Verhoeven Club - Starship Troopers

Well... here it is... Verhoeven Club MotM for August is Starship Troopers...
@Citizen Rules you were looking forward to this one?

Get talking


Be interested to see if Yods gets in on this one seeing as he's written an Essay on it
For all the rest of the stuff on PV, the Club Page is here and the Verhoeven Club Master Thread is here

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You first, Rodent

If the "bugs" launched a meteor from the other side of the galaxy, they would have had to launch it like 2 billion years ago for it to get to Earth!

Hmmm. I said most of what I wanted to in the aforementioned essay, but I wouldn't be against some polite disagreement/argumentation, or some elaboration, or even a little talking about the things I sorta do/did like about it at the time.

I certainly don't think it's a bad movie. It was a visual feast when it was released (one of the movies that helped sell people on DVDs, I'd say), and I was excited to see it at the time. If someone wants to basically mock a certain kind of worldview, they can, though it feels cheap to use an existing IP to mock itself. The only thing I feel at all strongly about, though, is that its idea of satire is pretty simplistic and is really just sarcasm.

No issue at all with the view that says "hey, it's giant bugs getting blowed up but good, and that's cool." It is cool.

I thought it was pure, unbridled fun.



funnily enough when I mentioned it to my #1 karate teacher he told me I was a very violent person. LOL.

Funny thing about the shot from that GIF: if you go frame by frame, if memory serves, the blood starts to come out just before the knife hits him. I remember that being one of the first times (along with the beheading in Gladiator) that I got to use the frame-by-frame feature from DVDs. Goodtimes.

I hve to ask, why did you go through either of those frame by frame? I think you might be the violent person here.

Mainly because they came out when I was 13 and 16, respectively. But in both cases it was the whole family watching! That and just the curiosity factor. Back then effects were still slightly mysterious, and I'd never gotten to really examine them so closely, so I was kinda curious how well it would hold up.

I think maybe with the hand thing one of us had an inkling, just watching normally, that it might have shown up a microsecond early.

The hand doesnt bother me so much but decapitations leave me rather green.

I do love that drill sergeant. PUT YOUR HAND ON THAT WALL. Always makes me laugh. And the rookie is such a dork.

hey is this Hank Schrader?

What's difficult is hearing people talk about this movie as being part of their childhood!
Seems like just yesterday I rented it from Blockbuster on a 2 day "New Release" rental!

For me, Star Wars was a childhood science fiction movie - I was 12 when it came out!

Captain Steel is on to something there

@The Rodent, it's cool that you mentioned Yoda's essay, I've read it and it's well written, but I would prefer not to debate the essay on this thread (and it sounds like Yoda doesn't want to either)...it's already been talked about on the essay thread, so that would be the thread for discussing the essay. I'm hoping for some new input and thoughts on the movie.

I have to go work in a few, so I will say this quickly about Starship Troopers:

It can be taken on three levels: pure adrenaline rush excitement, over the top satire-comedy....and a third hidden level that not many know about.

I just like how Neil Patrick Harris shows up in the second half of the movie wearing that long black Gestapo coat!

Woohoo! People are posting


Yeah I wasn't gonna debate Yoda's Essay tbh, I was just wondering if he'd be interested in the thread seeing as he did write an Essay for MoFo.


Love Starship Troopers myself.
It's loud, brash, funny, satirical and is an allegory (would that be the right word?) for Nazism but done in a kind of dark humorous way. Probably the only way Verhoeven knows how to do it tbh.


Plus, even today, the CGI stuff is better than pretty much all modern films.


The movie's not quite as prophetic as RoboCop. I mean, Robo looks at society in a very up-close way. Small scale stuff like prosthetics and technology being used to change the human condition, and the effects of big corporations on the little guy... all of which have come true, and other ideas that are slowly coming into being in real life.


Troopers is much more wide scale in that we see a planet-wide mentality of corporal punishment, everything pretty much is militarised, and even the teachers in schools teach violence and hatred toward that which they don't understand.
There's parallels in Troopers that, like with Robo, are coming true in real life.


I find a lot of these themes interesting in Verhoeven's movies. Like, the guy can see the future, maaan!

Oh, I forgot about the TV segments as well...


Like, live broadcasts of public executions?


It's like PV is saying "reality TV is just one step away".

I love Starship Troopers too The first time I watched it was shortly after it came out, and I remember thinking that it was pretty wild and cool, but I couldn't figure out why the 'good guys' were Nazis?

I mean any sci fi film I've seen that's about a futuristic society with totalitarian-Nazi like leaders...they're always evil and it's the little guy who's fighting to do away with them, like in V for Vendetta. But in Starship Troopers it's weird because we're cheering for the humans who really look like Nazi's. It's bizarre.


Yup, it's better Worlds better than modern CGI which looks like you're watching a video game...while Starship Troopers looks like really well done practical effects. It's impressive for 1997 and it's impressive for 2017.

You know how Starship Troopers has 'blind obedience' to those 15 second sound bite promo/slogans...that totally reminds me of the way politics are going, especially in the U.S. Yup it's prophetic, I'd say Verhoven understands the human condition.

Question: when you say: can you explain what you mean? or maybe a better way of asking is: what do you think ST is trying to say about Nazism?

I think Troopers is saying with the Nazism... that we're becoming it slowly.

I didn't like the movie, as I felt that the aliens were very uninteresting with no depth, as an invading army, and the movie uses cliches, that we have seen in so many other war movies before.

The aliens weren't the invading army though.
And the clichés used in the film were used purposefully rather than being from a lack of imagination.

That's true, I guess they were not the invading army from what I remember but even for an 'invadee army', they were lacking a lot of depth in my opinion.

I didn't feel the cliches were used that well though, even purposefully. It felt like a sci-fi rip off of Top Gun, which was in itself was a rip off of An Officer and a Gentlemen.

Ironpony, what do you think was the message of Starship Troopers? And weren't you thrilled when the humans win?