I thought the movie sucked for the most part. It had some eye-candy, but all the meaning had been sucked out of the story. The book was much better. Apparently, Heinlein did say at one point that if he could change anything in the book, he would have made the MI coeducational. So maybe that part wasn't too bad. I can't cite a source on that however, so I don't know if it's true.

The book is my all-time favorite. I enjoyed the movie a lot. The trick is, don't believe that they share much more than the title. It would have been easier if they'd have changed character names, but the producers wanted to cash in on the books fans.

My problem with the movie, is that the MI seemed to fight one Little Big Horn after another. No discernible tactic other than charge like a mob, and go berserk.

No planning.
No coordination with the fleet or other forces.
No artillery.
No armor support.
Little air.
little recon, and horrible intell.
They depict the MI as having zero knowledge of the lessons learned in two thousand years of warfare.
I suspect they didn't bother with technical consultants from the military, because it bears no resemblence to any army that has fought in history after the Mongel Hordes. It was if the tactic of dumping troops onto a hopelessly hot LZ was some kind of actual tactic. The movie was the brainchild of a dork who remembered the helicopter assaults from Vietnam, and hasn't paid attention since.

But that's just my opinion.

And that is what pisses me off so much, Mark, because most of your issues WERE covered in the book. With their powered armor, rocket launchers, and micro-nukes, the MI were their OWN armor and artillery. Since the MI only went in when Fleet was not going to nuke a planet's surface into a glass sheet, the only communications they had concerned pickup, which they did have. Air power was of less concern, since their primary enemies did not use aircraft of any form in the book. And the MI had specialized Recon suits, left scores of sensor pods as they went, had layers of communication between soldiers, NCOs and officers, not to mention that each Mobile Infantryman was hypnotized and then told his part of the mission, so he would not forget it.

Like I said at Cato's, if the movie had been called 'Bug Hunt' and was just a gorefest, it would have been an ok movie. I just wish that Heinlein had risen from the grave to throttle Paul 'the Military is Fascist' Verhoven before he made 'Starship Troopers'.

Indeed, the book was masterfull. As you say the powered armor took care of many issues. If the film had paid any attention to the book, it would have been so much better, even if they couldn't match Heinlein's talent.

Yeah. Good book. Good movie. Just unrelated for the most part.

Probably the funniest part in the movie was how the glorified M-16's did maximum damage at a distance, but the troops had to pour infinite rounds into the bug at point blank to get results.

The movie= 90210 in a space war

The book = Heinlein in his cryptofascist phase. But it was way better than the movie, as they always are. IIRC, the book was split about half and half between basic and war, and the part about basic was fundamental to the rest. It got very lightly skimmed in themovie.