Random film review: Starship Troopers
Starship Troopers | Dir: Paul Verhoeven | 1997 | USA
Paul Verhoeven wasn’t taken seriously as a filmmkaer for a long time, mainly in the States and UK by people who didn’t know (or care) that his early Dutch films were critically acclaimed and huge box office hits. But his post-Stateside films, Black Books and Elle, showed that he was a serious director, and his American films, once looked on as exploitative popcorn junk, are now being reevaluated as astute comments on American society (apart from Showgirls. And Basic Instinct. Okay, and a few others), revealing Verhoeven as a possible auteur, exploring themes of sex and violence (by being misogynistic and violent).
Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam but grew up in The Hague during the horrors of the Second World War, experiencing danger, violence, bombing and corpses at a young age. He went to university and gained a degree in maths and physics. His early films starred a young Rutger Hauer and were big successes in the Netherlands. He moved to Hollywood in the 1980s for greater opportunities and turned to directing controversial, big budget movies.
His trilogy of sci-fi films made between 1987 and 1997 – RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997) – present us with a violent, fascist America that, in the Trump-era of fake news, is perhaps more recognisable now than ever before.
Verhoeven’s visions of the future are generally dirty, sleazy and violent – the Mars of Total Recall and the Detroit of RoboCop. But Starship Troopers, which despite some amazing special effects often has the feel of a cheap, camp sci-fi TV series with shaking cardboard sets, presents us with a shiny, clean future.
It predicts the future more accurately than Star Wars, Blade Runner or 2001 ever did, by introducing us to video calls, iPads, robot-aided surgery, 3D printers, online propaganda and annoying websites with repetitive, annoying links asking us ‘Would you like to know more?’ (which manifests itself today in ‘See more’ or ‘Discover more’ links). Not to mention futile wars taking place many miles from home in barren deserts.
In this future, humans are fighting machines, whether male or female. In an extremely violent film, the most shocking or maybe just surprising scene isn’t a prescient gadget or a special effect or a solider being mauled to death, but something far simpler – a mixed sex communal shower scene, filmed so naturally, with men and women so at ease in their own and each other’s nudity (and not pointing and laughing at each others genitals) that you know this can only be hundreds of years in the future from our own prudish time.
Taken as face value on initial release (which it still can be, of course), and pretty much a flop, it is now clear the film is a political satire. Of what? Take your pick: WWII. 9/11. The war in Iraq/Afghanistan. The war on terror. The war on drugs. Covid. Aren’t all wars the same?
In Starship Troopers, the beautiful but dumb model-like characters wear Nazi-like uniforms and live in a fascist utopia they’re not even aware of. They exist in a constant, futile state of total war against a race of giant, alien bugs. Spending on military goes through the roof whilst spending on social support is dropped. At school in history class, students take a module on ‘the failures of democracy’. Public executions are broadcast live on TV.
Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier (who also wrote RoboCop) show that the media is the most convincing place to display what the future will look like – in RoboCop, it’s the news and adverts (NUKEM! ‘Get them before they get you’); in Starship Troopers, it’s the constant feed of propaganda newsreels and adverts from the Federal Network, telling the young to Join Up Now! In this fascist society, ‘Service guarantees citizenship’, which means people only get their rights, like the vote, after completing military service.
Which is what the young folk do. We follow a group of recruits through their military training and careers: Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), goes into the mobile infantry; his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) becomes a pilot, and Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) goes into military intelligence.
There’s a gung ho attitude throughout the film that the humans are always in the right, and are winning the war – though both statements are doubtful. There seems an endless supply of the bugs, and they are hard to kill. The end, when they capture one of the ‘brainy’ bugs, seems a hollow victory. The war looks like it will go on forever, with massive loss of life and no purpose.
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