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>The film is emulating the type of film that would be produced by this fascist regime.

There's no frame story to support this. Going by the available evidence in the movie itself, it's a conventional action movie.

>There's no frame story to support this.

There definitely is. No one on screen looks into camera and says this directly, but the whole recurring "Would you like to know more?" bit is supposed to tip the viewer off that what they're watching is a product of the government's propaganda efforts.

I truly don't know how you can watch this [1] and conclude we're meant to fully trust them as the 100% honest truth.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cktmS-yaxM

The "would you like to know more" segments are inner nested stories. Those actually are presented as in-universe video, and qualify as epistolary narrative. But to claim that the movie as a whole is anti-fascist satire relies on the assertion that the whole movie is epistolary, which goes against the narrative conventions of film-making. Judging only by what we see on screen, we have to take it at face value. To do allow otherwise permits bizarre interpretations of any fiction you like, because you can always claim it's unreliable narration.

Why do you think those segments were included in the movie if it wasn't to get us to question the reliability of the narrative they're presenting?

To differentiate between the potentially unreliable in-universe material and the conventional narrative of the rest. There's no on-screen evidence to justify a second level of nesting.

That confuses me because you seemingly aren't disagreeing with anything in the "unreliable in-universe material". The primary difference I see between those segments and the rest of the movie is simply tone.

The tone marks the difference between epistolary narration (which by convention may be unreliable) and omniscient narration (which by convention is always reliable). I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen. What we actually see is a society that's more ethical than any real world society in times of war. If Verhoeven didn't want us to believe that then he shouldn't have used the omniscient narration of a conventional action movie. Any movie that relies on external sources to convey its message has failed as a movie.

>I'm well aware what Paul Verhoeven intended, but he failed at conveying that intention on the screen.

Poe's law suggests that what you're asking for is impossible, there will always be people unable to read sarcasm or parody. Knowing this, I believe Verhoeven included those "Would you like to know more?" segments as the equivalent of a ;-) or /s to indicate his intent. I'm sorry to be blunt, but obviously some of us were able to understand his message so attributing your own inability to see that message on a failure of Verhoeven and not yourself comes off as self-centered.

He could have introduced a second level of narrative nesting with a single title card at the beginning. Something like "United Citizen Federation presents: Heroes of the Bug Wars" would have made it clear. Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.

>Lacking evidence to the contrary we have to assume it works like every other movie. Failing to provide this evidence when it would have been easy to do so is bad film-making.

Which brings us full circle back to my first reply to you, there is no evidence in the movie either way on the justification for their actions. You're reading that we must trust the fascists in the film due to film conventions is just as reliant on outside knowledge as my argument that we shouldn't trust the fascists in the film because they are fascists.

The evidence is shown on screen. We see the asteroid fired at Earth. We see Buenos Aires destroyed. We see the bugs killing the humans. If you call this unreliable narration it becomes impossible to discuss any fiction at all, because once you reject basic narrative conventions you can make up any nonsense you like and nobody can argue against it.

Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts. You could call it "vibe watching". If you look at what's actually happening, following the standard conventions of motion picture story-telling, the characters are not fascists. And if the director intended them to be fascists but omitted anything that would make that clear, he shouldn't be surprised when people watch it like a normal action movie.

>We see the asteroid fired at Earth.

No, we don't. The bugs have no technology. How could they send an asteroid from light-years away with enough speed and accuracy to hit Earth on any reasonable timeframe? It's not even a good lie. It's a story that strains credulity the second you actually think about its logistics. The only reason you believe it is that characters in the movie say it.

>We see Buenos Aires destroyed.

Sure, but asteroids also have natural origins. The government coopts the disaster for their own ends in an obvious mirroring of the Reichstag fire. The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is what the crisis can be used to justify.

>We see the bugs killing the humans.

Sure, after the humans invade the bugs home. If you go on a hike, find a beehive, and then start poking it with a stick, no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.

>Calling the characters "fascists" because they use fascist aesthetics is basically acting like an LLM. It's only engaging with the surface detail without having a solid world-model to back up your thoughts.

The government portrayed in the movie is fascistic because it shows a society that is entirely governed by military might and structure. The classroom scenes at the beginning of the movie discuss the failure of democracy and how that led to veterans taking control through force. We are also repeatedly told that basic rights of citizenship are only awarded to veterans. When they're at boot camp and all going around explaining their reasons for joining the military, one person says she wants to start a family and military service is the best path to getting a license for it. This is a highly structured and totalitarian society ruled by a military class. How would you describe that if it isn't "fascism"?

Once again, you seem to be guilty of the same thing you're accusing me of doing. The only evidence that this isn't a fascist society is the surface-level details of things like a bunch of happy high school students. Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.

>The bugs have no technology.

The bugs are shown firing projectiles to orbit. This is a setting with FTL travel; it's clearly not hard sci-fi. By the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies, the bugs are capable of firing asteroids at Earth.

>The true cause of the destruction is irrelevant

It's critically important to the ethical justification for military response. According to the information actually presented in the movie, the destruction was deliberate murder of millions of civilians. Any other interpretation is fan-fiction.

>no rational person would blame the bees for stinging you.

They'd blame them for killing everybody they know. And that initial provocation was not the fault of the United Citizen Federation.

>Any discussion of the actual society they live in paints a clear picture of fascism.

It has objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society.

I refuse to believe that you are actually engaging with the issues being discussed if you're claiming that needing a license to have children is "objectively more freedom in times of war than any real life society." Your stubbornness has bested my patience, so I'm done here.

I support reproductive freedom. I oppose slavery. My opposition to slavery is stronger than my support for reproductive freedom. When there's a conflict between the two, reproductive freedom has to be sacrificed.

Anybody who didn't support raising a slave army to liberate the Chinese from their one-child policy implicitly agreed with me.

Thanks for fighting the good fight in this thread. You had more patience than I would have.

> the standard narrative conventions of soft sci-fi action movies

What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?

>What if the real fascist propaganda was implicit in the standard narrative conventions we made along the way?

Ding ding ding. Endemic to fascism, among other things, are heavy State involvement in the curation of, shall we say, "the corpus culturále". Even in the United States, particularly in the earlier half of the 20th Century, there were certain lines you could not cross and still end up on broadcast television. Renditions of the Government, Police/Authorities, or the Courts in an unflattering light was an express lane to non-syndication. Go ahead, look for syndicated media that that highlighted the People's struggle against a corrupt Government where another part of the Government isn't also complicit in "cracking down on the bad apples" (thereby distancing itself from being party to the dysfunction, and reinforcing it's own Supreme legitimacy). No points if it's not in the United States. We're great at syndicating everyone else's problems. Not so much our own. Point is, those network decency standards were, in essence, formulations of what the governing authority considers invalid art. Art, on the other hand, is all encompassing. Ironically, mrob, you're pulling from the fascist art critic's handbook to dismiss the possibility of the work of satire being a fascistly produced piece of media consumption into and unto itself, by doing exactly what a fascist state does. Referencing guidelines and norms that lay out the boundaries of acceptable artistic practice.

In reality, art is as much the characteristics and execution of the workpiece itself, the cinema Starship Troopers, as it is the collective viewer's response to it. In essence, both you and the other poster have equal claims to artistic merit. Though I tend to side with the "this is fascist af" side of the argument given that despite the limitations of the medium, it is very clearly illustrated that what the military junta says goes, period. States are not containers or facilitators of the monopoly on violence. They are incubators for collective action. By trimming down the collective, and setting price of admission to "do our bidding or no representation"; you undeniably tread what in mid-20th century historical experience outlines as "the road to fascism". Disenfranchise the undesirable. Rule according to sensibilities of the desirables. Funnily enough, in it's own way, the U.S. of today is fascistic in that regard, given we absolutely adore the disenfranchisement of the felon, which seems more peppered through legal system than your Grandma's favorite spice.

Ain't Art grand?

I support the freedom to produce unconventional art. I'm just pointing out the empirical fact that if you produce a work of art that follows the conventions of a genre, people are going to judge it according to those genre conventions. That's how communication works, it's entirely normal and expected. If you want to subvert a genre, you have to actually subvert a genre. Just intending to do so is not enough.

How would Starship Troopers look if it managed to actually subvert the genre according to you? My first association is Gilliam's Brazil (or a Dark City that is a planet) - but wait, that's a whole 'nother genre of its own. What do you think?

Yet, we're cool.

It's not clear to me that the bugs have FTL indeed we don't see them use such in movie or book. Moreover sending a single small rock makes zero sense FTL and knowledge of humanities only major world would have allowed them to wipe out the threat in a stroke.

You could A) warp in a rock of sufficient velocity that a small one destroys life on the planet or B) warp in and move a bigger rock in system.

It only makes sense as a false flag by the humans.

You're ignoring genre conventions. Every soft scifi movie is nonsense if you look at it from the perspective of real-life physics. Sending a single rock via unspecified FTL to attack Earth makes as much sense as the human-piloted fighter spacecraft in Star Wars. The aliens are capable of bombarding Earth across interstellar space because it makes for a good visual spectacle. Watch (or more likely read) hard scifi instead if you need everything to make logical sense.

For fellow HN'ers reading this epically long back and forth:

sig appears to be taking the more mainstream stance that Starship Troopers is satire. This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/

mrob is part of the coalition (that included many critics when the film was released) that asserts the film has no elements that are satirical. I admit pointing to specifics that show the satire is tough. "Do you want to know more?" was the biggest tipoff to me.

But my point is that this argument is still going on in wider society. Lots of people say satire, and lots don't. But the balance say it is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/-e...

https://screenrant.com/starship-troopers-movie-meaning-fasci...

From Wikipedia:

> Since its release, Starship Troopers has been critically re-evaluated, and it is now considered a cult classic and a prescient satire of fascism and authoritarian governance that has grown in relevance.

What do people involved with the production of the film have to say about it?

The director intended to make a satire, but critics (and mrob) assert that he failed to do so.

This seems.. wrong? From the director's mouth, confirming it's satire [0]

> Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 science-fiction novel was militaristic, if not fascistic. So I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism. Robocop was just urban politics – this was about American politics. As a European it seemed to me that certain aspects of US society could become fascistic: the refusal to limit the amount of arms; the number of executions in Texas when George W Bush was governor.

I really have no idea why Wikipedia says what it does. Someone should edit it.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jan/22/how-we-made-...

I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a satire, intending to make a satire isn't enough, you have to actually make a satire. Others might disagree. The famous Roland Barthes essay "The Death of the Author" is relevant here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author

> This is reinforced my popular interpretations from, say, Wikipedia, but refuted by others, like say, IMDB.

Not "refuted", "disputed". If you "dispute" something you disagree with it. If you "refute" something you not only disagree with it but you conclusively prove you are correct.

They certainly haven't done the latter.

This word is very frequently used incorrectly. Sometimes on purpose by people (such as politicians) who would love to be able to actually refute some allegation, but instead just disagree with it and say that they refute it.

Yeah, I just looked at the tags for the genre on IMDB, and confirmed "Satire" wasn't there for Starship Troopers, but is there for other satires.

Thanks for the language lesson. You're of course correct, but "refute vs. dispute" isn't one of my language pet peeves (like "less vs. fewer" is), so thanks for the correction.

I had no idea that people seriously think that the film isn't satire - I thought it was just people who had barely paid attention to it and weren't really giving it much thought that didn't spot the satirical elements throughout the film.

They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top.

Maybe part of it is due to how it was promoted - in the UK, it was promoted as satire, but I believe the USA promoted it as a straight action film.

from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/anti-fascist-leanings-paul-verh...

> “I remember coming out of Heathrow and seeing the posters, which were great,” Verhoeven added. “They were just stupid lines about war from the movie. I thought, ‘Finally, someone knows how to promote this.’ In America, they promoted it as just another bang-bang-bang movie.”

> They're even wearing fascist style uniforms and all the commercials are so over-the-top

The big clue to me is when they visit the recruiter. The man is sitting at a desk and says something along the lines of "the galactic marines made me the man I am today", only for him to push back and reveal he's lost both his legs.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mLt-lDOzD1k

The recruiter also has a metal, presumably replaced arm as well.

> But we also don't see any evidence in support of their claims of an "existential threat" beyond the fascists claiming there is one.

That is pretty clutching at straws argument. It would turn basically any movie into satire, because this thing is normal.

Like, it was a bad movie and failed both as satire and as action movie.

The threat is undeniably real in the movie.

The point is that it doesn't justify the fascist society also depicted therein.