Watched Starship Troopers again tonight. Great movie.
Critics across the board have pretty much dismissed it as a pro-facist, Melrose Place in space summer blockbuster, but they’ve got it completely ass-backwards. This is satire, folks. The visual cues of Nazi Germany, from the eagle symbol of the Federation to the uniforms of military intelligence, should have made it obvious to any viewer that the film is trying to make a point. If the characters seem vacuous and bland, it’s because the society in which they live have stripped them of their humanity, filling them instead with nonsense about patriotism and the glory of violence. That these would-be “citizens” are devalued as human beings is underscored by the fact that about half of the characters that are introduced in the film are brutally maimed, impaled, or torn apart by the end.
This film is anti-fascist; more than that, it is oddly prescient of the terrorist attacks on the United States and the reaction of the country and our government to those attacks.
Thankfully, the good people at the Digital Bits seem to have their heads screwed on right:
…satire is incredibly hard to pull off because it has to function both as a satire and as the thing it’s satirizing. Dr. Strangelove is a prime example of this and so is Starship Troopers. On the one hand, if you go into this just wanting to see a bunch of monsters get blown up real good, you won’t be disappointed. The action and special effects in this movie are top-notch, holding their own against any blockbuster of the past decade. But you don’t have to look too far beneath the surface to see a far more interesting agenda at work. Verhoeven and Neumeier draw inspiration from the propaganda films of both sides of World War II, the American Why We Fight series and Leni Riefenstahl’s bone chilling Nazi classic Triumph of the Will. Sure, the enemy is literally dehumanized in Starship Troopers, but so are the humans. This is conveyed through the perfect casting of living Ken and Barbies like Van Dien and Richards. The Fednet News Feeds that pop up throughout the film are hilarious and serve to deepen our understanding of how this brutal utopia really works. And just in case you’ve somehow still managed to miss the point, Verhoeven has the audacity to dress Doogie Howser himself in full SS regalia for the movie’s third act.
This is worth watching. Go check it out.
