Five years ago almost to the day we reported on the approach of a Starship Troopers reboot coming from Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz. With no further announcements the project languished and Miller and Stentz jumped on board to write Top Gun 2. Don’t fret though – Variety have announced that Columbia are digging deep into the recent past and are bringing a new team to adapt Starship Troopers once again.

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Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, the duo behind the Baywatch film and 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason, have been named as the film’s writers.

As before the studio have hinted that they are not remaking Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cult classic, instead they are going back to the Robert A. Heinlein source material for their reboot. This makes sense as previous attempts to rehash Verhoeven’s best-known films, Total Recall and Robocop, were met with dramatic indifference from audiences.

There is also much Verhoeven omitted in his late ’90s from the Heinlein novel. He spun his own wonderful mix of hyperbole and credulity-sctretching socio-political elements which would now make it like a Michael Moore documentary.

The 97 film casts a long tonal shadow over the material. The excision of the ‘Verhoeven’ element from the recent Robocop and Total Recall films was filled in with an almost anaemic blandness. It’ll be interesting to see if Columbia take a similar road with Rico’s Roughnecks.