Starship Troopers reboot to cut back the violence

It gives the studio, and us as producers, the opportunity to reintroduce it in a new way”. - does he think people are idiots? He should just be honest and say it widens the audience and tie-in marketing opportunities!

Unfortunatly as I've realised recently most people that do go to the cinema are indeed idiots which is why we get so many remakes,reboots etc. - Just look how many people are in line already to see the new Total Recall movie (many who cried foul before the trailers hit) by the guy who made the Underworld flicks

The more reboots I see, the more I think "why!?"
Has Hollywood finally run out of original material? I think it's more a question of producing a marketable franchise than creating something unique. More about
profit over product. If enough people stopped patronising this lazy pap, they'd
be forced to deliver something original... oh well, I can dream...

What you're saying is in part what he's saying - more violence tends to lead to smaller consumer market, which means there's less confidence for high investment (you plough more money into things that can work in a wider market), so its a question of whether explicit violence that ups the rating is worth the potentially smaller budget to play in. He's not treating you as an idiot at all, in fact he's being more honest than I've seen in a film-maker's comment in a long time. It's less about dumbing down, it's just simple economics vs creative freedoms from his POV. Whether there is a further demand to "dumb down" for merchandise is a different question, though a valid one.

Bah! The tits and gore added to the charm of the original.

I am usually the first person to complain when reboots of my favourite movies and thrown out. But even I must admit with the cast this movie has behind it, I want to see it, its more a re imagining than a remake anyway. But they can be good. What does annoy me though is when movies are toned down to lower the rating and get more people in so they can that few extra hundred mil. I mean I can see that these studious need to make money, but that should be a secondary goal. I mean would it be so bad if movie studious had to break even if what they put out instead was what is was supposed to be.

Hunger games being a perfect example of this. I liked it I really did, but I think it definitely lost something in the book - movie translation and then just a little bit more in the 15 - 12a rating. A 15 I think would have been perfect and would be for the majority of these movies.

There's nothing wrong with remakes done right. Case in point: Halo. A game, not a movie, but the point remains valid.

This looks nothing like a re-imagining to me, it's a continuation. When I hear "re-imagining" I think about how they totally f***ed up Nick Fury's character just so he could be played by Samuel L. Jackson and how everybody's all cool with that for some reason.

Starship Troopers less violent. Along with decaffeinated coffee, alcohol-free wine, tofu burgers and carob chocolate.

The site's front page has SIX movies that are being remade/re-imagined/rebooted.

This will never end, it seems.

So maybe this time they can actually follow the book? Given how different the movie was the "original" was already a remake. So when someone hopelessly screws up an original work then the "remake" is just an attempt to get it right. (The original book being one of my all time favorites I'm very biased towards Verhoeven being nothing but a total jackass.)

More sex and less violence I always say.

he should write a book on how to ruin a franchise that had so much potential for second time. When that first movie came out it was awesome, i don't know what happened after that. sequels were incredible disappointing.

Violence-free Starship Troopers ranks alongside alcohol-free lager and nourishment-free food as a total inspid waste of space! In the original film, the scenes of all the human activities, relationships and goings-on were so abysmally and unremittingly awful, ludicrously scripted, badly acted and cavarlierly directed that the violence of the bugs tearing soldiers to pieces provided the only decent and enjoyable parts of the whole film. Remove them and the mayhem they wreak, and what is left? Just several episodes of "Future Coronation Street" stiched together, but not so well acted.

Now you're talking, Slowhand. I support your statement. The book was a masterpiece of political analysis and shock sociological awakening, comparable (perhaps even better?) than Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. In the book, the bugs played an extremely minor part, merely a briefly used literary foil for the main characters to "discover" themselves against. I cannot put into words how disappointed I was when I saw the film on first release. It was a crime.

AWW COME ONE. THAT'S THE POINT OF STARSHIP TROOPERS. TO BE CHEESY, LAUGH OUT LOUD STUPID, AND BLOODY.
HAPPY INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!

So it'll be like Verhoeven's film but without the violence and the irony?

'one man’s fascism is another man’s patriotism' No .... no .... no .... no. Just no. No. Are we clear? I'm not seeing this film as it's very obvious the man making it is an flaming
idiot.

Here, here. I actually saw the first movie in the theater! I had read the book several times over the years and it is still one of my favorites. I sat thru that masterpiece of wretchedness slack-jawed in dis-believe. My wife was too dumbfounded by what she saw to demand we leave. She refers to it to this day as THE WORST movie she has ever seen and uses it as her benchmark. If they could just stick to the book with very little artistic license, properly cast and directed, we could see an Oscar-worthy film.

Dear Lord! The Heinlein book is a teenage wish-fulfilment fantasy, thinly disguised an essay on the conflict in political history. The film is a damning critique not of fascism, but of American cultural imperialism - just consider how all those Buenos Aires kids had American accents and perfect, mall-rat, teeth. This isn't even just my interpretation, Verhoeven, who lived through the American bombing of Amsterdam, has said so. In the film, Americans ARE the fascists, expanding throughout the universe until they finally meet an opposition.

If somebody wants to make a film that is closer to the Heinlein novel that is all and good, but let's not hide from the fact that it is pretty poor source material.

yep. ive got an unlimited card for the cinema, so could get to see as many films as i want, but theres been a lot of run of the mill stuff, and films that are rehashes of simmilar ideas to make me want to go see much recently.
im not even sure i want to go see the new spidey reboot, as ive seen a few long 5+ min trailers pretty much telling me the story already. though Emma Stones in it... > shes nice.

Hollywood - making fascism palatable for a PG-13 audience.

Oh Dave, only you could call a winner of this many sci-fi awards poor source material while jerking it to Cloud Atlas. The problem is that people like you read, watch and hear everything through your own filter. Sure you occasionally empathize but only when the object correlates with your own paradigm. Starship Troopers, unlike all the other stuff that exists for the "you's" of the world, was written for a specific group; the infantry. Not special forces or navy seals or anything like that. He wrote it for the infantry. And yes, the infantry isn't the ideal model for civilization. Unless you're pro gratuitous violence and utter disgust for people too weak to be self sustained. But right or wrong socially, this book wasn't made with mass appeal. And evoking Verhoeven as confirmation is like saying we should ban oil because George Clooney reached the same conclusion. My conclusion is that you're a tool. By the way, what do you think a fascist is? I'm certain you either don't understand the word or you don't understand American history too well... Either way, you're wrong.

The film is, in fact, a commentary on the ideas perpetuated by the book.
While the novel is a 'tribute to the infantry', the film is 'the irony
of a tribute to the infantry'. People who watched the movie, honestly
watching the scenes (particularly at the beginning) with hopelessly
chintzy dialogue and disturbingly perfect looking actors wholly missed
the point. Verhoeven was providing a social commentary on the ideas
people have of soldiers being handsome, strong, courageous heroes, where
Verhoeven takes an abstraction and rather shows handsome, foolishly
courageous characters witnessing unholy, hellish violent scenarios and
seeing utter human devastation. Some images in the film say more than
they appear to about American fascism (OED states 'Fascism tends to
include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group or the
military prowess of an individual' so I would say David's assessment is
rather accurate), for example a soldier shooting the desperate eye of a
bug and continuing to shoot it after it has died (work it out) and the
large battalion of soldiers rejoicing at the fear of the brain bug. The
reason people are upset about the violence and nudity being removed from
the film are because they are essential to the message of the film and a
key factor in the success of Paul Verhoeven's enviable body of work.
The violence is necessary, because it allows us to observe the
nightmarish horror to which the brainwashed imperialist sophomore
soldiers are blind, but it is more of a subtle phenomenon with the
nudity. Explicit and highly arousing nudity is shown throughout because
he wants you to have the cognitive dissonance of being as turned on by
their destruction as you were by their youthful carnality, whether you
consciously register it as cognitive dissonance or not. It is insulting
that producers are cashing in greedily on the kudos of Verhoeven's body
of work while shamelessly stealing visual cues and directorial ideas
from the likes of Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg to create mutant,
humourless, bloodless, and joyless pastiches. And by the way, Starship
Troopers is not yours. I read it as well, and so did my mum.