10 Movies That Abandoned The Source Material (For The Better)

While the other entries on this list abandoned their source material completely, they still managed to stay true to the original's spirit. Civil War was a tragic tale of friends becoming bitter rivals, and that's the film they made. Jurassic Park is the story of science gone wrong because of mankind's desire to play god, and that's the film they made, etc.

Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers... is not that. At all.

In fact, at no point in this film do you believe that Verhoeven has anything but scathing, bottomless contempt for the story, its characters, and the writer who brought them into the world. And it is glorious.

Starship Troopers is what happens when you get an ardent anti-fascist to adapt a story that glorifies fascism. What results is a biting, scathing satire of fascism, nationalism and military exceptionalism in the form of what - in the world of Starship Troopers - would be a military recruitment film.

Verhoeven displays a thorough knowledge of propaganda films, how they work, and how they can make you buy into ideas that you would normally attest to being against. It's a brilliant example of a director getting to have his cake and eat it too.

He got to decry everything Starship Troopers as a property stood for, while making a story that was a million times better than anything the original author could have conceived.