My goodness, is Starship Troopers an under-appreciated movie. It’s also a strange movie, even by ’90s standards. It shares a space with Demolition Man, representing satirical sci-fi movies that, now, have more or less become a punchline. Demolition Man—while it’s admirable for what it was trying to do—suffers from poor execution. But Starship Troopers hits the exact mark it’s going for; it’s just largely misunderstood by audiences.
The thing is, if you watch Starship Troopers with a straight face, it doesn’t work all that well. It’s weirdly melodramatic, the performances aren’t all that good, and the antagonists are just giant bugs, amongst other things. It can be seen as “one-dimensional” or “immature,” as Roger Ebert, and other critics, have complained. But, as with all Paul Verhoeven movies, Starship Troopers is not meant to be watched with a straight face. Verhoeven makes movies with his tongue buried so deep in his cheek it almost comes through the other side, and that penchant for taking something very serious not seriously at all is one of the things that makes Starship Troopers so uniquely great.
The story in Starship Troopers is pretty simple: in the near-ish future, humans have begun to colonize far-off worlds, and in our travels, we sparked a war with a species of bug-aliens. We follow Rico, played by Casper Van Dien, as he defies his parents’ wishes for him to attend Harvard by joining the military because he wants to follow his girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards). She goes to flight school, he’s a grunt, and they soon break up—but it all works out, because just as Rico followed Carmen, Dizzy (Dina Meyer), Rico’s football (if that’s what you call the strange sport they play?) teammate, followed Rico into the military because of her feelings for him. And in the spaces between, they train under a hard-ass drill sergeant, they watch Buenos Aires get incinerated by the bugs, then they go to war.
While there’s nothing especially unique about the story itself, its effectiveness isn’t diminished by its lack of originality. Not in the least. Verhoeven directs with such bravado and the same sharp satirical eye that played no small role in vaulting Robocop (which he directed in 1987, from a screenplay by Ed Neumeier, who also penned Starship Troopers) to become, arguably, one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Starship Troopers is a movie about war, yet Verhoeven manages, with a deft hand, to display admiration for the military at times while eviscerating it at other times (though, to be fair, the admiration exists mainly to make the evisceration all the more potent).
That is what makes this movie so effective—Verhoeven, when he’s at his best, is a master of tone. There’s little doubt that the message behind Starship Troopers is anti-military, anti-fascism, anti-war. It goes without saying that those are all salient moral and political issues that humanity has contended with for years and years. But Verhoeven doesn’t deliver them seriously, not the way other directors would. He manages to build real camaraderie between Rico, Dizzy, Ace (played to perfection by Jake Busey), and the rest of the grunts. You get to kind of like them. The grunts bond in an endearing way, and while the movie plays most of its relationships with a bit too much melodrama and silliness, they still feel honest. But that camaraderie, and the zeal for war that binds the characters together, is underscored by the horrors they endure—which Verhoeven handles with the same steady hand. When one of Rico’s men gets his head blown off in a training exercise, it’s horrifying—but also, dare I say, a little funny. You’re not supposed to laugh, but because of the shock of the moment, and the over-the-top way it happens, you laugh in self-defense. But that’s what satire, and Verhoeven, does best: you laugh when you’re supposed to be crying.
Again, if you watch Starship Troopers at a straight-ahead angle, it’s not a great movie. The drama is hokey, the performances are mostly flat, and the story doesn’t do much to engage its audiences. The trick, as with most—if not all—Verhoeven movies, is to shift your point of view by a few degrees to capture how powerful Verhoeven’s storytelling is. In typical war movies, you have a clear message: war is hell. Characters go through hellish boot camp, are shipped off to a hellish war, then they die in hellish fashion or live to face a lifetime of trauma. Everyone gets what they pay for. But in Starship Troopers, not everyone thinks war is hell. In fact, a lot of them come to think it’s pretty awesome, which, if you look around the United States alone, you find that’s not an uncommon perception. Verhoeven hits us where it counts by not just damning war itself, but also our celebration of war. It’s no coincidence that more than one character meets a gruesome end soon after congratulating themselves on doing war right. In a decisive moment, Dizzy is literally torn apart after cheering her own success annihilating a tanker bug. If that’s not a clear portrait of how Verhoeven is actively tearing apart the happy jingoism of our military-industrial complex, I’m not sure what is.
Satirizing war—condemning war—is easy. What’s not easy is extending the tragedy of war beyond the politicians, beyond the world leaders, beyond those higher-ups that are typically held responsible and laying some of that blame on our shoulders—us watching at home—as well. To great effect, Verhoeven uses news footage to give context to the world beyond the story, showing us the broader strokes of the war—the galactic politics, and so on. It’s a technique he similarly deployed in Robocop, using media not only to further develop the world, but to establish a sense of voyeurism that brings us closer to the act. As a viewer, you become complicit with the mayhem plaguing Detroit, or the war machine that grinds out pointless death after pointless death. Famously, one of the newsreels in Starship Troopers asks “would you like to know more?” Well, yes. Of course we would. We have news streaming into our brainpieces 24/7, assuring us that things are terrible somewhere, if not everywhere. This question that Starship Troopers poses is almost rhetorical because there’s at least part of us that loves the mayhem, that loves the war machine. There’s a “thin line between entertainment and war,” according to Rage Against the Machine, and Starship Troopers shows us just how thin that line can be.
There’s no shortage of ways to understand Starship Troopers. While the newsreels can be seen as a device for voyeurism, they can also be understood as a brainwashing tool, indoctrinating every able-bodied “civilian” (you’re not a “citizen” until you serve in the military) to believe violence is the answer to pretty much everything, as Rico’s high school history teacher—and eventual squad commander—Rasczak (Michael Ironside, in one of his best tough-as-nails roles) tells him. There’s the fascist bent as well, which especially smacks you in the face when you see Rico’s buddy Carl (Neil Patrick Harris, of all people) accelerate so high in the ranks that he gets to don garb that literally makes him look like a commander in the German Reich. And, for bonus points, it can also be held up to its source, the Robert A. Heinlein novel, which pretty much is the celebration of militarism and imperialism that Verhoeven is sending up.
Starship Troopers’ only sin is taking itself lightly when it was expected, apparently, to be more serious. But if you recognize that it captures the same tragic glee and manic satire that drove Robocop, Starship Troopers can easily be appreciated as something special.
“Would you like to know more?” Then give it a rewatch (provided you don’t love it already, that is); you’ll be glad you did.
Michael Moreci is a comics writer and novelist best known for his sci-fi trilogy Roche Limit. He’s also a Star Wars obsessive, who is lucky to spend his time playing Star Wars action figures with his two sons by day and writing Star Wars-inspired stories by night. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelMoreci.
This movie suffers even more from satirizing exactly those people who most hold the source material in reverence. I agree about your point about needed to watch it on the proper levels, but mostly it’s because those people (the reflexive war glamorizers) hold the book as what can only be described as a fetish object.
“But Starship Troopers hits the exact mark it’s going for; it’s just largely misunderstood by audiences.”
No, I understand the movie just fine. Verhoeven took a classic sci-fi book and butchered it. He never read the book and used only the title.
I was always surprised by how many people did not understand that this was satire.
People I talked to in actual real life. Even people that, when told so, did not believe that.
It’s when I realized the Internet need of <sarcasm> tags.
Poe’s law ftw.
The first time I watched “Starship Troopers”, I took it seriously and came away disappointed, thinking I’d just watched a particularly dumb and poorly-executed action movie. But then I ended up seeing it again, more or less by accident, and I suddenly understood what the director was trying to do. I’m still embarrassed that I managed to watch it all the way through once without noticing that it was satire — and, more to the point, that it isn’t just being satirical for cheap laughs, but that it’s actually raising real questions.
Heinlein fans complain that it’s unfaithful to the original novel, which is true on one level. But on another level, Verhoeven includes a lot of Heinlein’s pet ideas — the whole ‘service as citizenship’ notion, for example — presents them faithfully, challenges them (often humorously), but leaves it up to us to decide what we think about them.
Verhoeven doesn’t always make good movies, but — as you say — this one deserves a lot more respect than it usually gets.
Plus, he had co-ed showers in the future. The man is a visionary!
There are no shortage of people who “get” this movie…it’s just that it isn’t very good, as satire or as anything else. Let’s be honest, this is a mediocre (at best!) movie that no one would remember but for the fact that it used valuable intellectual property as its vehicle. That the idea behind it is something that you may agree with doesn’t change that. If you want an anti-war satire, go read The Forever War–it’s actually good!
I always thought it was widely known that it was a satire and this is the first time I hear of someone taking it seriously.
Of course it’s the exact opposite of what Heinlein mean, but that’s why I find it brilliant: Verhoven show the authoritarianism implied by this society with almost the same narrative as the book.
@6: Or Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero, or Bob Shaw’s Who Goes Here?, or any other SFnal anti-(or ambivalent to-)war story: to paraphrase Brian Aldiss, the Starship Troopers movie manages to be a third-rate version of a second-rate novel.
People didn’t know this was satire? Are you sure?
The first problem is the movie is so heavy handed at satire it become camp. It’s just not good camp.
The second problem is that while Heinlein’s source material does has deep, dry undercurrents of irony and satire, more so that probably anything else he wrote, he would never, ever ridicule serving society or the members of the military that do so. On that mark alone Verhoeven ensures the source material is butchered beyond recognition.
Oh, people totally miss this as satire. Check out the original reviews–it was judged, largely, as being childish and no more than B-movie schlock. But that’s the genius–or at least part of the genius–on display, in that Verhoeven used a B-movie aesthetic to really great use. Now, this opinion has changed, a little, over time (from what I see), but it still pretty much seems relegated to a campy sci-fi flick and nothing more, which isn’t true (in my opinion). Point being: there’s a lot in this movie that was taken for granted when it came out, and it hasn’t had a major rediscovery (as other films are treated to) since. The sequels–which are pretty bad–don’t do the original any favors, either.
And Forever War–one of the greatest sci-fi novels of all time, without question. It should be read regardless of Starship’s context. It should be read by everyone, I’d say.
Starship Troopers is one of my favorite movies of all time. I have always been surprised that people didn’t realize that it was a satire. I read the book and was extremely disappointed. The books is almost unreadable. Then again, I don’t enjoy much of what Heinlein wrote because his blatantly misogyny always managed to overpower his writing.
I am literally the only person I know who gets it and loves the film. It’s among my favorites, too.
@10: “And Forever War–one of the greatest sci-fi novels of all time, without question. It should be read regardless of Starship’s context. It should be read by everyone, I’d say. “
I’d go a step further and say that if you read Starship Troopers, you have to go on and read The Forever War, and then Old Man’s War (plus Ghost Brigades and Last Colony to really get the full effect).
Those three are the Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis of SFnal War stories.
Bernadette: You touched on one of the key elements I take away from reading Heinlein’s works, the anthropologic social norms of his generation extrapolated through the lens of science fiction elements to give commentary on the American zeitgeist. Modern adaptations might sadly revert back to these “ideals” as our society is riding the pendulum hard at this moment which is why these “turn-of-the-millennia” films feel so strange to us now.
One of my favourites. It’s hilarious.
This is an amazing movie. The people who hate on it love the book – and that’s the problem. The book is bad, its message is bad, and people who like the book are also bad. The movie is the rare adaptation that took the source material and instead of adapting the source decided to skewer it for being awful and fascist. I’m not really sure what else you’d expect from a Holocaust survivor.
That it upsets so many of Heinlein’s puppies is one of the things that elevates the film to cult classic level. It is why it works. Lets all face it, Heinlein had some extraordinarily iffy ideas and values when it came to the military and it would have been all too easy to present those at face value without giving a little further thought to how they would actually work. Verhoeven just peels back that facade a little to see the ridiculousness of them.
@16 I take exception to what you wrote. I love Starship Troopers the book, but that doesn’t mean I want to be governed by veterans any more than it means I want to join the military or that I believe “Humanity uber alles”. Just because you don’t like the setting or theme doesn’t mean the book is bad or that it’s fans are bad.
It works very well as a bildungsroman. It has that page-turner, can’t-put-it-down appeal in the writing, even with huge infodumps interspersed. It is extremely memorable both to people who like it and people who don’t. Doesn’t sound like a bad book to me.
Count me as another one who is surprised that Michael thinks this wasn’t widely understood as satire. I remember it as being well understood when the movie came out. The Nazi uniforms (not just Carl, but the Sky Marshalls as well) and news/web segments were so over the top that you couldn’t take it as anything but satire.
I personally saw more disappointment that there was no power armour more than anything else.
I have always loved this movie. It’s one of my favorites
@13 I’d add Armor by John Steakley to that list, another great philosophical (if not directly satirical) take on the same theme as Starship Troopers.
That said, if Verhoeven wanted to make a satire on the themes of Starship Troopers, he should have done the same thing those other writers did: made his own work. Taking the name of a favorite classic book and sending it up…well, ask a James Bond fan what he thinks of the 1967 version of Casino Royale.
If nothing else, all the furor over the “insult” to a classic book has eclipsed the satire. And that gets in the way of appreciating the satire, no matter how good it otherwise might have been.
It was a very powerful movie, based on a very powerful book. The thing is, the power in the movie came from satire, while the power in the book came from its philosophy. The creators of each took an extreme position, and defended it vigorously and with great passion. I enjoyed both works, without buying into what either of them was selling.
I always knew this movie was satirical, because I knew Verhoeven’s earlier work. And no doubt because I read about it in Starlog, so I knew what the behind-the-scenes thinking was. I didn’t think it was as good as RoboCop or Total Recall, but it was definitely effective as a biting condemnation of militaristic fascism. Verhoeven spent his early childhood in the Nazi-ruled Netherlands, so he had the firsthand experience to let him see the evils of that philosophy clearly and comment on it. The problem is that understanding satire requires the ability to look beyond the surface and critically question what’s presented to you, and too few people ever learn to develop that skill. (I’m always surprised by how many people don’t get that RoboCop was a comedy.)
What I didn’t know at first was that the book wasn’t satirical. I read it after I saw the movie, and I assumed that it was a very shrewd and subtle satire of the fascism its characters endorsed — because their arguments in favor of fascism were all predicated on the assumption that it worked, but no hard evidence was offered to prove that it actually did work, so it was circular and ad hoc reasoning. I expressed this opinion some years back on the Analog message board, and was informed by no less a luminary than Gardner Dozois that Heinlein had actually been in earnest. Although I’ve seen it suggested since that maybe he wasn’t a true believer in military fascism so much as conducting a thought experiment to explore how such a system could hypothetically work. Although I still say it fails to offer any evidence that the system works beyond the characters’ blind faith that it works.
And that is why I have so much respect for the movie, because it’s able to see its characters’ blind faith in the system for the risible and self-destructive folly that it is.
No misunderstanding here: this movie was the work of someone who hated the source material. Any other SF classic treated in this fashion would be rightly seen as an insult.
@23 I think I, Robot with Will Smith is a good example.
I can’t provide much commentary on this movie because I saw it when I was kid (probably below the age rating) and never managed to get through the book.
@23 Eh, there are lots of books out there that are considered “unfilmable” as-is and get their plots replaced with something else. James Bond is the canonical example. That’s not disrespectful, that’s just adaptation. But when the “adaptation” explicitly goes against the original philosophy of the book, that sets my teeth on edge.
@25/Robotech_Master: I think all fiction is a response to other fiction in a way, and sometimes it’s a critical response rather than a reinforcement. It’s not unheard of for adaptations to be critiques of their sources or to take them in the opposite direction from the one intended. For instance, the comic strip Little Orphan Annie was by a conservative cartoonist who despised FDR’s New Deal, but the musical Annie is very pro-New Deal. Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica was radically unlike the original in tone and was largely a critique of the original’s failure to deal adequately with the inherent darkness of its premise. Then there are all the Dracula adaptations that paint the Count as a romantic, seductive figure, when Bram Stoker portrayed him as an irredeemable monster and sexual predator, basically an allegory for his anti-immigrant beliefs.
There have been a number of movie adaptations that took a satirical or spoof approach to remaking TV shows that were played more or less straight in their original form, like the 21 Jump Street movies or the Seth Rogen Green Hornet. Then there’s the very weird case of the Dan Aykroyd Dragnet movie from 1987, which presents itself as a direct, in-continuity sequel to the original, ultra-serious Jack Webb series (even bringing back Harry Morgan as Bill Gannon) despite being a comedy spoof of it.
Of course, a lot of these alternative takes don’t work that well, but I don’t believe that fidelity is really an essential part of an adaptation. The whole reason to do a new version of a story is to find a new way of telling it, to approach it from a different angle that reveals some other layer of its meaning or potential. An adaptation that directly critiques or challenges the original work’s point of view is a rather extreme way of doing that, but the point-counterpoint debate of the opposing interpretations of the same premise can be interesting and worthwhile.
The first time I saw this was in Basic Training, on movie night, so it had a bunch of the beginning and the co-ed showers and sex scene cut or fast-forwarded through, and I don’t think we got to the end. We were also in the process of learning about the military and being good soldiers, so perhaps an over-the-top-into-ridiculousness satire of the military wasn’t the best option (or maybe that was the Drill Sergeant’s exact point…). I ended up watching the whole thing a couple years later after I was out of the Army.
I think, like another commenter above, since I read the book after viewing the movie, it colored my perceptions of the book’s messages to be “this is the setting and the people think it works but here Rico is in this neverending war that’s cost him nearly everything” while finding the philosophy and discussion sections to be interesting but not entirely convincing due to that juxtaposition. Rico’s ruminations, and beliefs in that system, keeping him going was a large point as well.
I’m not a huge fan of slapstick comedy or comedy that tries as hard as this did. It added female characters while whitewashing the main characters, and went so overboard with the satire that even understanding that, I cannot take it “seriously” as a satire. There are ways to adapt and lampoon the message and source while still producing decently written lines and good performances, making the satire bite not because you’re trying so hard the actors have no idea how they’re actually supposed to do their job.
Also, for absolutely no rational reason I could find, I couldn’t stand Denise Richards at the time, so that didn’t help. Just something about her produced a visceral negative response and to this day, I have no clue why my early-20s self reacted to a complete stranger doing her job that way, on any of the films and shows I saw her in. No one else has ever gotten that, and heaven knows some of them deserve dislike much more than she did at the time.
It has been awhile since I read Starship Troopers; I tried to get through Stranger in a Strange Land and couldn’t stomach the gender/sex politics there, but my recollection of Troopers is that while Heinlein’s misogyny exists it’s downplayed given Rico’s lack of interaction with women, mainly. I might reread soon, though there’s already a bunch on my current to-read pile.
Verhoeven openly admitted that he hated the book, to the point that he didn’t even finish reading it! The movie was already in production when the original script’s similarities to Heinlein’s novel were pointed out, at which point they licensed the rights and retooled the script. To a large degree any correspondence between the book and movie seem to be somewhat coincidental. (FWIW, I’ve never read the book, and neither this movie nor the attendant commentaries here and elsewhere have ever given me the slightest inclination to do so.)
I recall leaving the theater thinking that the movie must have been intended as a satire because otherwise I could not convince myself that I had not just wasted two hours of my life watching a disturbing film. The performances probably had a lot to do with that: with the possible exception of Neil Patrick Harris in a few scenes, the cast simply didn’t seem to exude the proper amount of self-awareness needed to effectively convey the ridicule that Verhoeven intended. Also, while discussing the movie over beers later that evening, one of my friends said something that for some reason has stuck with me: “this director needs to learn that people are not props.” This movie is gratuitously gory and violent. RoboCop is certainly grisly, but it is somewhat more judicious about using the violence to underscore the message and has characters who become more conflicted about the events. Starship Troopers comes across more as an exploitation movie, thus making it a bit harder to takeit as satire.
I can appreciate what Verhoeven was attempting to do here, and even agree with the basic sentiment. But I, along with many others, simply believe that it was a poorly executed attempt.
Add me to the small throng of people who saw Starship Troopers in the theatre, instantly grokked (a Heinlein word!) that it was satire, and adored it.
To be candid, I’ve never yet gotten around to reading the novel, though I’ve meant to for a very long time. Perhaps if I loved the novel–or at least loved Heinlein more than Verhoeven–my attitude would have been different.
Don’t get me wrong: I largely like Heinlein. A decent writer, interesting ideas. Sometimes hard to tell when he was being provocative and when he was being serious. I’m not sure if some of his worse notions don’t just get a pass for that reason–“Oh no, Heinlein didn’t mean what he seemed to be advocating!” Entertaining, for sure, and one of the titans of that SF generation alongside Asimov and Clarke.
But Verhoeven, oh, I do love Paul Verhoeven even when he’s awful (and he’s done some terrible films, though Starship Troopers isn’t one of them). I came to Starship Troopers (the movie) not as a fan of the book I hadn’t read, but as somebody seeing it through the lens of RoboCop, which is delectably, brutally, cuttingly satirical. And it still amazes me, all these years later, that anyone takes seriously a movie in which Doogie Howser shows up as a bona fide Space Nazi; or, I should say, “seriously” in the wrong way–takes it straightly–when the whole thing is so obviously a send-up, though one with some serious points (in the way any great satire has a certain kind of seriousness to it). Troopers isn’t close to being his best film; but it’s a helluva lot of fun.
(As a tangent, I’d like to add one other thing: if I had to pick a favorite SF author, I’m sure I’d pick Philip K. Dick, one of my favorite authors overall, really, for all his faults. Dick, who got Verhoevened in Total Recall, a fun and ridiculous film that has almost nothing to do with “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” except the premise, although it manages to capture a certain phildickian sensibility in a way that Blade Runner doesn’t. But I mention it because: if I took PKD, one of my favorite writers ever, waaaaay too seriously, I might get offended by what Total Recall does to his work, instead of recognizing TR for what it is, a crazy, loopy, nutty film that plays with PKD’s sense of the absurd and unreal even while replacing the usual battered and baffled phildickean protagonist with Arnold Schwarzenegger and the usual quiet despair of a phildickian setting with booms, breasts, and blood. Point being, maybe those who are offended by what Neumeier and Verhoeven did to Troopers should unclench a little? I’m more than okay with what O’Bannon, Shusett, and Verhoeven did to “Wholesale”: I had fun and Phil Dick’s kids got paid, so all is good. (PKD seems like he may have been an… erratic… father, plus he didn’t really start making any money until a couple of years before he died, so I am way cool with his kids finally getting something out of their pop’s life’s work.))
Epic flick. Demolition Man and Robocop are also awesome.
If Verhoeven was trying to make a point, it is not an argument in his favour to say that most of his audiance missed it.
And “Rico’s high school history teacher” was right to say that politics is about force. Whenever the government does something, it forces some people to do it, or forces some people to pay other people to do it. That is what laws, and regulations, and executive orders and taxes are all about. Take that force away, and you don’t have a government anymore.
It’s just that most people don’t want to admit the fact, when the government is doing something they approve of.
The satire you love about this movie is the reason those of us who like the books and the author want to find the director and pillory him. The book was very serious and interesting – the movie not so much. Bad bad bad – but not surprising as everyone loves to hate Heinlein now for the sin of actually being a capitalist and a supporter of the military. #16 and I do love people calling me bad for thinking humanity has a right to protect itself and that the military is important and a noble career. The idea that voting should come with responsibilities as well as rights is also a GOOD idea. To many people vote/buy into the idea of rights without thinking about responsibilities as well. The whole “everything should be free” movement is proof of this.
Once again my lack of faith in the people who visit this site and comment here is confirmed.
@dwcole: Once again, I will point you to our Moderation Policy and ask that you please refrain from showing up just to insult or disparage other commenters. Since this has been an ongoing issue with your interactions on the site, please consider this a final warning.
@27 To be fair to Rico, that is not much of an argument against the system. For example: I recently read The Guns of Normandy, by a WW2 Canadian artilleyman. He believed in democracy and all that, and yet there he was, five years into a world war, which he viewed as a continuation of the previous world war, as dead soldiers have their intestines eaten by feral pigs, live soldiers stagger back from the front delighted by their good luck in having an arm blown off, and his field artillery regiment routinely opens fire on their own infantry positions, sometimes getting messages back congratulating them on their “great slaughter”. At one point he reflects on how absurd terms like “Band of Brothers” are, when so many riflemen are killed without ever finding out what any of the people fighting next to them are called.
If all that should not have turned him against the system he was fighting for, I don’t see why Rico should have lost faith in his system…
@27/LynMars: I’ve seen it suggested that the whitewashed casting — the absurdity of having lily-white actors play characters with Latin American names and origins — was itself part of the satire. Verhoeven had a tendency to mock things in the media by doing the same things to an extreme, dead-earnest degree that made them ludicrous. And a lot of people miss that they’re ludicrous on purpose. Although, granted, if it actually results in nonwhite actors being excluded from job opportunities, then the satire is really no better than the thing it’s satirizing.
And from what I’ve observed, having a negative reaction to Denise Richards is not all that uncommon. She was really hot, but didn’t really have much else to offer as an actress — unlike Dina Meyer.
@29/eric: The interesting thing about Total Recall is that, even though it’s based on a Philip K. Dick story, the filmmakers actually approached it more as an homage to Alfred Hitchcock. I think it’s actually a pretty good Hitchcockian thriller, except that Hitchcock probably wouldn’t have approved of its graphic violence, since he always believed that what you don’t show is scarier.
And I’m philosophical about the replacement of the story’s original milquetoast protagonist with Schwarzenegger. Sure, it’s a massive departure, and it’s hard to understand why Quaid is so unhappy with his life when he looks and acts like Arnie; but the fact is, there are a number of sci-fi and fantasy movies from the ’80s that never would’ve gotten made at all if they hadn’t had Schwarzenegger’s star power attached to them, and this was one of them.
@35 I should think that once you have a protagonist who looks like Arnie, you have pretty much abandoned any hope of a scary film anyway. He just doesn’t look like someone to be scared for.
Largely panned at the time (from what I understand), the ONLY review I ever read at the time GOT it all and decreed it a masterpiece. It was a college newspaper (UNC) using a five star rating system and the critic gave it all five, and not in a kitsch-ironic way, but as a A) cagey satire of how Gulf War One appeared on CNN. Then B) J. “Village Voice” Hoberman wrote about it glowingly for FILM COMMENT, and C) Grantland (anyone remember Bill Simmons’s sometimes under-rated site?) had a huge laudatory piece on it. A few smart pop culture academics understood it well, too (but not too many). They were looking for “obvious” (if still good) SF movie fare like Sayles’s “Brother from Another Planet.”
I thought the idea of Starship Troopers as dreck was passe, but I’m probably in the bubble. For me, this is epic Vehoeven, WAY more important than Robocop, and I was bored by Soldier of Orange, a picture nominee in his homeland, and Spetters, another Verhoeven classic.
Keep spreading the word for all those people who think this is the, ahem, “Showgirls” guy – what a joke; it may be the 90s best SF film, or I’m indulging in hyperbole.
@23 Almuric
If you think Verhoeven created a one-sided, unfair, and frequently ridiculous presentation designed to denigrate ideas that he disagreed with and make their proponents seem foolish…well, Heinlein did the exact same thing in the book of Starship Troopers. Every single character who disagrees with the ideals of the Federation, without exception, is either presented as a stammering fool unable to defend their ideas or a naive child who will loyally puppet everything Dubois says once he’s been educated to know better.
Heinlein mocked the basic founding principles of America, having his mouthpiece Dubois laugh at the very idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In their place, he substituted a system where the independence and free thought of the citizen were replaced by the automatic obedience of the soldier, where everyone thinks and talks alike, and where no one is allowed to deviate from the official narrative. I’m sure that real-world soldiers have different political opinions, that there are cynics as well as true believers, and that each one has his own vices and virtues. Heinlein erases that humanity to show us soldiers without any real human qualities. Parody is the least of what he deserves.
@31 ad
Yes, politics is about force. It’s also about convincing people to follow the law without having to hold a gun to their heads every minute of every day. Take away force, and you don’t have a government. Take away consent, and you have the French occupation of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars or the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War. As Talleyrand said, “You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.”
Elections, free assembly, free speech, political parties…all of these are release valves on a pressure cooker. They provide people with nonviolent ways to enact change, to make their voice heard. They create the belief that talking is better than shooting. When those valves don’t exist, conflict resolution tends to be much less pleasant than it is in liberal democracies.
@38. Heinlein created countless future societies in his work. It’s fascinating how this one, out of all of them, is the one that everybody seems to assume that Heinlein intended as some sort of ideal utopia. It’s mind-boggling.
Politics is not about force; it’s about persuasion. Force is simply the crudest, most brainless form of persuasion. And it’s not the form that made humans evolutionarily successful. We’re not bigger and stronger than other animals; we succeeded by being social, by using communication and interpersonal bonding to persuade one another to share common goals and work together voluntarily. That’s what politics is — the means by which leaders persuade people to agree to a goal.
@40. If you think the government doesn’t use force, then try not paying your taxes. Then you’ll see how persuasive they can be. :-)
“Demolition Man…suffers from poor execution”
Does…not…compute…
Most people did get the movie was satire. But it is poor satire. It is obvious (especially at the time) and clumsy. This post is like the IMBD rewiews by somoene’s sock puppet telling me I was too stupid to get Brown Bunny.
I think more people heard about the book instead of reading it themselves.
Military service isn’t the prerequisite to becoming a citizen; “federal service” is. We didn’t get a list of everything that qualified, but Carl performing scientific research on Pluto was one.
And Carmen wasn’t his girlfriend.
The novel isn’t fascist. Not everyone gets to vote- but not everyone gets to vote now. No, no reason is given aside from ‘what we had before didn’t work; this method is working so far’. But the book was hated in the 60s, when it’s pro-military message definitely didn’t mesh with the anti-war movement.
Just because Verhoeven made Robocop doesn’t make all of his movies great.
I have no need to re-watch it to be reminded that Verhoeven is actually very fond of the fascism he claims to be parodying and that none of his movies have had any socially redeeming value.
@39 Almuric
If an author gives all of the good lines and arguments to one side of a debate, while making every opponent of the Federation’s system sound like a delusional child, it’s pretty obvious what his actual feelings are.
@41 Almuric
If you think the government doesn’t rely on force and persuasion to collect taxes, look at Margaret Thatcher’s downfall. She thought that she could impose a poll tax, and the rest of Great Britain disagreed. When no one decided to pay their poll tax, the courts were powerless to do anything; they literally couldn’t arrest everyone who decided to ignore the law. The police gave up trying, the people of England didn’t pay their taxes, and Margaret Thatcher took an involuntary retirement from the Prime Minister’s Office.
@43 sps49
Allowing the government to create hoops that citizens have to jump through in order to vote strikes me as an impressively bad idea. Instead of having citizens who choose their government, the system allows the government to choose its citizens. The government gets to decide what tasks make people “worthy” of citizenship, but the first duty of every good citizen is to not let the state tell you what good citizenship is.
Right now people don’t get to vote if they’re felons or if they don’t have sufficient legal identification. I am a firm believer that the government should have legal responsibility for issuing free legal identification for voting purposes to any citizen who requests it. Voting is a right, not a privilege, and the state should make sure that poverty or age are not barriers to the practice of democracy.
I haven’t read the novel and it’s been a long time since I watched the movie, but I don’t think earning citizenship and the ability to vote would be a terrible idea—if it were done through various charity work instead of military service. (It’s never been too difficult finding brave men and women to serve their homeland.) So if being a good voting citizen is the ultimate goal or status, probably better for everyone if it was achieved by building homes for the poor and caring for the elderly and so on. Holding that carrot in front of a military is a dangerous path to take.
@46 Please tell me you are joking.
To all those who think Heinlein’s “true feelings” about the best form of government were expressed truly in his work, especially “Starship Troopers”, what about “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, etc.?
To those who say “people who like the book are also bad.” You think I’m bad? In the sense of being Evil? What about other books I like, such as “Old Man’s War”? Am I bad for liking that? Or “Handmaid’s Tale”? There are plenty of people hwo think I’m wrong for liking that book. While I realize that the mods here won’t go after you for attacking others here, and will go after us for defending ourselves from unjustified attacks, please do consult the Moderation Policy before you say that we are morally wrong.
Especially in point 3:”Under NO circumstances should this be used as a place to insult, attack, demean, slander, or otherwise hurt others.”
I’d like to think that this is a safe place for people like myself who support LGBT, PoC, and others to post, and being called “bad” for my literary tastes is definitely not that.
This discussion seems to be getting heated, and it seems the most relevant point in the Moderation Policy at this juncture is probably the admonition to disagree with an argument or idea, and not make disagreements overly personal (as in “people who like this book are bad.”) It’s important to keep the conversation civil and be respectful of others if these discussions are going to be constructive or productive in any way. Thanks.
It’s hilarious to me that just a few short years after he wrote ST and people accused him of being a fascist, people were accusing him of being a hippie for Stranger in a Strange Land.
I think Heinlein would be happy to see people still debating Starship Troopers after all these decades. How many works written today will still be remembered, let alone passionately argued over, 50 years from now?
@43 “Military service isn’t the prerequisite to becoming a citizen; “federal service” is. We didn’t get a list of everything that qualified, but Carl performing scientific research on Pluto was one.” @46 “Allowing the government to create hoops that citizens have to jump through in order to vote strikes me as an impressively bad idea.”
The original point in the book IIRC (its been a few years) was that in order to become a full Citizen you had to be willing to spend a couple of years doing work on behalf of the People (through the State, but there aren’t very many other ways that that could even work), and by being willing to put their needs above your own you were granted the Vote.
Military service was one way, but there the books even made sure to state that nobody was ever turned down – they used an example that someone completely incapable might be tasked with counting the fuzz on a caterpillar (or something like that), but the point was that you had to be willing to make the offer. You were even allowed to set limits on it – non-violence for example – but that offer of service would have to be accepted by the State and fulfilled within those restrictions.
I’ve always liked this movie, because I understood its point. Years later, I read the Heinlein book, and could see that while the movie was not a good adaptation of it (Neumeier and Verhoeven really didn’t try at all to do so), it was still a good movie. It’s one of the rare examples where I like the source (though not as much as later works of the author) and still like the adaptation that basically lampoons it. But I bet that has a lot to do with the fact that I saw the movie before reading the book, or I would have been disappointed by the lack of power armor.
@7 & @9: Yes, lots of people missed this was satire. I was 14 or 15 and still got it, but lots of people, adults, didn’t.
@18 – vinsentient: I’m with you, I love the book, but I’m not a fascist.
@32 – Don’t speak for all of those who like Heinlein’s book.
@27/35: As I have done in other threads in this site, allow me to point out that being Latin American does not preclude you from being white. I offer myself, Martín Alberto Pérez Carrara, as white as Casper Van Dien, as proof. Particularly when you consider that Rico comes from Buenos Aires, a place full of white people, and apart from Latin Americans descended from the “traditional” stock of Spaniards and Italians, has people of Irish and Scottish descent (as does my country, Uruguay), as well as lots of other things as Russian, Lithuanian, etc.
@39/48: Yeah.
@51 RJStanford
In a free society, the proper role of a citizen is determined by the citizen, not the state. Many dissidents and troublemakers have worked on behalf of the People in opposition to the State, and the State is hardly likely to appreciate their efforts. Fortunately, our system doesn’t allow the state to decide which forms of service will be rewarded by voting rights, so the government can’t shut the people it doesn’t like out of voting.
I completely agree that there isn’t any way of “earning” the vote which doesn’t involve the state. That’s why people who want to serve should do so for its own sake, without receiving any special rights as a reward. That way they won’t have to worry about whether their service meets with the State’s approval.
Wow, I never knew both the book and movie came with such strong opinions.
Count me as one of those that both enjoy the movie and the book quite a bit (no, I do not fully agree with the ideals espoused by either).
However, I also feel that the movie struggles as a satire. I think part of the reason for this (and why so many people miss it) is because bad sci-fi that follows cliched tropes is simply to similar to much of the forms this satire takes. For example, the way in which Dizzy died. Is it “tearing apart the happy jingoism of our military-industrial complex” or is it a ridiculously overused scene in sci-fi? It just seems that in a genre filled with overacting, bad dialogue, cheesy plots, overused tropes, and cheap effects, the satire either needs to be much more overt or subtle rather than the lukewarm middle ground that Verhoeven takes.
@47
If you like. But these are comments about science fiction and satire, not a proposed bill in Congress. Don’t take it quite so seriously, please.
“Service guarantees citizenship” and similar formulations were frequent refrains in the movie, but I’m struggling to recall any notable mentions elsewhere in the film of acceptable forms of service outside active-duty military service (as opposed to the book, which several commenters have suggested was a bit clearer on that point). That lack of obvious in-universe alternatives likely explains why so many people can miss Verhoeven’s intentions here. Successful satire relies on the juxtaposition of the object of ridicule with a more socially acceptable alternative. Some things may be so beyond the pale of the prevailing culture that their mere presence in the story is too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but the type of militarism (particularly the hagiography of veterans) and national/ethnic chauvinism at the heart of Starship Troopers is far too widespread—or frighteningly close to being unleashed given the right circumstances—to be viewed this way. (Sad how little has changed in twenty years, no?) Hence, without a clear narrative foil with the film itself, it’s not necessarily obvious whether the characters’ activity and attitudes are being held up for glorification, ridicule, or simple sensationalism . If Verhoeven was relying on audiences to share his beliefs on warfare and/or extrapolate from the satirical bent of his previous films to put themselves in the proper mindset to ‘get’ the movie, I think that was a bad miscalculation [insert heated side-discussion of Authorial Intent here].
@45 Anyone can try to persuade people to give them money. The distinguishing characteristic of government is that it is allowed to use force to do that. Other people who try that are called criminals. (Unless the government has granted them the authority to do that, of course.)
Politics is mostly about getting the government to use its power to favour the causes you like, and against the causes you dislike.
I’m not surprised the discussion is so vigorous. The same thing happened when we discussed the book a few months ago: http://www.tor.com/2016/09/06/a-genre-cornerstone-starship-troopers-by-robert-a-heinl
Magnus @52.
Rico isn’t Latin American, he’s Filipino. Iirc, his mother is visiting relatives in Buenos Aires when it gets hit, but he is definitely Filipino. Speaks Tagalog at home. So, yes, Verhoven definitely whitewashed that character, as well as Carmen.
@57 ad
Anyone can try to persuade people to give them money, and anyone can try to force people to give them money. If you’re a mugger in a back alley, you might go to jail. If you’re a British tax collector in the run-up to the American Revolution, you might get lynched. The line between “legitimate government” and “criminal robbery” exists primarily in the heads of the people who are giving the money. President Ben Ali of Tunisia wasn’t able to persuade his people that his taxes weren’t armed robbery, and he had to flee his country ahead of the revolution.
“The law” is a fiction we invent to disguise the fact that all laws and regulations are written by people and backed by force. Without the force, there is no government, just a voluntary association whose members are free to leave at any time. Without the fiction…well, Americans know what can happen when the state forgets the social contract. We might still be singing “God Save the Queen” if the British had understood how fragile the entire concept of legitimate government can be.
dptullos @45- Specifically, I mean there is an age requirement (18 in the USA) to vote. It wasn’t that long ago when the requirements included being male. And owning land. And who says 18 is the demarcation, or that there needs to be that requirement at all? And… well, somewhere a requirement exists.
The rest of this discussion is of what that requirement should consist.
@59 – wiredog: My bad, I had completely forgotten his Filipino origins from the book, and kneejerked on one of my usual triggers. My bad. *shame*
Things seem to be getting off-topic; since the original article doesn’t delve into any present-day political comparisons, let’s not take it completely off the rails.
Just to tack the conversation into the silly, inane and superficial, I recently thrilled to the realization that Carmen’s impressively authoritative ship’s captain was none of other than Brenda Strong, aka Sue-Ellen Mischke the famous Bra-less Wonder of Seinfeld fame.
That’s certainly discordant.
(I also can never figure out what bizarre casting stunt they were trying to achieve by casting Rue McClanahan as the blind, oddball science professor)
“Starship Troopers hits the exact mark it’s going for; it’s just largely misunderstood by audiences.”
Sorry. I cannot agree it is misunderstood. It is understood, and deeply disliked.
The director took a prestiege high quality work of science fiction, and made a sub-grade “B” movie of it.
I am disgusted by it.
I walked into Starship Troopers expecting Johnny Rico, rocket-jumping through an alien city in a Mobile Infantry Combat Suit, shooting alien bad guys and launching mini-nukes out of his Y-rack launcher.
What did I get? Doogie Howser in an SS uniform.
Twenty years later, I am still angry I paid to see it at the theater. It informs my entertainment purchases, to say the least. Paul Verhoven flicks are strictly Netflix fodder. If that.
Contrast with Demolition Man. People still quote the movie in popular culture. “In the future, -all- restaurants are Taco Bell.” You can re-watch it. It’s funny.
Ever hear a quote from Starship Troopers the movie? Nuh uh. Not even dank memes. Just Doogie Howser in an SS uniform.
Demolition Man was an effective satire. Starship Troopers the movie, not so much.
@69 Yes, that sums up a lot of my feelings about the movie too. Even leaving aside the disappointment that there is not more than superficial similarity to the book, you’d think that a movie with that much bombastic propaganda would have come up with some more catchy lines than only “Would you like to know more?”
@72/vinsentient: I think the cheerful insipidity of “Would you like to know more?” is just what makes it so effective. It’s presenting its propaganda and indoctrination as this nice, helpful source of information. And it’s a lure, an invitation to click the link and get drawn in deeper. It encourages the listener’s cooperation in their own indoctrination, and that’s the most insidious part.
#73 – Starship Troopers the movie was a commercial failure. It lost ~ $50 million at the box office. It was not “effective”
Yeah, I don’t think he’s talking about the commercial sucess or lack of when he says a specific dialog choice was “effective”.
Agree, the “Would you like to know more?” bit definitely stuck with me to this day, much in the same way a catchy jingle or quirky TV commercial can be more memorable than the product it was intended to sell.
@73 I agree. What I actually meant was I was surprised there was not a numerically higher number of catchy lines, not that that particular line was insufficiently catchy :)
#75 Regardless of whether he was or was not, the movie was a commercial failure, and by the opinion of most movie viewers an artistic failure as well.
The book clearly was an artistic and commercial success else people would not still be reading it.
I suspect in 20 or more years from now the movie will be remembered more for it’s association with the book, than anything else. It is bad, sub -b grade sci fi
the omission of powered armor, the discussions about patriotism and duty left out, and the focus on destroying hordes of “bugs” with 20th century weapons isn’t art. It isn’t satire. It’s movie executives clumsy attempts to create blockbusters by hacks who read the cliff notes of the book, which were written by hacks who read the back cover of the book. There were good ideas well expressed in the book. Learning about the struggles leaders go through to train men. Movie bad. Book good. Nuff said.