Starship Troopers - Exterminating Democracy Along With The Bugs

Aug

1

Starship Troopers - Exterminating Democracy Along With The Bugs

≡ Category: Action, Essential, Movie Reviews By Country, Satire, Science Fiction, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Action/Satire/Science Fiction
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Year: 1997

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE

From the opening minute of Starship Troopers, a series of propaganda shorts that form a newsreel, we know we’re in good hands.

The first scene is an armed forces recruitment ad that appeals to patriotism. A series of soldiers in uniform assert “I’m doing my part.” When the last soldier, who is roughly 12 years old, joins in the refrain, the others laugh in a way that lets you know that they were directed to do so. The colors are bright, and the tone is light, which only makes it more chilling. Any similarity to recruitment ads for the Marines is purely intentional.

The next scene poses as a news clip about a Star Wars like device (hint, hint) destroying an asteroid aimed at Earth by the “bugs” of Klandathu. The real purpose of the news clip is to justify the destruction of Klandathu and by extension, the extermination of an intelligent race.

From there, we segue to a classroom scene where Lieutenant Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside) gives a civic lesson on the use of force, frequently using the stub of what’s left of his arm as a pointer. Actually, it’s a none-too-subtle indoctrination in the necessity of a citizen being willing to die for the good of the state. Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) is able to parrot the words of the text, but Lieutenant Rasczak wants to know if he really means it. “I don’t know, sir.” Of course he doesn’t.

Director Paul Verhoeven presents the students as a bunch of pretty, blandly Anglo-Saxon puppies, unformed and ready to be molded into the shapes dictated by the state. They’re largely interchangeable, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

It should be clear by now that Starship Troopers is a satire about fascism, something that the vast majority of critics missed the first time around. I mean, for crying out loud, the flag of the Federation is lifted straight from a decal on the helmets of the Wermacht, the unified armed forces of Germany during WWII. Also, it’s pretty obvious to me that this satire is aimed directly at the United States. How do I know that? Well, let’s get back to the movie.

To Verhoeven’s great credit, the fascist society of the future looks quite affluent. There’s a certain surface appeal to it all. The streets are clean, the trains (oops, I mean hovercrafts) run on time and there’s plenty of leisure time for brutal contact sports and a formal dance. At the dance, Rico runs into Lieutenant Rasczak, and he wonders aloud if he should join the armed forces. “What would you do, sir?” he asks. Lieutenant Rasczak tells him to decide for himself. “That’s the only freedom anyone ever has,” he says. That’s an awfully convenient statement after all the indoctrination Rico has undergone.

It makes you ask yourself, in a world where the underclass has little opportunity, there is military recruitment in the schools, the administration pounds the drumbeat for war, and the corporate controlled press cooperates with the power structure, how much choice do kids from the Midwest really have, even in an all-volunteer army? They might feel like they’ve decided to join the armed forces of their own free will, but have they, really? And keep in mind, Verhoeven made Starship Trooper BEFORE Dubbya stole the 2000 election. Looks pretty darned prophetic now, doesn’t it?

When the new recruits repeat their pledge of allegiance, there’s a line that they will serve for not less than two years, and HOWEVER LONG THE STATE MAY REQUIRE. Can anyone say “stop loss?”

Along the way, there are more newsreels. In one news spot, someone accused of murder is tried and convicted in the morning, with the execution to be televised just in time for supper. Trivia question: who among the first world nations still has the death penalty? Just asking.

The filmmakers leave the best newsreel for last. After the Federation has captured a brain bug, they torture it to gain military intelligence, censoring the icky part so as not to offend any delicate sensibilities on the part of the citizenry. Ahem.

The genius of the script of Starship Troopers is that it threads all of this social commentary into a straightforward war movie. All the standard sequences are represented: the night before induction, the training sequences, barracks life, holding off thousands of the enemy in an undermanned fort, the whole bit.

And Starship Troopers works as a visceral war movie, too. As always, the direction by Paul Verhoeven is energetic. The creature effects by Phil Tippett look great, even ten years after the fact. The filmmakers were very smart to make the alien race bug-like. The slick textures and sharp angles of the creatures are perfect for CGI. In fact, Starship Troopers is a great example of a responsible use of computer graphics, where CGI serves the story instead of the other way around.

But make no mistake, the beating heart of Starship Troopers is satire: mockery of fascism, the military mindset, and the endless optimism and lack of awareness of their own mortality on the part of young people. As usual, Paul Verhoeven subverts genre conventions for his own purposes. I mean, the fascists are the “good guys.” How perverse is that?

Incidentally, this really pissed off the Scientologists because they view Robert Heinlen’s novel Starship Troopers, upon which the movie is putatively based, as being about an actually intergalactic conflict in the distant past. They also agree with the proto-fascist politics espoused in the novel. So, to them, the movie version of Starship Troopers amounts to a distortion of history and “low-toned mockery,” and Paul Verhoeven is no doubt considered a “suppressive.” But at least, according to Scientologists, they got the bugs right. I’m sure that’s a relief to Paul Verhoeven.

Interestingly, I think that Starship Troopers offended the American public, too. They showed their displeasure at the box office. On a budget of 95 millions dollars, Starship Troopers only grossed 54 million dollars domestically. Americans can be pretty darned dumb (after all, 23% of the public would reelect Dubbya if they had the chance, even now), but when it comes to sniffing out satire that is critical of the United States or their own worldview, they are absolute geniuses.