The film has very little to do with the novel, actually. Verhoeven, the director, hated the book:
“I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.”
The film is basically intended as parody of fashism, while the book is much more positive about the military and an exploration of an alternative society, where everyone has to do voluntary military service before having the right to vote and hold office (later Heinlein claimed that 95% of the Federal service is civil service, but the book itself seems to imply it’s mostly military).
Personally I find the book much more interesting than the film. While the film is a parody its message is actually not that complex and in my memory seems to me to boil down to “Fashism is bad, mkay”.
In contrast to this, the book is partly deeply problematic, but contains much more original though
and interesting world-building with a political system, which is somewhat orthogonal to the established political dimensions of thinking. Which leads to criticism, when people like Verhoeven lazily project it down to the dimensions, they are familiar with.
It’s a bit like a weirdtopia instead of an utopia or dystopia: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWjK3SbRcLkb3gN69/building-w...
Personally in my mind I group this book somewhat together with non-fiction book “Shake Hands with the Devil “ by Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. As a German the thought that you could have pride in being part of a military felt foreign and distant, for example routinely thanking soldiers for their service is still unthinkable for me and these two books in very different ways made me have more empathy with a perspective where being a soldier for a democratic society is something you can be proud of.
By the way, somewhat fittingly for the original blog post, the main character in the book is implied to be of Filipino descent (but played by a white in the film).