10 Things You Didn't Know About Starship Troopers

Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written. It won the Hugo Award in 1960, influenced a generation of science fiction writers (including Joe Haldeman and Orson Scott Card), was made compulsory reading for the United States military and even James Cameron asked the actors playing Marines in "Aliens" to read the novel in preparation.

Surely then the director of the film adaptation would have keenly studied such highly regarded source material? In fact, no, Paul Verhoeven famously hated the novel, barely making it through the first few chapters as it was too "boring and depressing".

Luckily, Ed Neumeier, the film's writer, was on hand to explain and describe the events of the book, a story he loved as a kid and one that inspired him to write the original script for "Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine" - which eventually became licenced as Starship Troopers.

Despite never having read the book, Verhoeven's second-hand interpretation of Heinlein's militaristic, idealistic and (arguably) fascist outlook inspired the film's hyper satirical look and feel becoming almost a parody of the classic source material.