Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionab

Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly. I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought. But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both respect and criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting, and necessary. Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.