No, Starship Troopers Is Not Brilliant Satire

I did have some preference for the cute people fighting the bugs (mainly because I am a human), but my level of engagement with any of the characters was only a little more than I get for a TV commercial. I got it...evil bugs, cute humans fighting them, but living in a society that's both utopian (when everything is OK) and sanitized. The downside to that is that it's also a rigidly controlled facist state. That's about the level of insight you can get in a 60 second commercial. Bugs, cute people and nazis. Having grown up around some people who actually did experience real nazis and seeing what was done to them, trivializing them like this movie did was borderline offensive.

What I also find to be seriously weird in all of this is that there's really not much of a narrative. I'd like to have some suggestion that the film maker thinks that there's another way other than bugs or nazis, that any of these characters has a second thought about any of this or any awareness of how much life like that sucks. Everything in the movie was so lacking in history or future or aspirations or rebelliousness that there was nobody to identify with. Aside from me wanting a brief, impersonal tumble in the hay with some of the female characters, nothing in the movie really had any guts and even the nude scene seemed like it was put in there to bump up the MPAA rating by a notch. It was like a marjorine commercial with partial nudity.

I first saw the movie on VHS.

And I have to admit I loved it (from multiple perspectives: the satire, the war movie clichés, the good looking actors, the action, the special effects, the violence, the gore, all the sci-fi geek-appealing elements). I had a similar feeling to when I first saw Robocop (1987) which I did first see in the theater.

There's something about the overall look of the film too that's hard to describe. It's really "fresh" and clean looking.
I can only imagine my reaction if I'd seen it on the big screen. (Maybe someday I'll still get the chance.)

Listening to the commentary from Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier, there seems to be a sense of self-loathing in Starship Troopers. Makes for a kind of unusual film. Most of it's a reaction to the First Gulf War in the early 1990s. There was a lot of hand-wringing around that time in response to a sense of fascism in the United States during the second half of the 20th Century.

At one stage though, Verhoeven notes that fascism can make societies that function well. It's a kind of curveball that rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.

I think of it like Parasite where on the surface it's a cut-and-dry good-versus-bad narrative where our sympathies lean towards the poor underdogs trying to escape a desperate situation by hatching an elaborate (and entertaining to watch) scheme to take advantage of a comparatively unsympathetic rich family, but between certain plot twists and other details built into the film, we realise that the poor family are not meant to be treated as the heroes of the story. Both films even end on similar notes:



I mean, the whole point of the shower scene is not just to indicate that military discipline is so ingrained in these people's minds that different genders shower together without any apparent second thoughts about sex or embarrassment but that it allows for the various infantry grunts to chat about their life goals and how they're given as reasons for enlisting, thus exposing further details about the society and what exactly is meant by "service guarantees citizenship" (and the two points collide when one woman says she wants citizenship so she can legally have children).

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The shower scene to me was part of the whole zeitgeist of the movie and its shallow, commercial-like depiction of that world. I have to admit to thinking that some of our sexual behavior is hard-wired, and given that these people are not tribal folks for whom nudity is part of the culture, it's really difficult for me to NOT think that the scene was a ratings-teaser and not an expression of how well trained, de-sexualized or enlightened they were, especially since enlightened attitudes were nowhere else in the plot. It didn't have much plot relevance, and these folks still act like 20-somethings when they're off duty.

The whole citizenship thing, of course, was obviously adopted from the ancient Romans and seemed to be used in the same way, which is and was, ironically, to ensure a class system by making it into an aspiration that most people will never get, ensuring a steady supply of warm bodies for the next war.

None of these aspects of the movie made me think much better of it. It was sort of a one-shot comic book plot, meant to be trivial. I didn't see any of the sequels, which seem to have landed with a thud worthy of a falling bug.

Was the shower scene gratuitous? Do we even need to ask the question?

Are we heading in this direction? Yes, absolutely. The exponential curve of trans is basically the star-bellied sneech machine that is making universal bathroom and shower facilities the easiest solution.

Oh okay, that's an interesting comparison.

But in comparison with Parasite, I felt that the bugs in Starship Troopers were not given much character development, and it felt very one sided, where as Parasite I thought developed it's characers and both sides much more, or so I thought.

How much character development do you want bugs to have? The bugs were just giant, dumb bugs...and everything they did was by bug instinct.

Oh well it's just that the bugs were suppose to be opressed and the humans were suppose to be the villains, so if that's the case, I want to get behind the bugs, and would want to idenfy with them more, if that's the case, or so I thought.

Then again, maybe it's just a crappy movie, not worthy of a lot of erudite analysis and metaphor. Maybe nothing stands for anything other than exactly what it seems to be, the cute people vs the bugs. It's sort of a satire, but hardly a brilliant one.

I saw the movie when it came out in theaters.
I actually was kinda shocked at how bad it was.
Years later I heard how I'd missed something and it was really this extremely clever thing that had gone over my head. So I watched it again.
Still thought it sucked. Saw the satire (I guess). Still thought it was a bad movie.

I can say that if you've ever read the book, the movie is downright infuriating. I'm sure Heinlein's ghost haunts the makers of that film to this day.

I think you are going to have a lot of issues since Verhoeven chose to adapt a novel he hated.
Verhoeven has made some good films, but ST is not among them, for reasons that have already been stated here.
Now if you want some other interesting viewpoints, go to a science fiction website that has a Robert Heinlein forum, and look up the opinions there....

TO put mildly, the more hardcore Heinlein fans hate the movie.

I am not as over the top as they are, but I do think that Vorhoeven really does change..I would actually say distort...what Heinlein says in the novel.
But then, the Movies have not been kind to Heinlein.

[quote=Wooley;2205011]I saw the movie when it came out in theaters.
I actually was kinda shocked at how bad it was.
Years later I heard how I'd missed something and it was really this extremely clever thing that had gone over my head. So I watched it again.
Still thought it sucked. Saw the satire (I guess). Still thought it was a bad movie.

I can say that if you've ever read the book, the movie is downright infuriating. I'm sure Heinlein's ghost haunts the makers of that film to this day./QUOTE]

I strongly agree.
I actually disagree with a lot of what Heinlein says in the novel...I don;t think a term in the military will automatically turn somebody into a responsible , thinking citizen.....but calling Heinlein a fascist is way out of line. It's a cheap shot.
And ironic that in the novel the military does not actively recruit at all, They don't need all that many soldiers ,and few really have what it takes anyway.
Not to mention that the combat in the novel is much more interesting then that in the movie.

It's strange the people get so exercised over the question. I guess they must be irritated by those who have overvalued it as a brilliant satire?


What more do you need? It's a BDAM (Big Dumb Action Movie). It's fun. It's rewatchably fun. If you're a fun hater, don't watch I guess.

It's fun but I think it's wildly overpraised by it's fans.

I have not really encountered the fandom, but I don't doubt that that is true. I didn't think much of Troopers when I first saw it. I thought the Spiders looked good and seemed like a real menace on screen. I have rewatched it on occasion over the decades since, and I have yet to really be disappointed by it. It's like a warm bowl of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. You know what you're getting into and it sometimes hits the spot.

I just came across this (again) and read it (again) and I think it is an excellent essay. Way more insightful than I expected and no offense intended, it's just a way of looking at it I hadn't thought of.

No offense taken, especially since I went really clickbaity on the title.

And thank you.

I didn't think it was a very good BDAM though. I re-watched it not that long ago and I thought, "Nope, this still pretty much sucks."