'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' Coming To the Big Screen

HughPickens.com writes: According to the Hollywood Reporter, Twentieth Century Fox recently picked up the movie rights to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, based on the classic sci-fi book by Robert A. Heinlein. It will retitled as Uprising. Heinlein's 1966 sci-fi novel centers on a lunar colony's revolt against rule from Earth, and the book popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch), a central, libertarian theme. The novel was nominated for the 1966 Nebula award (honoring the best sci-fi and fantasy work in the U.S.) and won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in 1967. An adaptation has been attempted twice before — by DreamWorks, which had a script by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and by Phoenix Pictures, with Harry Potter producer David Heyman attached — but both languished and the rights reverted to Heinlein's estate. Brian Singer, who previously directed X-Men: Days of Future Past, will adapt the screenplay and reportedly direct. Several of Heinlein's works have been adapted for the big and small screen, including the 1953 film Project Moonbase, the 1994 TV miniseries Red Planet, the 1994 film The Puppet Masters, the 2014 film Predestination, and — very loosely — the 1997 film Starship Troopers.

Comments

There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Jhon]

Predestination was a "decent' attempt at "All you Zombies" and was very watchable.

All the other attempts kind of sucked out loud with a bamboo umbrella.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Penguinisto]

All I know is, I'm praying "...please don't fuck it up as bad as you did Starship Troopers..."

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Monkey-Man2000]

The film was actually a pretty good satire and action flick (a la Robocop) if you ignore the book, and I agree it should not profess to be based on it. I don't have a better idea for a title offhand for it though; maybe "Interplanetary Troopers", "Space Troopers"? Nah, Starship Troopers just has a better ring to it... Anyway, a more faithful adaptation would have been so much different and required a substantially larger budget I suspect...

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Z00L00K]

Starship Troopers was more an ironic paraphrasing of the book than literally following the book.

I actually come to realize that if you follow a book literally then it may not make a good movie.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[the gnat]

There is one way of looking at the movie in relation to the book that actually sort of makes sense. For all of the criticism leveled at Heinlein for being too militaristic or even "fascistic", the society he describes is basically a multicultural libertarian utopia: people of all nationalities seem to be relatively happy and well-off, the government is relatively minimal, and the federal service is open to absolutely anyone (even cripples). And that's precisely the problem - utopian ideals rarely turn out well in practice. Actually, the even more specific problem is that Heinlein assumes the society would basically be run by people like him. Verhoeven's version, although it badly misrepresents what the book actually says, is probably a more realistic vision of how such a society would turn out.

That said, I'd still love to see an adaptation that plays it straight. Or at least gets the mobile infantry right, complete with orbital drops and mechanized armor.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Nidi62]

Starship troopers is a fantastic movie.

You just have to acknowledge that it's a parody piece that (rightly) shits all over the source material for the war worshiping jingoistic crap that it is. :)

Did we read the same book? I took out of it that war is horrible, leaving the lucky ones dead and the unlucky ones in broken bodies and scarred souls, but still a necessary evil to allow the people back home to live peaceful, happy lives. It also implies that drafts are bad and the only soldiers should be volunteers who willingly measure the rewards vs the risk of dying/getting injured, realizing that their sacrifice benefits the whole. Remember that the general feeling of the cap troopers was that they would be happy if the war was over tomorrow and no one was ever forced into a capsule if they did not want to go, and they weren't even punished for doing so besides getting discharged.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Quasimodem]

Robert Heinlein graduated 20th in a class of 243 Annapolis cadets and spent five years stationed on the Pacific Ocean until forced to retire in 1939 because of tuberculosis, so calling Robert Heinlein a frustrated Naval Officer wannabe is a bit contemptuous of a person who was in the process of making a success along one career path, was forced to discontinue, and made an even greater success along a totally different career path.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Mike Van Pelt]

"The Puppet Masters" was actually pretty decent, given their limitations. (They ran out of budget to do decent alien spaceships, and they're obviously not going to be able to take it as far as Schedule Suntan without getting a kiss-of-death NC-17 rating.) Donald Sutherland absolutely nailed the rold of The Old Man. And how did they get that chimp to act so *creepy* when hag-ridden? Much of the dialog was straight from the book, and a number of scenes were very close to the book, modulo moving the setting to the present day from a future where there are Venus colonies. It was made by people who read and loved the book.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Thud457]

Don't forget that was one of the real arguments for the revolution.
Trade with Earth was bleeding them of water and would eventually lead to the colony's collapse.

They could probably have been self-sufficient if they hadn't been forced to send grain to Earth. But being a bunch of transportees and convicts, they didn't get a say in the matter.

Good luck explaining the finer points of a closed-cycle ecology, economics and politics in a 2-hour movie.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoyed reading Starship Troopers. It is what it is, a juvenile fantasy.

The /movie/, on the other hand, told an actual story, was competently directed and acted. Sure, Heinlein was spinning in his grave over it -- but IMNSHO the movie we got was far better than yet another juvenile fantasy. We have enough of those already.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[blue9steel]

I'm not sure the government of that universe can be properly described as fascist just because they limited suffrage to veterans. My understanding was that it was still a mixed economy republic without the organized business and labor groups that would be required for a fascist system.

Regardless, a movie about Starship Troopers that doesn't include power armor isn't a proper re-telling of the story.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[fnj]

Heinlein's thoughts were so far above the cookie cutter "isms" as to be on a different plane altogether.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[werepants]

But changing the title from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to "Uprising" does not bode well; the book is not about an "Uprising" but about how a society develops when the rules of normal society are removed. The actual "uprising" in the book is almost a by-product and not a central theme.

Not sure that I agree - the main thing that moves the plot forward certainly is the revolution. You could argue that the revolution plot is just the scaffolding Heinlein uses for his speculation about society, but to be fair a huge amount of sci-fi could be described this way. The other thing that makes the revolution critical is that he uses it to showcase the way colonization efforts will eventually evolve - Earth will view colonists as dependent and incapable, but as soon as basic self-sufficiency is possible it will become very difficult to maintain control over determined inhabitants who are acclimated to the very different environment and accustomed to dealing with the challenges of space.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[0xdeadbeef]

Oh my God, I can't believe you morons still believe that.

Verhoeven was fucking with you.

This is the man who made RoboCop and Total Recall. The writer of Starship Troopers, Edward Neumeier, also wrote RoboCop.

Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine is a working title. A lot of movies like that have working titles. It helps keep them secret when they're in production.

Do you honestly think they weren't aware of one of the most famous science fiction novels that bore a striking similarity to the movie they had written, which was itself a satire of fascism and war propaganda?

Verhoeven may not have actually finished the novel, you don't need to, it's pretty boring, all hopping around in power armor and nuking skinnies and bugs after you get past the parts they directly lifted. But Neumeier is a writer who is into science fiction, do you honestly think he had never heard of Starship Troopers? That it was all coincidence? If so, you Heinlein fanboys are as dim-witted as the characters.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[slashdot_commentator]

If you think Starship Troopers is one of the greatest works of science fiction, you have an extremely limited exposure to sci-fi literature. I don't think I could put it in the top 100 of sci-fi novels.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[tnk1]

I agree. Wannabe certainly sounds to me like he was never commissioned or in any way successful. Heinlein wasn't a wannabe naval officer, he *was* a commissioned naval officer.

You could say he was a wannabe captain or admiral, perhaps, but "wannabe" implies he didn't have it in him to be either of those things and there is no evidence that he lacked the ability to have an otherwise long and successful career, especially on the eve of WWII. Being forced out for a legitimate medical reason does not indicate that he was a failed officer in the way that the term implies.

So yeah, not a very good way to put it. "Frustrated" in his attempt to have a full naval career, is what I might say if I actually believed that his frustrations were being acted out in his fiction. Which I don't.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[lgw]

Verhoeven completely misunderstood the book, was the thing, and made a parody of it. What he missed, what Heinlein's reader's often miss, is that Heinlein doesn't write utopias. None of his books are some imagining of an ideal society. The point of Starship Troopers was to explore in depth what life would be like in a militaristic/fascist society from the point of view of someone who knew nothing else. It was subtle and powerful as a result: the point-of-view characters are fully adapted to their society, and don't point out all the ways it's batshit crazy. Heinlein trusts the reader to make that call, to see how easily people get used to even such a harsh society and accept it as normal, if that's all you know.

Verhoeven missed all of that, saw it as an endorsement of the society in the book, and parodied it, turning the really interesting point the book was making into trite anvilicious crap.

Moon is the same - exploring an ultra-libertarian society in the same detail, in the same way from the point of view of people adapted to it. I expect the same Hollywood treatment: making a satire of it since they see the society as unwanted, not realizing it wasn't an endorsement in the first place but a critique.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[drinkypoo]

Verhoeven missed all of that, saw it as an endorsement of the society in the book, and parodied it, turning the really interesting point the book was making into trite anvilicious crap.

Look, I'm not going to claim that Troopers was a good movie in any way really, but you totally failed at watching it. The propaganda scenes made it quite clear that Verhoeven was not providing an "endorsement" of such a society.

Verhoeven is a perfectly bright guy, he's smarter than you in that he knows that explosions and tits sell pictures both to execs and audiences. Total Recall was the film that convinced me that he knew what he was doing. Get the basic ideas down in the picture, and get the big twist/reveal right, everything else can be twiddled for Hollywood.

Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation

[lgw]

You mis-read me. Verhoeven saw the book as an endorsement of the society in the book, and parodied it in his movie, since he saw it as such an awful book. Verhoeven has said as much in interviews.

Uprising?

[TechyImmigrant]

I suspect I'm much more likely to go and watch a film called "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" than one called "Uprising".

Re:Uprising?

[vanyel]

Starting off by fucking with the title tells me they have no interest in actually bringing the book to the screen, which is a real pisser, because it's one of my favorite books and it would make a great movie.

Re:I Read All of Heinlein's Stuff

[MightyMartian]

His later books got more than a little bizarre and disturbing. Strange things seem to happen to aging SF writers.

No, the film is *bad* satire.

[Dr. Manhattan]

In "Starship Troopers" the book, a trainee asks why they are learning to throw knives when they have nukes. The instructor stops the drill, and points out that you don't housetrain a puppy by decapitating it. The military is supposed to used controlled force to achieve policy objectives, not wanton destruction. He tells the recruit who to talk to if he still doesn't understand.

In the movie, the instructor throws a knife through the recruit's hand, and says, "Hard to push a button now, eh?"

I get that the movie is satire. I even get that there's a lot in the book that can be fairly satirized. The problem is, the movie is lazy, unfair, incompetent satire.

Re:I Read All of Heinlein's Stuff

[ColdWetDog]

I think too many journeys through the Time Portal (aka Scotch Whiskey) really fries the old brain cells.

And once he really tried to think through cats and women he just lost it. Therein lies madness.

Confidence is low, I repeat confidence is low

[spaceyhackerlady]

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is an interesting, thoughtful story.

Hollywood doesn't do interesting and thoughtful.

QED

I'd be much more confident if this was being done in England or Scandinavia (cf Real Humans).

...laura

Fascism largely a creation of director Verhoeven

[perpenso]

The fascism was largely a creation of the movie's director, Verhoeven. He had his own agenda that he thought the movie would be a good vehicle for. He even admits not reading the book.

As you point out the book is quite different. I would like to emphasize that the book is quite clear that federal service is not necessarily military service. That the federal service required hardship and a risk of severe bodily injury or death, for example construction in harsh environments (asteroids, space, etc). In fascism the military and combat is held above all else, mere laborers even doing hazardous construction would never be considered to have equivalent service.