Neill Blomkamp to direct Starship Troopers movie — do you want to know more?
It's back to the page for the District 9 director...
Neill Blomkamp is to direct a fresh adaptation of Starship Troopers, and it’s likely to be very different to the 1997 film many of you may know and love.
District 9 director Blomkamp will act as co-producer and director on the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
And it is planned as an adaptation of the original Robert Heinlein novel, not a rehash of the fantastic '90s sci-fi satire film from Paul Verhoeven.
Verhoeven told Empire he never actually finished the book, which isn’t exactly a whopper at just under 300 pages in its paperback guise.
“I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring,” Verhoeven said in 2012.
“It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time.”
Heinlein’s book is not the action-packed narrative the existing movie might make you expect, and more of a musing on political values.
In the book’s society, only veterans are given the right to vote, leading to accusations it amounts to a treatise in favour of fascism. And it spends a whole lot of time following protagonist Johnny Rico through basic military training. The novel was first published in 1959, and won a Hugo award in 1960.
It will represent a return to sci-fi for Blomkamp, who came to prominence in 2009 for District 9, but most recently directed the well-regarded Gran Turismo video game movie adaptation.
There have been three live action Starship Troopers films to date, with follow-ups to the 1997 cult classic in 2004 and 2008. But they are best avoided.
However — fun fact — the second in the series is directed by Phil Tippett, whose studio was behind the initial VFX demo that saw Starship Troopers get greenlit in the first place.
We'd advise you seek out Tippett's stop motion masterwork Mad God (2021) ahead of Starship Troopers 2 — Hero Of The Federation, though.