Seeing as how we're rapidly approaching some weird totalitarian regime fueled by
propaganda anyway.
Now's as good a time as any to take a look back at Paul Verhoeven's bloody cheese
ball masterpiece, Starship Troopers.
>> Based on Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, the same name.
The film that gave us Casper Van Dien came 40 years later,
such a time that featured most of the Cold War.
So surely views on the necessity of war didn't change in just four little decades,
right?
>> Well, it's time to find out.
Ten-hut, come on you apes it's time to ask What's the Difference?
Both the book and the movie tell the same basic story.
Following Johnny Rico from his recruitment into the military and
his assent through the ranks during the Bug War.
He's a rich kid who's parents are opposed to his term of service in
the Federation Army.
Thinking his desire to become a citizen is trumped up by the high school's not so
subtle recruiting efforts.
But, like all 18 year olds doing exactly the opposite thing their folks want them
to do, he joins up, and ships out, and kills some bugs.
>> And that's pretty much the only thing these two stories have in common.
Well, that and some character names.
And Heinlein's novel starts in the middle of the Bug War and then flashes back just
like they do in the movie, but that is definitely it, yeah, that's it.
The book takes the form of a memoir of sorts,
Johnny Rico's first person narrative recounting of his time in the Bug War.
But right away there's a big difference,
the mobile infantry in the book are fighting in a developed planet,
an urban setting full of buildings and structures.
They're carpet bombing the city,
attempting to destroy as much as possible while killing as few aliens as possible.
Now, it's populated by a race Rico calls Skinnies.
>> The movie opens with a recruitment video, a completely cheese dick piece of
propaganda that sets the tone for the entire movie.
And establishes the film's structural difference from the book.
A quick little side note about this section, Verhoeven modeled it shot for
shot after portions of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi love letter, Triumph of the Will.
By the time we see any action, it's the mobile infantry armed simply with machine
guns getting their asses handed to them by the Bugs on their home planet Klendathu.
We see Johnny Rico wounded and
screaming before fading into a title card that flashes us back in time by a year.
>> The mobile infantry in the book, however, are much higher tech.
They wear mechanized power suits that amplify the soldier's movements to make
them both super strong and super agile.
It's actually pretty awesome.
Rico and his comrades spend the opening chapter getting shot out of individual
pods directly from their ship, landing on the surface.
And then leaping over buildings, just lobbing nuke grenades,
just trying to do as much damage as possible.
Just causing chaos, just watching the world burn.
>> The book and the movie's high school sections play out largely in the same way,
but the characters are very different.
Let's do a quick roll call.
Movie Rico, Casper Van Dien, good looking, bad at math, joins up because of a girl.
>> Book Rico, also handsome, rich, and bad at math, but unclear on why he's joining.
He's against it one minute and he's all for it the next just because Carl joins.
>> Movie Carl, Neil Patrick Harris, great at math, a little psychic,
manipulates ferrets.
>> Book Carl, unlike Rico, not super rich and definitely not psychic, but
a fair tinkerer and electronics whiz, a shoo-in for a cushy research position.
>> Movie Carmen, Denise Richards, Rico's girlfriend, great at math,
but can't handle alien stomachs, wants to be a pilot real bad.
>> Book Carmen, smart, and strong, and also wants to be a pilot.
Even though Rico's mom adores her, she's not tied down with a steady boyfriend,
Rico or otherwise.
>> Movie Diz, Dina Meyer, athletic, a total bad ass, super into Rico, but
he's only got eyes for Carmen.
>> Book Diz, didn't really exist.
Well, you see, in the book Dizzy Flores is a man,
a solider that buys the farm in the opening chapter, he's a fart in the wind.
Movie Rasczak, Michael (Sound) Ironside.
The not so subtle high school propaganda we mentioned?
That's him, he's a no bull.
(Sound) One armed, truth spewing son of.
(Sound) Who's later revealed to be leader of the Roughnecks.
A battallion of total.
(Sound) Punchers.
>> Luke Rasczhak, he's dead too.
He was the leader and namesake of Rasczhak's Roughnecks when Rico first
lands with the unit, but doesn't last too long.
Rico's high school teacher is Mr. Dubois.
He finds out later that Dubois was actually a decorated military man, but
his arm and a half situation keeps him fully out of active duty.
Still the scene in the movie where Rasczhak goes on and
on about violence being the only true way to solve conflicts is lifted straight
from Dubois lectures from the book.
>> That's some good roll calling there soldier.
>> Thank you. >> Once Rico decides to join up,
it's all smiles and welcome aboard from the recruiting officer.
A paraplegic veteran himself,
who comically endorses the mobile infantry by claiming it made him the man he is.
In the book, however,
the Federation discourages military service at every turn.
Firstly, the recruiting officer, who is similarly short on limbs,
spends several minutes trying to talk Rico and Carl out of joining up.
After signing up anyway they get poked and prodded by a bunch of doctors.
Not to see if they're fit for duty,
because they legally can't turn anyone down, but instead they're checking to
see what duties they're physically capable to perform.
After that, it's 48 hours leave to think it over one last time.
And if they don't come back after those two days, it's no biggie,
the army won't try to track them down.
>> Skipping past a super rad jump ball sequence that is, for some reason,
not anywhere in Heinlein's text.
The film is wildly different from the book in a variety of ways.
Plot wise, for instance, movie Johnny is from Buenos Aires.
And rethinks his decision to quit the MI when a bug meteor kills everyone,
his parents included, in the Argentine city.
>> In the book, though,
Johnny's mom was just on vacation in Buenos Aires when the attack happened.
An event that actually causes previously anti-military dad to join up himself so
that he could finally be a man.
>> The movie's plot is a much more straightforward narrative,
focusing on Rico, his high school buddies, and the associated love triangles.
As their paths cross in an effort to find the Brain Bug in a foothold in this near
impossible war.
Verhoeven structures his film through a framework of satirical cutaways,
news broadcasts, press conferences, and other bits of wartime propaganda.
Remind the viewer just often enough that the society perpetrating this bonkers war
in another solar system is straight up fascist.
>> The book, on the other hand, is much more contemplative.
Frankly, it's got a lot more in common with Full Metal Jacket than
Paul Verhoeven's adaptation.
In fact, Rico's travels through the military feature more info dumps
than action.
His teachers, drill instructors, and superior officers along the way spend long
chapters taking part in broad, philosophical debates.
About everything from voting rights, to capital punishment, and patriotism.
>> The through line of the Bug War is still there, but in a very different way.
The military knows all about the bugs and their caste system of workers, warriors,
and intelligent ruling class.
The bugs, overall, are much more obviously advanced ,they've occupied other planets,
they've got weapons, and are known to take hostages.
All of which is a far cry from the general arrogance with which they're
treated in the film.
>> By the end of the film, Johnny Rico is reunited with Carmen and Carl.
All of them successful in their military careers,
happily jaunting off to the next battle and another bunch of bugs to destroy.
But the end of the book finds Rico in charge of the Roughnecks
like his movie counterpart.
But Carl wound up dead on Jupiter instead of a high ranking military sidekick.
Book Carmen and Rico only got to meet up for dinner once, but that's it.
We also find out that Rico is now his own dad's commanding officer as they load up
into launch tubes, ready to take another run at Klendathu.
>> Even with a very different plot,
the biggest change from the book is still the difference that 40 years makes.
Robert Heinlein wrote a book singing the praises of the military,
preaching about its necessary place in any successful society.
Written in the early days of the Cold War,
shortly after the US halted its nuclear weapons testing.
Heinlein's novel proclaimed quite explicitly that societies who don't stay
aggressive don't stay around for long.
In fact, many of the ideas in the novel were critiqued as adding up to nothing
more than an overstuffed military recruiting pamphlet.
Verhoeven's film, meanwhile, made in the late 90s,
the post Gulf War days of a budget surplus says the opposite.
We pissed off the Bugs in their own home and the subsequent war is our own fault,
the resulting propaganda is meant to be ridiculous.
The tactics in battle sending soldiers hustling in hoards of arachnids with
machine guns that have little to no effect on the enemy are meant to look
equally dumb.
But while the book became one of the most influential and
controversial pieces of science fiction in the 20th century.
The movie with all it's limb severing gore and, well,
let's call it stiff performances >> You're some kind of big, fat,
smart Bug, aren't you?
>> May have been too smart for its own good,
satirizing the most fascist elements of the novel.
(Sound) >> That'll do it for
this episode of What's the Difference?, would you like to know more?
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