‘Starship Troopers’ Was A Warning To America
The ’90s cult classic is a savage satire of fascism that’s required viewing now
The sci-fi war movie Starship Troopers bombed when it opened in 1997. Both audiences and critics hated it. They saw a shallow, gratuitously violent CGI cartoon about giant alien bugs dismembering sexy space marines.
But I saw a different movie than everyone else. Yes, it’s a gruesome special-effects-stuffed spectacle where, for instance, a human’s brains are sucked out by a giant intelligent worm. Starship Troopers is also more complex than most thought at the time.
I sat in a movie theater during the waning days of a century that saw the birth of a new empire — an empire of the people, by the people, for the people — and beheld a big-budget blockbuster preach the truth. The future belongs to America, which isn’t great news for the future.
America, you see, is a boot. It has always been a boot. The nation was founded in mercy but it governs in violence. The state smashes. It obliterates enemies, foreign or domestic, real or invented, us or them. This is called the American way, but it’s also called fascism.
It is what it is and Starship Troopers knew, back then, what it is.
