page_title: Starship Troopers (film)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Starship Troopers (film) / Production / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: The badlands of Hell's Half-Acre in Natrona County, Wyoming.
context_page_description: Starship Troopers is a 1997 American science fiction action film directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier, based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel of the same name. The story follows a young soldier named Johnny Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry, a futuristic military unit. Rico's military career progresses from recruit, to non-commissioned officer, and finally to officer, against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an insectoid species known as Arachnids.
  The only theatrically released film in the Starship Troopers film series, it received mostly negative reviews from critics upon release, but has received a more mixed reception in retrospect. It grossed $54.5 million in the U.S., and a total of $121.2 million worldwide, against a budget of $105 million. In 1998, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the 70th Academy Awards. In 2012, Slant Magazine ranked the film #20 on its list of "The 100 Best Films of the 1990s".
context_section_description: Script writer Ed Neumeier had been a fan of the novel since his childhood. Paul Verhoeven on the other hand had never read the book and attempted to read it for the film but it made him "bored and depressed", so he read only a few chapters:
  I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.
  Neumeier had previously worked with Verhoeven as a writer on RoboCop (1987).
  During production the film had the working title Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine.
  The "Bug planet" scenes were filmed in the badlands of Hell's Half Acre in Natrona County, Wyoming.
  Two nude scenes were kept in the original version (the co-ed shower and a bedroom scene with Rico and Dizzy), although these were modified in the broadcast version. The cast agreed to do the co-ed shower scene only if Verhoeven agreed to direct the scene naked, which he did. Verhoeven found it strange "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets."
  In the audio commentary on the DVD or Blu-ray release, Verhoeven remarks that he had hoped to cast actors whose age more closely matched that of the characters, but that the producers felt such actors would look too young. The teacher and leader of the "Roughnecks" in the novel are combined into one role played by Ironside.
  Test audience reactions led to several minor changes before the film was released. Originally, it was clear that Carmen was torn between Rico and Zander. Test audiences, regardless of gender, strongly felt that a woman could not love two men at once, so scenes which portrayed this were cut. These audiences also felt it was immoral for Carmen to choose a career ahead of being loyal to Rico, to the extent that many commented that, in so doing, Carmen should have been the one to die instead of Dizzy. While admitting it may have been a bad commercial decision not to change the film to accommodate this, the producer and director did cut a scene from after Zander's death in which Carmen and Rico kiss, which the audience believed made the previous betrayal even more immoral.
caption: Badlands of Hell's Half Acre, Natrona County, Wyoming, where parts of Starship Troopers were filmed.
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