ABSTRACT
With its giant Bugs, ultraviolent special effects and a script that even admirers might regard as cheesy, Starship Troopers is undeniably a state of the art sci-fi action movie. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it belongs to the period of science-fiction cinema's greatest commercial success. Whereas the majority of recent sci-fi films, from Independence Day to Men in Black, drew on either mainstream novels, comic books or old movies, Starship Troopers was adapted from the classic SF novel written in 1959 by Robert Heinlein, one of the genre's most distinguished practitioners. As a case study it allows comments not only on the relation between science fiction film and literature, but also on the specific thrills of that most disdained and, to many critics, ideologically transparent genre, the big-budget action movie. Critics with an investment in legitimating the genre have long regarded SF novels as more subtle and imaginative than sci-fi movies, which till recently were chiefly valued for their ideological subtexts.
