Starship Troopers is getting rebooted which is either a great or terrible idea

Columbia Pictures is mounting a second adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's controversial novel

(COLUMBIA/TRISTAR)

Columbia Pictures is rebooting Paul Verhoeven's 1997 sci-fi Starship Troopers, The Hollywood Reporter has revealed.

Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, the writing duo behind the new Baywatch movie, have been pitched to pen the screenplay with the potential for relaunching Starship Troopers as a full-on franchise (of course). Fast & Furious' Neal H. Moritz is producing alongside Toby Jaffe, having previously collaborated on the studio's remake of Verhoeven's Total Recall (1990).

Yet, between the Total Recall remake and the remake of Verhoeven's Robocop (1987), revisiting Starship Troopers doesn't actually seem all that terrible an idea. Though the film's legacy has soured somewhat, partly thanks to several direct-to-DVD sequels and an animated series, the director's original take is still pretty bold in its political satire; using echoes of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to take on militarism and fascism.

The new film promises to go straight back to Verhoeven's source material, the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein; a book deeply political in its themes, telling the story of a young soldier named Juan "Johnnie" Rico and his time with the Mobile Infantry, a futuristic military service fighting in an interstellar war against an alien species known as "the Bugs".

Heinlein's writing was filled with moral and philosophical discussions of suffrage, civic virtue, juvenile delinquency, corporal punishment, capital punishment, and war; though it's attracted its fair share of controversy by critics who believe the novel promotes both militarism and fascism in the depiction of its futuristic society, which Verhoeven took heavy aim at in his satirisation.

The studio will have to navigate the book's various controversies, though there's the potential to create something actually interesting by directly engaging with the book's themes. But then again, if this is going in the same thematic league as the new Baywatch movie, we might be in big trouble.