You're right that Starship Troopers should get a better movie-- that opening drop-scene of the book could be so brilliantly done, perhaps even with long takes, that the audience would be quivering after the first 10 minutes. IIRC, Verhoven said that there was money enough for bugs, or the cool armor suits that they dropped in, but not both. Bugs got in the budget.
But, post-Vietnam, Hollywood doesn't like to root for the US military, so maybe they'll make "The Forever War" by Haldeman instead.
I also heard it was just the difficulty of getting actors to emote through inches thick armor... but just having everyone run around in black paintball gear was kind of silly.
Armor and helmets are always tricky for movies, but they always take the stupid shortcut of creating a full-face-visible helmet and light it up inside, guaranteeing the actor both recognizable and completely blind.
I think "Ironman" punctured this very well-- cut betwen the suit and the actor and his awesome HUD, and you've got a great means of showing emotion.
Frankly, a unit of 12 or 20 or whatever it was giant armor suits runnign around would have trouble recognizing specific members visually without some kind of overlay anyway-- just give the audience the overlay, or color cue (the Power Rangers solution-- the actors had to do their emoting audibly-- especially considering that the voice and face actors weren't in the fighting costumes) or something else.
I had that sense of guilt when it came to CDs, too, especially when I would sort through the CDs sometime later and ask myself, "Why did I stop listening to this so much?"
By the way, Kirk, if you liked "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," I think you'll like the excellent adventure story of "Gentlemen of the Road" also by Chabon. He jokes in interviews that its subtitle is "Jews with Swords." Takes place many hundreds of years ago (with more than a couple anachronisms) in central europe, among a bunch of little states I've never heard of, but apparently existed. (Chabon was seeking out a historical race of Jews that was not oppressed, and found several.) Brilliant read, former serialized in... I forget which magazine-- New Yorker or Atlantic or the like.