10 Movies Where The Director Hated The Source Material
9. Starship Troopers
Conversely, Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is a shining example of a filmmaker taking only the scarcest outline of a dubious book and mutating it into something far more interesting and entertaining.
The sci-fi action satire is very loosely based on Robert A. Heinlein's right-wing 1959 novel of the same name, which is a blatant work of pro-military, seemingly pro-fascist propaganda.
The movie was initially written as Edward Neumeier's spec script Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, and after similarities to Starship Troopers were discovered, it was decided to option the book in order to use the title.
Verhoeven attempted to read the book, but claimed it made him "bored and depressed," and given that Verhoeven himself grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, he unsurprisingly wasn't much interested in making a pro-war, pro-fascist, right-wing movie.
So, aided by Neumeier's self-aware script, he fashioned his Starship Troopers as a deeply tongue-in-cheek satire of war, the military and the propaganda machine, all of which some critics bafflingly missed upon its original 1997 release.
Today the film endures as a kitschy cult classic, and given what has become of American foreign policy in the decades since, its themes feel only more relevant than they were in 1997.