Verhoeven disguises this queasy ode to gore as an anti-military cautionary tale. It's kind of like watching a prude drooling over pornography while protesting to the world how evil it is.
The combat scenes are laughable. The soldiers have the tactical acumen of a heard of sheep with assault rifles. The movie doesn't just ignore significant aspects of the book, it goes out of its way to deliberately distort them. A single example (one of many). The protagonist of the novel, Johnny Rico, was a Filipino. Verhoeven casts stereotypically Aryan Casper Van Dien as Johnny. Is this a cynical distortion of the book to `prove' that the author wasn't `honoring diversity?' Or is it a cynical marketing ploy to appeal to a particular demographic? Or didn't Verhoeven care?
The movie's supporters seem to fall into three main categories. There are those who enjoyed watching people being torn limb-from-limb while thinking `Gee, what a great science fiction action movie!' There are those who justified watching people being torn limb-from-limb because they were thinking `Gee, what a clever satire of a militaristic society!' And there are those in the first category who apparently had to see the movie more than once to move to the second category. This is amazing to me since I thought the satire was about as subtle as a brick through a window.
