We had about five featured actors and 30 featured extras in the field. Since both males and females serve in the MI of the future, we carefully selected a mix of people to form our two-platoon unit.
Movie starship troopers how to#
We designed a training curriculum that projected what infantry training might be like in the future using Heinlein’s book as a bible and focused on what things a Mobile Infantry trooper might need to know how to do once he had landed on alien planets. Jump Suits were scratched from the production as too costly, so our infantry of the future would go into combat wearing a sort of sci-fi futuristic armor and carrying a weapon that we mocked up from a shotgun and an assault rifle mounted over-and-under and covered in a plastic exo-skeleton that made it look like a wonder weapon of the future.
Movie starship troopers free#
The Producers and Directors were much more interested in creating a special effects extravaganza than in adhering to Heinlein’s story, so we were left with a relatively free hand regarding training. Since the story involved here involves forces which do not exist and takes place far in the future, we fell back on re-reading Robert Heinlein’s book and began to speculate in details how the Mobile Infantry of his story might be organized and trained. In Heinlein’s world of the future, a resident of earth must earn the privileges of citizenship by service to society such as a stint in the military. His infantrymen of the future fight from inside ‘jump suits’ which give them incredible mobility and protection and serve as launching platforms for an impressive array of weapons.Īlso included in the story are some intriguing social commentaries regarding citizenship and the attendant privileges. Heinlein projects ‘amphibious landing’ of the future as being assaults or ‘drops’ from orbiting warships after which his Mobile Infantry troops ‘hit the beach’ on alien planets to do battle with defenders dug into cavernous fortifications that are reminiscent of the way Japanese forces defended many islands in the Pacific during World War II. While he takes his readers into the 25th Century where forces of earth are engaged in an inter-terrestrial struggle with giant arachnids and insect intelligence of other planets, many of the characters could just as easily have been found in an infantry platoon of more contemporary conflicts. He used his background both in science and the military to create this fable of the future. He retired from active duty after contracting tuberculosis, although he returned to the Navy to do engineering work during the war. King, who later became commander in chief of the U.S. Naval Academy, served aboard the Lexington under Captain E.J. Heinlein’s classic science fiction work of the same title. The basic story and premise of this film is related to Robert A.