Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
It would be somewhere over twenty years ago when I Lost My Heart To Starship Troopers, crashin’ light in hyper space, Fighting for the federation hand-in-hand, we’ll conquer space, and we did speak about that love a couple of years or so back in our episode entitled Sci-Fascism, so I’ll try and minimise the recovering of old ground.
Verhoven here adapts and completely subverts Robert Heinlein’s novel of the same same, just as his casting subverts the meaning of the age of high school students. Casper “deffo not 18” Van Dien plays our protagonist here, one, Johnny Rico, a jock from a wealthy family who defies their will and signs up for military service, the only way to become a citizen with voting rights in this junta.
Not having much to offer intellectually, he’s assigned to mobile infantry, while his classmates, such as his girlfriend, Denise Richards’s Carmen Ibanez heads off to pilot school, Neil Patrick Harris’s slightly psychic Carl Jenkins heads off to military intelligence, and before long Dina Meyer’s besotted Dizzy Flores joins Johnny in the infantry as another leg to a love quadrangle, once Carmen is assigned to train alongside Patrick Muldoon’s Zander “Haircut One Hundred” Barcalow.
This soap opera stuff takes a back seat once war kicks off in earnest, a race of Arachnids, or Bugs, get all shirty when humans start encroaching on their space and commence hurling asteroids at us, including one that devastates Buenos Aires, killing Johnny’s family, and giving him the necessary motivation to get through boot camp after almost going home when a hilarious and fatal accident occurs under his watch on a training exercise. Medic!
The rest of it, you probably already have the gist of it – lots and lots of shooting of bugs, a mix of some early-ish CG that more or less holds up, well, better than a lot of the era, mainly because there’s enough practical effects and delightful models mixed in to keep the disbelief a little suspended, which alongside some impeccable production design makes this a delight to revisit.
Now, famously this had something of a frosty reception back on release, but has been reappraised over the years. We’ll get to that, but most of these reappraisals don’t tend to place a lot of focus on how much fun Starship Troopers is, and they really should. It’s a riot, with a great blend of over the top humour and action that’s more satisfying than any superhero film.
Said reappraisals are more about pointing out, apparently to the terminally stupid, that this is not, in fact, glorifying a fascist state and it’s lust for violence, but satirising this. I have long been unable to fathom how the former view ever came about, as this is very much a film where it’s irony is clearly visible from space with the naked eye. Of course a director who grew up in a country occupied by a fascist regime did not make a pro-fascist film. Dummies.
For a movie that is, on the face of it, stupid, it’s got a lot to say for itself. Mostly in ways that have become more obviously relevant over the past few years, sadly. The continuing march of the military industrial complex, the continual need for an enemy to justify that, the media manipulation that vilifies that enemy and “others” them, and all the other signposts on the way to a fascist state, and applies just as well inside the USA that it’s referencing, as seen with the militarised police response to BLM demonstrations and the like.
So, a deeply depressing film to put any thought into, but a wildly entertaining one on the surface of things. Highly recommended.