The MoFos Top 100 of the 90s Countdown - Redux

Liking it because it's fun is perfectly fine. But I think the "it's not really satire" thing is not running afoul of fun, because it's specifically a response to the people trying to elevate it beyond mere fun into something profound.


I think the audience missed it because the film itself gets wrapped up in the fun and forgets it's supposed to be condemning things, and/or doesn't actually now how to do that in a clever way. There's no coherent vision of what it actually wants to say about the thing it's supposed to be satirizing. It just sort of points and gawks at it like "isn't this absurd?" But it's fundamentally absurd even to the people who like what its depicting, so that doesn't do anything or even signal satirical intent, nevermind satirical accomplishment.

It's a giant bug space movie and it spends so much time on that visual that it has no time for anything else. Being told it's biting satire is like being told Transformers is a skewering of the military-industrial complex.

People have mentioned that Starship Troopers satirized fascism, militarism and even satirized the pro militaristic ideas of the novel on which it was based. But Starship Troopers is much more than just the obvious satire.

Starship Troopers is a prime example of the unreliable narrator. The entire movie is told from the fascist human's perspective. The information we get is from the Nazi like government or from old patriotic soldiers or gung hu recruits. Even the entertainingly over the top satire in the Do you want to know more? information spots, works to bend the mind of the movie viewer and convince them of a lie. Most, including myself on the first viewing bought what I was told by the movie, hook line and sinker.

Starship Troopers is propagandist and done in the vein of the infamous Der ewige Jude (1940). Those type of messages work as people are prone to believe what they are told, especially when that misinformation is being presented as factual and coming from what appears to be reliable sources.

Watch Starship Troopers and you'll probably believe the humans are the good guys even though they look like and act like Nazis...and that the bugs are evil beings capable of launching attacks on Earth to wipe out humanity by steering asteroids half way across the galaxy. Which of course they can't do. That's a false flag and it drives the movie forward with scenes of a dead dog in the rubble and humans hell bent on revenge to kill evil bugs. Like real Nazi propaganda films the enemy bugs are portrayed as evil and a threat by creating false 'truths'. But it's the humans who are evil in Starship Troopers and the bugs are the innocents who are slaughtered because they're considered ugly and different...we cheer to see them die like good little militaristic supporters.

Verhoeven as a child witnessed the horrors of Nazi occupation in his home in the Netherlands. He show us how easily it is to fall for propagandist messages even when they're 'hidden' in plain sight.


Starship Troopers was #4 on my ballot.

When do you guys think Happiness is going to show up?