Actually, no. The movie preserved exactly the parts of the novel it needed to preserve to take a swing at them. The movie ignores many things that are important to fans of the novel, but it reproduces the most important of the things that will irk a European-style leftist. It reproduces them with interpretation, so a serious fan of the book who did not perceive it as a mindbogglingly disgusting militarist-fascist manifesto will perhaps not recognize those elements.
Of course, this is relative to ones own political leanings. If you feel strongly about the philosophical statements in the book either way, you will not consider power armor or the sequence of events central to the book. And if you consider the ideas presented in the book to be equivalent (both morally and in their consequences) to fascism, you will not care that Heinlein goes to great lengths to claim that the people in ST’s future care about freedom and that this hypothetical society is not fascist.
Yes, I remember that, too. I can’t complain about satire being too obvious as long as there is a significant number of people who miss it.
“Starship Troopers’ take on moral philosophy”.
Nothing moral about it.
The thing is, American superhero movies do reasonably well in the European market as well, but over here in Austria, American superhero comics are completely unknown. I grew up a complete and total science fiction geek (my father had me read the Lensman series followed by the first few thousand pages of Perry Rhodan when I was 7), but I grew up thinking that Superman was a character from a 70s movie series and Batman a character from a 60s TV series. Nowadays I know plenty of fans of American superhero movies, but literally* no one (in Europe) who has ever read superhero comics.
Time travel can be used to drive interesting stories that are inherently based on the concept (as opposed to space war stories, which are just an excuse to have a war story that completely dehumanizes the enemy and does not stop to consider whether war can be avoided).
Unfortunately, in 90% of time travel stories, the main element that keeps the suspense going is that the time travelers are about to run out of time. Which makes no sense, given that they are supposed to have a time machine.
* While I am perfectly willing to defend the hyperbolic use of “literally”, I am using “literally” literally this time.
