Principals collaborate for 2001: A Space Odyssey; director smears writer of Starship Troopers. By Kevin Rush

Boldly enigmatic, notoriously inscrutable, and featuring a grandiose fusion of classical music and cinematic images, Stanley Kubrick’s dazzling science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey has mesmerized and confounded audiences for decades. Released in 1968, 2001 was largely ignored at Oscar time. But today, the American Film Institute ranks it as the greatest science fiction film of all time.

2001 began as a collaboration between producer/director Kubrick and the famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. The plot is drawn from Clarke’s 1951 short story, The Sentinel of Eternity, and deals with the essential theme of his 1953 novel, Childhood’s End, wherein extraterrestrial beings nudge along the final evolution of humankind. Childhood’s End solidified Clarke’s reputation, and he was eventually ranked as one of the ‘Big Three’ sci-fi writers of his generation, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. But with 2001, Kubrick and Clarke worked together to pen the screenplay. Clarke did not begin work on the novel, or the ‘novelization,’ until the film was already in the can. Yet, the success of the film, and the subsequent book, led to three more literary installments, as well as a movie sequel, 2010: the Year We Make Contact.

2001’s story is structured in three parts, starting in the prehistoric world of man-apes on the brink of starvation, because they lack the tools to survive in their hostile environment. One day, a strange, black monolith appears in their territory, then emits a piercing tone that agitates the man-apes. Soon after, their leader conceives of using the bleached bone of a fallen animal as a weapon. The man-apes then hunt, vanquish their enemies, and ensure the survival of their species. Fast-forward three million years, which passes in the toss of a bone and the blink of an eye, and the evolved man-apes, now fully human and capable of space flight, have found an identical monolith on the moon. Triggered by the light of the sun, the monolith sends a signal into space, and the curious humans dispatch a space ship to find the source.

Thus begins the second story segment, aboard the spaceship Discovery, nominally piloted by two astronauts, but actually under the control of a supercomputer, the HAL 9000. In a twist that mirrors the evolutionary jump of the man-apes, HAL imagines he must kill to survive. It’s the up to a surviving astronaut, played by Canadian actor Keir Dullea, to take the ship back from HAL and continue the mission. (At the time of his casting, Dullea seemed on the brink of stardom. But even though he gave a strong performance, 2001 did not propel his career to celestial heights. In fact, he soon retreated in obscurity. Thus was coined the Hollywood aphorism, “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.”)

The third segment follows Dullea’s character as he traces the signal to a moon of Saturn, on which an elder of the galaxy lies prone in a queen-sized bed in a hotel room decked out like a giant chess board, from which he mystically transforms Dullea into a giant, galactic fetus which drifts slowly back to Earth.

Although Clarke once said, “If you understand ‘2001’ completely, we failed,” he was concerned that the film was too hard to follow, and set out in his novelization to provide clearer explanations for the action . The final effect is the loss of the visual and aural wonder of Kubrick’s film, for which Clarke’s pedestrian prose is a poor substitute. Reading 2001 reminded me why I’ve only dabbled in Clarke’s writings, rather than devouring them. While his ideas are fascinating and intellectually stimulating, his storytelling doesn’t stir passion. His characters, all nice, conventional, bland folks, lack depth. And, while Clarke’s plots delve into the rich mysteries at the center of the universe, there’s no struggle between good and evil, no conflict of vice and virtue.

I also find Clarke’s atheistic vision deflating. If there is a supreme force in Clarke’s universe, it’s not a Creator God, but an evolved intelligence. This reminds me of a conversation I had once with an irreligious friend, who said the stumbling block for him was this question: If God created everything, what created God? That’s a mystery my religion doesn’t seek to answer, and the mantra that God ‘always was and always will be’ is unsatisfying to the analytical mind. But even less satisfying is the notion of human destiny being one part random evolution and one part alien manipulation. Clarke’s premise begs the question, ‘Who manipulated the first aliens?’ If no one, then how did they make their evolutionary jump? And if they could make it all on their own, why shouldn’t we be given the same freedom?

Ultimately, there’s little to be gleaned from Clarke’s book that’s not in the film. Clarke redresses a great wrong in the first sequence: the monolith is not the black slab the film’s art directors constructed, but the crystal prism Kubrick and Clarke had envisioned. But that tidbit is hardly worth slogging through what amounts to a mostly dull viewing guide for the movie. My recommendation for anyone who wants to understand the film is to forget the book. Just keep watching this magnificent movie until your own evolutionary switch flips and everything starts to click. If you want to go deeper, you can always pick up one of the sequels.

I must confess I didn’t see the 1997 version of Starship Troopers when it was first released, even though I had enjoyed director Paul Verhoeven’s previous sci-fi actioner Robocop. I skipped Troopers mostly because the trailer made it look like two hours of mindless bed-hopping and bug-zapping and because The Puppet Masters, the 1994 film of a Robert A. Heinlein novel, had been a ridiculous disappointment not worth the price of admission. Starship Troopers was popular enough to spawn a few sequels, but no one has ever seriously suggested it’s a great, or even a very good, film. Having seen it recently on cable, I’d call it a dull, noisy, directionless mess. The novel, however, is regarded as a science fiction classic. So, how do we explain that disconnect?

First, some context. Robert A. Heinlein is often called the Dean of American Science Fiction, having had a prolific career in which he established many of the sci-fi tropes that have become mainstays of the genre. A left-wing Democrat early in his career, Heinlein gravitated towards libertarianism and infused much of his writing with the politics of individualism. Some of his themes, such as plural marriage in his classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, created significant controversy. Yet, like most radicals, Heinlein was intensely interested in the edification of youth. He wrote a series of juvenile novels for Charles Scribner’s Sons that combined sci-fi with moral instruction (e.g., Red Planet, Starman Jones, The Star Beast). Starship Troopers was supposed to fit into that Scribner series, but the publisher rejected the book, and Heinlein took it to Putnam.

Thus, anyone picking up Troopers should understand it’s a YA book, meant to inculcate civic virtue in young readers. Thus, there is much inartful, “on the nose” dialogue that does not sound the way people actually talk. There are lectures galore from high school teachers and military superiors. And there is abundant moral reasoning that is sensible and provocative, including an ardent, well-reasoned defense of corporal punishment. Perhaps the best way to describe Troopers is as a dissertation on duty, played out against an interstellar war against marauding arachnids. 

Unfortunately, Verhoeven did not give Heinlein’s views a fair airing. In fact, his film seems determined to undermine the principles Heinlein sought to promote. For example, the society of Heinlein’s Troopers is multi-ethnic, encompassing all of a united Earth. Yet, Verhoeven’s cast is almost uniformly white, including Nordic beauty Denise Richards as the Latina Carmen Ibanez and Casper Van Dein (as Caucasian as that name would suggest) as the tale’s narrator/protagonist, Johnny Rico, who is a Filipino in the book. Critics have noted that Verhoeven intended to depict Earth as a utopian Nazi Germany—Because the military, duh—which is a lazy, myopic calumny against military service that is far too common among contemporary Hollywood elites. 

Almost always, Hollywood gets center-right politics deliberately wrong, as perverse payback for the industry’s completely reasonable response to the Soviet Union’s determined attempts to commandeer the American dream machine. Carrying an unquenchable torch for “the blacklist,” Hollywood Leftists gleefully portray anyone who believes in individual liberty as a fascist. This despite the obvious fact that fascism is a collectivist ideology that subverts individual identity by demanding subservience to an all-powerful leader. Y’know, like Communism. As for Heinlein’s novel, collectivism (could be Fascism or Communism) is the enemy, as depicted by the hive-mind of the bugs attempting to destroy humanity. Far from being fascists, the Troopers are volunteers—free to opt out at any moment—who risk all, not for an ideology, but for the people they love. 

Starship Troopers is worth reading if only so that Heinlein’s ideas, which are worthy of consideration, can come through unfiltered and undistorted. Verhoeven’s film smears Heinlein, and in doing so contributes to what is currently the dominant deceitful narrative of the political Left: that America is an imperialist nation driven by white supremacy. People who want the truth should read the book.

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If you’ve enjoyed this article, please look at some of our other pieces examining the books behind the moves, here, here, and here…