Everyone agrees that both the novel and movie at least attempt to satirize fascism/militarism, with varying success. The trouble is a lot of people have, through lazy history, concluded that all fascists are Nazis. Mention to anyone born after 1975 or so that one of the WW2 neutrals was a bona fide fascist dictatorship which existed well into the ’70s (Spain) and you’re likely to get puzzled looks. Nor do people talk much about how even the other Axis powers privately thought Hitler was a total flaming psychopath who would get them all killed. This is intensely relevant because both book and movie show the military-political regime as extremely dysfunctional but not Always Bad All The Time as we have been conditioned to respond to any mention of the word fascism. Indeed, the book in particular makes the near-heretical assertions that the ideology itself is morally neutral (“bad fascism” stems from crappy leadership e.g. the overly confident general), and sometimes off-the-chain militarism is an inevitable, perhaps even necessary consequence of dire threats to personal and national well-being. Verhoeven–to his credit–doesn’t really shy away from this, as he leaves in plenty of hints that the government may simply be the least of many evils.

And so, I think this incongruity between what we’re “supposed” to think and what we see on screen or page leads many to a sort of automatic revulsion where people feel compelled to hate the movie. Hence why many critical pans turn in on themselves, lauding aspects they subsequently hold up as the reason for its failure. There’s still plenty of room for criticism of form and substance, but I’m convinced a major reason a lot of people don’t get Starship Troopers is they don’t understand true fascism.

In all seriousness, though, we have a fundamental disagreement on the issue of whether you can be true to the source without knowing what the source is. I do see where you’re coming from – something about the phrase “true to the source” implies a conscious decision – but I still think you’re getting caught up in a technicality. How about we just substitute that phrase for “is the same as the source.” Is that okay? I mean, I’ve never read The Grapes of Wrath, but if I decide to make a film version and name the main family Joad, it’s still the same as the source.

It’s true that there are some places where the matrix could be logically inconsistant. Take “Verhoeven made a movie that is intentionally awesome, because its satire of facism is the same as the source.” If the film is intentionally awesome, we assume that he knew what he was about, and if he didn’t know what the source was like, presumably he didn’t know that his version was the same. But if you just reverse the causal relationship, it works perfectly: “Because Verhoeven wanted to make an awesome movie and succeeded, his satire of facism ended up being pretty much the same as the source’s satire of facism.”

Either it isn’t true to the source material because you need to actually -know- what it is before you can be true to it, or whether it is true to the source material or not, it cannot be intentionally so, since again, he didn’t read the source material.

Further, correct outcomes based on faulty inputs are still bad science.

Robocop, 24m, 100m, 4.11, +76m
Total Recall, 106m, 195m, 1.84, +89m
Basic Instinct, 74m, 179m, 2.4, +105m
Showgirls, 63m, 28m, 0.45, -35m
Starship Troopers, 141m, 73m, 0.52, -68m
Hollow Man, 118m, 91m, 0.77, -27m

Robocop was a bonanza – small budget, big return. Total Recall in absolute numbers was also very profitable, and Basic Instinct, in absolute numbers, even moreso. Then the wheels fell off. The first three movies and the last three movies are like mirror images of each other.

Robocop – man loses humanity, recovers humanity.
Total Recall – man fights fascist/corporate state.
Basic Instinct – didn’t watch it.
Showgirls – didn’t watch it – had boobies.
Starship Troopers – fascists fight bugs.
Hollow Man – man loses humanity, does not recover humanity.

If he was intentionally making bad movies he did a good job of it and lost a lot of people a lot of money.

If you wanted to take a COMPLETELY modern way of looking at it, you might argue that the most important departure from Euclid is that you should reject one of his unstated postulates: that space is completely homgoneous–that every point “looks” like every other point. There are worlds of rich structures that you can find in geometry if you relax this assumption.

It is true that the non-absoluteness of euclidean geometry was established in the early 19th century when it was proven that Non-Euclidean homogenous geometries existed. But it was a true explosion when Gauss and Riemann discovered that you could develop all sorts of non-homogenous geometries, and it was even more fundamentally shaken when set theory and topology got developed, and it was found that you could find out a lot of geometric truths without even making reference to distances at all.

Definition: Two strait lines are defined as parallel if any third line which intersects both has interior angles on the same side which add up to two right angles.

Euclid’s Elements starts with 5 axioms (assumed to be true but unprovable rules) one of which is that any two non-parallel strait lines intersect if extended infinitely (being able to extend any strait line infinitely is an earlier axiom). This is the “Parallel Postulate”. There are many logically equivalent axioms to put in it’s place, but that’s the one Euclid used.

If you throw out this axiom and put something else in you are working in non-Euclidean geometry. You could throw out any of the axioms and be working in non-Euclidean space, but that’s the one that people have studied alternatives to. I imagine Lovecraft might have been throwing out more axioms we he refered to non-Euclidean geometry since he didn’t have to come up with a logically consistent set to but in their place.