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Earth's military might goes up against space bugs in Paul Verhoeven's militaristic satire |
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Casper Van Dien (Johnny Rico), Dina Mayer (Dizzy
Flores), Denise Richards (Carmen Ibanez), Jake Busey (Ace Levy), Neil Patrick
Harris (Carl Jenkins), Patrick Muldoon (Lt Zander Barcalow), Clancy Brown (Sgt
Zim), Michael Ironside (Lt Jean Rasczak), Seth Gilliam (Cpl Sugar Watkins)
Every so often, a film uses the tropes of bad films so well,
and makes such effective satirical digs, that people initially miss the point
of what the film is trying to do. This is pretty much what happened with Paul
Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. On the
surface a terribly acted, deeply stupid sci-fi actioner about soldiers killing space
bugs, Verhoeven actually created a sharply intelligent, wry satire on the very
bombastic militaristic fascism it seems to celebrate. This satirical bent was
missed not only by the critics, but also the producers of the straight-to-video
sequels the film spawned.
In the 23rd century, mankind has reached the
stars. But it’s done so by creating a militaristic, aggressive society, where
the young are encouraged to join up to the military in order to become
“citizens”. Leaving high-school, hotshot would-be-pilot Carmen Ibanez (Denise
Richards) joins up – followed by her boyfriend Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien),
in turn followed by Dizzy Flores (Dina Mayer), the girl in love with him.
Joining the ground soldiers, Ricco and Flores find themselves as the point of
the spear in mankind’s war with the Arachnids (the Bugs), a race of (it becomes
clear) intelligent and savage insects on a distant planet.
Starship Troopers
isn’t really like anything else: it might well be Verhoeven’s American
masterpiece, the perfect mix of his love for extreme gore, violence and sex
(filmed with lashings of comic colour and playful glee) with keen social
satire, the very ideas he had explored in everything from Robocop to Total Recall.
At first glance, Starship Troopers
serves up the all-action, gun-toting space battle excitement you would expect
from its genre. But Verhoeven not only ramps everything up to 11, he also laces
the dialogue and action with a keen satirical bent that hammers home the
underlying theme of how war essentially (as Verhoeven puts it) “makes fascists
of us all”.
The action is regularly interrupted by propaganda newsreel
footage, which stresses the importance of sacrifice for the military effort.
The military training camps are almost obsessively focused on brainwashing and
reducing the young people in them to cogs in the machine, with safety and
welfare as very much a secondary concern (the death of a recruit in an exercise
is a concern only because it shows careless leadership rather than because of
the death itself). Everyone in the film seems to be a perfect physical
specimen. Military lives are thrown away through a combination of arrogance
(they’re just bugs, this will be easy!) and incompetence, but never with any
feeling of responsibility or expression of regret (though the media works hard
to adjust all casualty figures wildly downwards).
The film fires shots at everything in the industro-military
complex. The foreign policy of this world is ludicrously aggressive and
jingoistic. Despite the spin of the propaganda, it’s pretty clear that humanity
has started the war itself. The army is like Hitler’s wet dream – sleek perfect
bodies, suicidal self-sacrifice, a complete lack of questioning of any orders
or directives, a willing acceptance of corporal punishment. This attitude of
violence and unthinking aggression is at every point of society – newsreel
footage shows children holding guns with grinning soliders, who then proceed to
hand out live ammunition. Later children are shown stomping cockroaches, to
cries of the “the only good bug is a dead bug!”. Trials are routinely praised
for the brevity (one day between arrest, conviction and execution!). It’s a
terrifying world.
What Verhoeven does so well is that, while aware of the
multi-leveled nastiness of the world of Starship
Troopers, he also makes it a pretty effective straight-war movie. It’s
exciting and the action quotient is high. Just like the soldiers in the
picture, it’s very easy to see the bugs as faceless opponents which it is easy
to feel little regret over killing. The battle scenes are high scale – and of
course blackly comic in their extreme gore and bloodlust. But you can still
enjoy the action – which is why the film works so well as satire. And also
perhaps why so many at the time missed the point. Verhoeven makes this as an
enjoyable B-movie, by really effectively using the tropes of B-movies. He turns
the trashy B-movie into a sort of art exhibit.
That surely also explains some of the casting. I’m not sure
how many of the actors are in on the joke. Certainly Casper van Dien and Denise
Richards seem blissfully unaware of the satirical bent under the film. These
two wooden actors trot through the sort of banal, by-the-numbers plot arcs and
dialogue that fill films like these, with van Dien’s jaw as chiselled as
granite and Richards grinning no matter the content of the scene. But their
honest woodenness is perfect for the film: a smarter actor would have wanted to
tip the wink to the audience, but these guys play it totally straight without
even a hint that they are aware of the message underneath.
The more satirical element is left to other members of the
cast: Michael Ironside has great fun as an almost absurdly fanatical solider,
first introduced as a teacher lecturing his students on how the state must come
before everything else and violence is the solution to all the world’s
problems. Neil Patrick Harris tips a slight nod to the audience as a young man
who rises so swiftly through the ranks that by the time we reach the end of the
film, he’s a Gestapo-coated secretive colonel. He fits right into the grey
militaristic, Nazi design of the military. You can watch all this stuff and
simply enjoy the silliness – teenage boys will love this. And when they mature
they’ll realise how awful the world it’s presenting is.
Starship Troopers
is the ultimate military satire, a film that pushes every single fascist, militaristic
society cliché to the limit. The news comes only from state propaganda. Military
training involves brainwashing, maiming and slaughter. Education praises anger
and violence as a solution to all problems. Verhoeven shoots this all with a grandeur,
that pushes the celebration of militaristic violence to the max.
It’s a film which is brave enough to make its militaristic
sequences exciting, to shoot and cut this fascist wet dream with a stirring
sense of excitement underpinning all the action. At the end you can celebrate
the small victory our heroes celebrate in what is clearly going to be an
ongoing war – until of course you realise it’s the victory of a Nazi
organisation. The fascist world of the future may bring us sexual and racial
equality – but that’s because it’s worked out everyone is needed to feed the
grinder. It’s a super-smart satire film that disguises itself as a completely
trashy action flick. It’s actually rather brilliant.
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