For some reason, Hollywood has taken upon themselves to pick on Paul Verhoeven movies and remake them. With ‘Total Recall’ coming out next month and ‘Robocop’ already in pre-production, all eyes are now on ‘Starship Troopers.’ In an interview with Empire Magazine, producer Toby Jaffe gives some insight about what to expect in his version of the Robert Heinlein book.

What made the first ‘Starship Troopers’ so enjoyable was its satirical adaptation of bug aliens and gratuitous carnage worthy of its “R” rating. So if you’re expecting some of the same with the remake, then you will be sadly disappointed. According to Jaffe, the plan is to be less violent and more faithful to Heinlein’s novel and focus on the right-wing militarism:

“The more expensive a film is, the harder it is now to make it that violent. With Recall in particular, we made a conscious choice to keep it tonally closer to something like Minority Report. It gives the studio, and us as producers, the opportunity to reintroduce it in a new way… Verhoeven took [Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel] from one extreme and made it almost comical, whereas our job is to be a little more faithful to the book, and ground it a little more.”

Of course the remake could do something that Verhoeven’s version couldn’t and that’s add the CGI look of Jump Suits onto the soldiers. At the time Verhoeven was being made, the director was given a choice between spending visual effects money on the Arachnids or the Jump Suits. As you can tell, he chose the Arachnids. “What Verhoeven was able to do with the bug army in 1997 was phenomenal at the time,” says Jaffe, “but working in a visual-effects renaissance as we are, just logically we have the ability to do so much more now. We can do the Jump Suits, for example, which I don’t think they could have done before.”

The script has apparently already been written by Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller both who have written on ‘Thor’, ‘Fringe’, ‘Andromeda’, ‘X-Men: First Class ‘ and ‘Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.’ Currently there is no director attached to the film nor a release date.

Given the pedigree of the work of the writers, I haven’t lost all hope with where the remake seems to be going. Of course, Jaffe is also involved with that other Verhoeven remake, ‘Total Recall,’ so we can get a gist of his work when that movie is released next month.

So what do you think about this new version of ‘Starship Troopers’?’