And yet, the film falls short in chronicling even part of Heinlein's vision. The cast of the movie resembles the castoffs from Aaron Spelling's pool of tanned, buff, silicon-enhanced actors, because that's exactly what they are. Even Neil Patrick Harris, TV's Doogie Howser, failed to make his intelligence-officer character appealing. Not that that's much of a surprise. The plot of the movie is taken from a juvenile novel, one of many Heinlein wrote, and it shows.
Earth is a totalitarian state.
Alien bugs start attacking. Right away, we send millions out to kill the bugs. Well, approximately an hour and a half of cheerless, often excessively gruesome fight scenes. Unlike the creatures designed by H.R. Giger for Alien, these arachnid enemies don't resemble man at all. In a scene which came off like an old war bond commercial, an ever present TV narrator urges us to do our part in the war, while the screen shows pictures of children stamping our common insects.