the system then the system will literally die to foreign invasion, no draftee army to defend the supreme leader from enemies in a total war.

The only benefit from military service is voting, nothing more, private property, free speech, sexual preference, freedom of association, gun ownership, literally all other rights are given at birth.

Compare that to fascism where the state is supposed to control your thoughts, where you work, your education, you will be eliminated for proving dangerous to the regime, all in order to create the "new man" for a new age of utopian egalitarianism.

The idea behind both star ship troopers and the citizen soldier principle is not that war=good, but rather that if those that can vote fight for the nation, they will be significantly less motivated to vote for laws that will destroy the nation in the long run because not only they have something to lose but they risked their lives for the system is unlikely they'll vote to degrade what they risked their lives for, is not at all about militarism.

Militaristic societies don't make it impossible for the state to draft armies.

That dutch director is just an idiot Hippie that thinks "army=fascism"

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u/Vocal__Minority 8d ago

In terms of the book it certainly has fascistic elements, such as glorification of the military and voting restricted to an elite.

In terms of the film, the society it depicts is certainly fascistic - pulling out and emphasising elrments of the book that lean that way, although it's quite subtle (somehow, in the bombastic nature of the movie as a whole) about what it's showing you.

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u/VastAddendum 8d ago

That is not even remotely what fascism is. They are literally in a state of war after being attacked so badly an entire city was wiped out in one hit. Of course it's a pro- military society. That's like saying Britain in WW2 was fascist for being pro- military as they fought to hold off the Nazis.

And voting is not restricted to "the elite", it's restricted to those who have served their country. You don't have to agree with the idea, but that's not a tenet of fascism.

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u/hallucination9000 8d ago

I think it's interesting to compare the Federation's voluntary service-based citizenship to real life countries with birthright citizenship and compulsory service.

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u/Vocal__Minority 8d ago edited 8d ago

You sound like one of those people who really don't want ideas they like to be fascist.

Also someone who doesn't understand allegory and thinks very literally

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u/Only-Friend-8483 8d ago

Surely you mean Starship Troopers. 

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u/NarmHull 8d ago

Oh fuck, haha yeah

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u/njsullyalex 8d ago

The movie’s anti fascism message is objectively better

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u/Lil_Quip 8d ago

Haha awesome typo. The irony is Heinlein isnt really fascist at all.

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u/ThatFatGuyMJL 8d ago

Im assuming you mean starship troopers

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u/NarmHull 8d ago

Littering and.....voting without enlisting in Federal Service

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u/SpiceWeez 8d ago

And we love it for that

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u/notherenwerebear 8d ago

Did you mean star ship troopers, only because I was unaware super troopers was based off of a book

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u/Fancy_Chips 7d ago

People reading Heinlein to be pro-fascist is fucking hilarious to me. Yes, the "we should live butt naked in isolated polycules while killing the shit out of authoritarians" is a fascist.

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u/fresh-dork 7d ago

that isn't an adaptation, they just slapped the title on an existing script

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u/ToonMasterRace 8d ago

I legit don’t understand how starship troopers is meant to be fascist even in the film where the director insists it is. Post-race post-gender society. When the white sky Marshall fucks up he’s replaced by a black woman. Does that sound like fascism?

But omg they wore Nazi style uniforms at the end ignore everything else

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u/Sturmgarde 8d ago

*starship?

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u/NarmHull 8d ago

yup changed it lol

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u/Sturmgarde 8d ago

All good, bruva