Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is one of those movies that sounds completely, irredeemably dumb on the surface, but eventually comes to be revered precisely for that dumbness, because it turns out they knew what they were making after all. But it takes a special director to turn something truly ridiculous into an actual classic, and since Verhoeven was clearly the only guy who could pull off Starship Troopers, why would anyone try to do it themselves?
Sadly, in a world in which no remake is impossible, that's exactly what's about to happen. Vulture reports that producer Neal Moritz has decided to "reboot" Starship Troopers, setting Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz to write the script and probably breaking the heart of Denise Richards, who we have to assume won't be invited back for the new one. The thing about Starship Troopers is that when you take away the deliberate campiness, it's just another story about soldiers on a faraway planet fighting aliens-- like, well, Aliens, or Avatar, or the upcoming Prometheus, or a zillion other things. Obviously it's a concept that can be reused endlessly, but what's the point of calling it Starship Troopers unless you're gonna make it fun?
We have no evidence, of course, that they won't make this one fun too. But given that there are already reboots in the works of two more serious Paul Verhoeven movies, Total Recall and Robocop, I worry that they'll just try to make it grim and serious and miss the point entirely. Then again, as Vulture predicts, maybe this is just the inevitable run-up to a Showgirls reboot, which is when things will really start getting ridiculous.
