Get Your Reps In: Finally, Everyone Gets That “Starship Troopers” Is Satire

Starship Troopers (1997)

Most Paul Verhoeven movies walk a high wire: They bear the shape of straight genre stories, but loaded with 800 pounds of humor, contempt and allegory. Still, the legendary ones (Total Recall, RoboCop, Basic Instinct) remain miraculously upright, never becoming more commentary than movie.

In Starship Troopers, the plot proper is about a handsome, wealthy young jock (Casper Van Dien) who joins the international space military with his high school pals (Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, Dina Meyer) to wage humanity’s war against intergalactic bugs. The film is basically a sci-fi Full Metal Jacket, skewering fascism while daring American audiences to indulge their latent thirst for authoritarian violence—and showcasing viscera so over the top that it’s simultaneously harrowing, goofy and meaningless.

It’s tough to put oneself in the mindset of 1997 reviewers who thought Starship Troopers was 100% on the level as a ra-ra, pro-war action film (even the most cursory glance at Verhoeven’s youth in the occupied Netherlands would reveal his thoughts on the Nazi imagery he plays with here). Critic Stephen Hunter once lambasted Starship Troopers as a perversion of All Quiet on the Western Front, and he’s not wrong. But bloodlust is a sickness that you can’t diagnose with sincerity alone.

Do your part, and see Starship Troopers at Cinemagic on Aug. 11, 13 or 17 as part of a monstrous mini-fest with Shin Godzilla (2016) and Pacific Rim (2013).

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