Paul Verhoeven slams new ‘Starship Troopers’ in the era of Donald Trump

Some reboots are simply superfluous. Others? They could be downright dangerous.

At least that’s what Paul Verhoeven thinks of the new take on his 1997 cult sci-fi satire “Starship Troopers., for which Columbia Pictures has just hired writers in the hope of kick-starting a new franchise.

On Tuesday night in New York, at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of his work, Verhoeven made his unhappiness clear.

“It said in the article [that] the production team of that movie of the remake, that they would go back more and more toward the novel,” Verhoeven said, referring to the Robert A. Heinlein tome on which his original, well, wasn’t really based. “And, of course, we really, really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt that the novel was fascistic and militaristic.”

Then he added a more charged, political spin. “You feel that going back to the novel would fit very much in a Trump presidency,” he said.

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The original “Starship Troopers” looked at a futuristic society in which humans achieved status by imposing their military will on so-called “Bugs,” a kind of Other from a distant planet. It’s seen as a satire of a civilization unwittingly heading toward fascism.

Heinlein’s 1959 novel, meanwhile, takes the form of classroom debates about individual sacrifice and the greater good. (Coincidentally, the novelist is about to get another 21st century take as his “Stranger in a Strange Land” is developed as a SyFy series.)

Of course, depending on how the new movie is shaded it could be seen as its own comment on the present American situation. But Verhoeven didn’t seem to agree.

He also generally wondered if any movie about fascism would be too uncomfortable.

“We are living in a very interesting, or you can call it scary times, and of course you would like to do something about it too,” the director said. “But I think if you go too directly into the now, you have no distance.”

The Dutch director, whose Cannes sensation “Elle” is about to hit theaters, has seen many of his 1990s pulp classics turned into modern movies with mixed results. He had a theory about why they tend not to work in these bigger Hollywood re-imaginings.

“The studios,” he noted, “always wanted not to have a layer of lightness, a layer of irony, sarcasm, satire.”

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