It is always easy to read or write a science fiction book where you either are asked to "just accept it" or you ask your reader to do so. It goes without saying that this rule must ring true with moviemakers and their audiences. Such was the case with director Paul Verhoeven, who is renowned as a sci-fi guru of sorts in the movie world, and his interpretation of Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers. "Paul became a box office success after the release of Robocop (1987), [and then with] Total Recall (1990)[,] and...Critics often praise him for his violent and intelligent science fiction movies" (Expatica.com). However, despite his "...degree in math and physics"(Expatica.com), he failed to consider, and take into account, many obvious mistakes, some of which are catastrophic to theorems we rely upon today.
In the following paragraphs I will discuss some of the small, yet obvious mistakes that we are asked to "just accept" after which, I will discuss the largest and most bothersome mistake in the movie.
We can start with the basics of the time that it takes to travel across the galaxy. Given the rough estimate that the galaxy is 100,000 light years from end to end and the battle for the bug planet Big K had taken place in the Klendathu system, it is reasonable to say that traveling at light speed the troopers could land on the surface of the planet fifty to seventy thousand light years after they left earth. Unless they left the earth traveling at one thousand times the speed of light, in which case it would take roughly 50 years to reach the bug planet. This too would ruin the image of the picture perfect 18 year old soldiers that we see in the movie, leaving them with canes and walkers in their 60's and 70's. This is in spite of Einstein's theory of relativity that assumes that as we travel faster we age slower or even stop aging. However, there is much talk o...