Opinion: ‘Starship Troopers’ Deserves a Re-appraisal (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Loved to Kill Smart Bugs)
This madcap satire didn’t get the reception it deserved on its release.
Paul Verhoeven’s career has had some of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Just compare the opposing reactions to Robocop and Showgirls; while the former is a highly regarded science fiction film about the pitfalls of enhanced technology, the latter was a was a critical and commercial failure, subject so some of the most scathing reviews a film can receive.
So by the time Verhoeven released Starship Troopers, his first film after Showgirls, the director wasn’t nearly as highly regarded as he was a decade before. It’s not too surprising, then, that the film was met with a similar response to its predecessor.
However, I believe that many critics undervalued or completely missed the film’s hilarious, biting satire of fascism and the military industrial complex.
Right out of the gate, Starship Troopers lets the audience know what kind of cinematic experience they are in for: a flurry of short, televised propaganda pieces plays in rapid succession.
(As a quick aside: these segments play out more like media on a streaming service or videos on Youtube than ads on TV. After each video, an announcer asks if the unseen viewer would like to see more, while a number of thumbnails for different videos is displayed on a menu screen, with a particular video being selected each time. For a film that came out in 1997, it’s surprisingly prophetic of the internet age and how media is consumed within it.)
There’s a filmed broadcast on the planet Klendathu, where a military officer begins describing the threat level an attacking species of bugs poses to humanity, just as one of the creatures grips his midsection with one of its pincers and rips him in half. The unseen camera then, inexplicably, continues filming, until the camera’s operator and the surrounding soldiers are killed.
Not only does the cameraperson not even attempt to run, they also have the good manners to keep the equipment steady before their demise, so the viewer’s immersion isn’t broken with a shaky shot of the footage.
In any other film this would be an annoying but necessary plot hole, but in Starship Troopers this is par for the course in a world where everyone is driven to reckless martyrdom and bloodlust (or, since the enemies are bugs, should it be paste-lust?).
With the film’s playful tone being widely misunderstood upon its release, Starship Troopers was derided for its shallow, vacuous characters and a hollow storyline supplemented by gory, gun-filled action.
But the petty, interpersonal drama between its principal characters is used effectively to contrast the blood-drenched, brutal showdowns between humans and bugs. This way, the characters are just as naïve as the viewer is about the horrors of war awaiting them.
At the beginning of Starship Troopers, some of protagonist Jonny Rico’s primary concerns include an opposing player in his school sports game flirting with his girlfriend, or having his lacklustre math grade amplified on a large screen in front of his peers. By the movie’s climax, he’s lost almost everyone he’s ever loved, yet he’s more eager to fight than ever before, and has lost none of his optimism.
It’s a character motivation that doesn’t have a shred of logic to it. In a typical war film, it would start similarly to Starship Troopers, with the character’s innocence being torn apart by their gruesome environment. Then it would end with a mentally broken Rico, so blinded by resentment that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies as he attempts to eradicate the group responsible for the death of his loved ones.
But that implies bitterness and deep sorrow, emotions nowhere to be seen in the film’s ending. Instead, the soundtrack swells triumphantly, as its narrator insists that humanity will thrive in what sounds like an eternal war against the bugs.
Despite there being no end in sight to the carnage and destruction, it’s a fitting ending considering the characters’ maddening low amount of concern for their safety.
As an example, after an entire battalion of troops is gruesomely dispatched by the enemy bugs, all Rico has to report about them is that it must have been ‘some kind of smart bug’ behind the slaughter.
Yes, really, that’s his statement to one of his superiors. And instead of terrifying Johnny, the destruction just makes him hungrier for violence, as if he’s become hypnotised by the film’s outlandish military adverts.
In fact, it’s as if the film itself has become persuaded by these obvious propaganda pieces. By its end, it doesn’t even feel like a film anymore: after all, what’s the substantial difference between the ending and one of those ridiculous videos?
Recent re-appraisal of Starship Troopers has commended it for its parody of fascism, where attention has been drawn to the parallels between some of its scenes and Nazi propaganda, as well as other allusions to Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht and Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the characters’ uniforms.
The film’s changing reception is welcome, but it still remains widely misunderstood and severely underappreciated. For its gleefully psychotic tone and its characters’ hilarious, bottomless pit of fatalism, Paul Verhoeven’s madcap satire deserves to be seen as one of his finest films.
