Saturday, December 06, 2003
Battlestar Galactica vs. Starship Troopers
No, this post is not about what would happen if the Battlestar Galactica crew met up with the Starship Troopers gang and had to fight it out. (Although I may as well point out that the Galactica would kick butt in a space battle against the spaceships from Starship Troopers. But the Colonial Warriors would be totally killed in a ground battle against the Mobile Infantry. The M.I. had super advanced fighting suits that turned the soldier into a killing machine. All the Colonials had were those black leather outfits they wore when they raided Gamoray.)
I just finished rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and naturally I couldn’t help but think about the comparisons with Battlestar Galactica. Some RAH fans might be aghast that I’m comparing the two against each other. RAH is, after all, the Dean of science fiction. But when you compare Starship Troopers, the movie, against Battlestar Galactica, then BG wins that contest easily. The one thing I couldn’t help but notice in Starship Troopers, the movie, is that in the future everyone is incredibly good looking. Even Doogie Howser looks pretty good in the future.
With the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries set to premiere on the Scifi channel in just a few hours, one notices the similarities between how they messed up both the Starship Troopers movie and the new miniseries. In Starship Troopers, the book, the Mobile Infantry was one hundred percent men. In the movie, the M.I was inexplicably co-ed. They even took showers together. Similarly, in the new miniseries, Starbuck and Boomer inexplicable became women. Somehow, when Hollywood makes a new movie or miniseries out of an old story, they have to add more women. It doesn’t make any sense.
The girl in the Starship Troopers movie had some nice muscles. If she had a fight with Dirk Benedict, she’d kick his ass! (Dirk was pretty skinny. I predict that all the male warriors in the new BG miniseries are going to be all buffed out like they walked out of a body building contest.)
Robert Heinlein truly put the science into science fiction. Even though the book was written more than forty years ago, I can’t see anything in it that doesn’t make any sense. It's the complete opposite with Battlestar Galactica where none of the science makes any sense.
The most important similarity between BG and Starship Troopers is that they both have a political message. In many ways, it's the same message. In Starship Troopers, the government is run by people who have served in the military. The theory is that only veterans have the virtue to run a government. In BG, there’s a civilian government, but we wish that the military was running things because the civilian government always make the dumbest decisions. In their hunger for peace, the civilian Council brings down the complete destruction of humanity. And then they keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
An important difference between the messages is that BG had a very religious theme to it. Heinlein, on the other hand, was an atheist, and all the sensible characters in his books don’t make religion an important part of their lives.