Also because they had made a completely other film called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7.

They realised that it was going to be a complete flop so they got the rights to Heinlein's worst book (and in the lead for worst scifi of all time) and gave it to Verhoeven to mangle onto the already shot Bug Hunt at Outpost 7.

Even Verhoeven agreed with me giving up on reading the book half way through it because it was so fucking awful. Both from a glorifying the fuck out of the fascists and because it was singularly one of the worst written books of all time whilst being completely and utterly self-serving.

Heinlein had big daddy issues and they come flooding through the book in a huge way. Notwithstanding the ridiculously broken plot about how his Filipino dad kicks Johnny out because he joined the military, before getting officer training (basically coz everyone dies and his the bottom of the barrel) before his home city of Manila is destroyed, but not before his dad joins and ends up a sergeant in Johnny's platoon, begging his sons forgiveness.

If you know Filipinos this is the absolutely last thing a Filipino father would ever do. They would walk on glass, render their limbs from their body before ever admitting, to their sons no less, any fault.

Fuck I hated that book like I've hated no book. The never ending slaughter, the killing of civilians (albeit aliens), the absolutely shit prose and dialogue, the boring as fuck plot. The absolute hard on for fascism. The pages and pages dedicated to shitting on civilians and sucking off the military. I have read hundreds of, probably thousands of scifi novels, shit I've read phone books that were more interesting then starship troopers.

I cannot believe that Heinlein wrote the book as some sort of dystopian allegory.

Verhoeven subverted the subtext and showed how insane a fascist government would be in the case of interstellar war.