Starship Troopers: one of the most misunderstood movies ever

> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty accurate as well.

That's the "problem" - the film assumed the viewer had enough brain to see the satire instead of spelling it out. Apparently that wasn't true of most reviewers at the time. (I saw it when it came out and loved it. Much more than the book which was depressingly fascist apologetic.)

Agreed. I had no idea there was any such controversy surrounding the film. I watched it when it was first released and I'm pretty sure most people watched it knowing from the outset it was a satire?

It had Doogie Howser wearing a Nazi uniform for gawdsakes!

I don't think people got it, simply because it hit far too close to home. The message in the film and the message in the media at the time were too closely aligned.

"Would you like to know more?" was Fox News. The movie presaged an age where knowing more actually meant: "knowing only what we want you to know" ..

> What it doesn't have is any major character questioning the state that they are living under - but then looking around today, sometimes that seems pretty accurate as well.

One scene I liked is when the only person in the film questioning the state, a TV reporter, is saying something like 'maybe this war wouldn't have started if we didn't attack them first, so maybe should we leave them in peace' and is promptly interrupted by zealous marines

If they failed to see that, the Nazi uniforms should have been a dead giveaway. Plus Neil Patrick Harris in a Darth Vader suit...

I never read Starship Troopers (actually, never knew it existed) but always enjoyed it as a fun movie. I know, fun and dumb do overlap at certain points, and maybe that's why I liked it. I like one of the comments here describing it as "Ken and Barbie go to outer space" or something like that - sums it up well for me.

I've read the book, and seen the movie. Let me tell you, I can't say that anything more than a skimming of that book is necessary. It's about as one dimensional as sci-fi gets. Worse even than Scott Cards work, and I don't say that lightly. Both Enders Game and Starship Troopers replace that tedious work of actually figuring out what sort of character development you want to be in your story with "young naive guy matures as he learns the value of war."

The movie, for all of its self-aware cheese, has much more to offer.

Young homo sapiens males have a natural instinct for war, which can be expressed or not depending on circumstances. Going to war is the historical high risk + high reward option: you might be killed, but if you survive, you have a good shot at becoming richer, more powerful, and having offspring (both by becoming a desirable husband/son-in-law, and through the pervasive rapes in which victors indulged after a won battle). Founding a startup is a modern incarnation of that instinct, appealing mostly to the same young males demographic, albeit skewed toward those with very favored socio-economical backgrounds.

So, the less hope people have to thrive the "regular" safe way, e.g. because of durable economical crisis and loss of upward social mobility, the more likely they are to respond well to jingoism.

As a side-note, polygyny and jingoism are strongly correlated. Indeed for each man with several spouses, there are unwilling bachelors. They're willing to take the high-risk road and fight battles to become patriarchs; as a bonus, war casualties increase the female/male ratio.

I recommend reading The Red Queen if you're interested by all aspects of mating strategies and risk acceptance, not limited to human beings nor even whole organisms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evol...).

> My standard rule is that to properly satirise or ridicule something, a story must simultaneously be a good example of target being parodied as well as having a strong parody element.

The obvious counterexample that leaps to mind is Catch-22, which isn't a good war novel at all but is a brilliant antiwar satire.

I don't understand this comment. What's "bad" about the movie? I think it works very well. Of course the characters say cheesy things sometimes, they're brainwashed kids acting macho. I always found the action compelling and the acting is good - it's a very well made movie, as you'd expect.

I think you're missing some sort of point here. None of the points in your comment hit home for me at all. Galaxy Quest is a baffling comparison to make and is not in the same league at all.

Edit: You do realise there's a difference between parody and satire, right? GQ is the former, ST is the latter.

I think they purposely show the protagonists serving in forces and promotional videos as too cheesy. That's the whole idea. We are over-glorifying violence. In the movies, they dumb down the bugs. In real life we dumb down human beings. There is a scene where kids are squashing roaches commenting 'everyone is doing their bit'. Ah hate hate everywhere?

Well it has the brainy colonel Carl Jenkins, to show how smart people are can be oblivious of their society failings and participate to the "massacre". Also, there is little point insisting on this part given the recent history (nazism, war agains terrorism, etc).

>Turgid dialog, horrible acting, repugnant characters and general cheesiness.

Sorry, but this is American politics today. In that sense, the movie scored big.

As long as you don't evaluate the satirical message by the qualities of the film, that's ok.

>Star Trek, bad sci-fi writing, unbelievable monsters, magic science, red-shirts, ridiculous sets with no purpose and humanoid aliens-of-the-week

as they say, can't see a forest for the trees :)

Relax, man, you don't like it, obviously. Tastes are different. Galaxy Quest is a nice funny movie, Starship Troopers is a brilliant masterpiece. Kandinsky's black square is just a square a child can paint (i think i drew a lot of black squares among everything else while dreaming at classes in school).

It was the coercive positive / negative spin they put into each "story" that was 1984-ish.

If you liked Starship Troopers, watch their straight-to-video sequels. Low production value, kitschy special effects, but written by the same guy.

They're terrible movies really, but a nice dose of the ultra-blatant satire.

> Great films are often made from bad books

People never believe me when I bring up Shrek as an example of this.

Knowing that the movie was coming prompted me to read the book first, having seen it discussed fondly.

I enjoyed the book, but was surprised by its unfashionable celebration of martial values: in particular a viewpoint about the necessity and inevitability of war. They couldn't possibly get that into a modern mass-market sci-fi action flick, I thought.

But Verhoeven did! And he managed to work in overlapping layers of both respect and criticism for the militaristic source material. He makes the jingoism and quasi-fascism alternately seem attractive, clownish, revolting, and necessary.

Preserving some of the book's rhetorical case for warmaking, even though Verhoeven also simultaneously mocks that case, is a subversive achievement as interesting, and in a way as faithful to the book's ideas, as a film featuring more of the "super suits" and infantry-tactics would have been.

Verhoeven has a history of making completely ridiculous, tasteless movies, with poor scripts, atrocious acting and over the top special effects.

I don't blame people for missing the parody in Starship Troopers, because Verhoeven has consistently made such movies in absolute sincerity throughout his career. I suspect all the praise for Starship Troopers belongs with the writer of the screenplay, and that Verhoeven never had the remotest clue that he was making anything more than another dumb action movie.

My memories are hazy, but Robocop felt very different. It did not criticize the establishment (i.e. the police) very much. In fact, the main character was a cop who got fatally wounded by "the bad guys" and then was resurrected as a badass robot and delivered sweet payback.

Most of the satirical elements in Robocop were directed at corporations.

Robocop is even more over the top. One of the first scenes in Robocop is a guy being eviscerated with bullets in a board room meeting and one of the businessmen says "That's life in the big city!".

It's just dripping with satire.

Sadly it ends up feeling more like a roadmap these days.

As satire the brilliant part about that, and a few of the other really shocking things like the drill sergeant beating up a new recruit to establish himself as head of the pack, or the whipping, is that it's lifted fairly directly from the book.

A subset of the fans of the book get mad because the violence and fascism seemed so much cooler in their heads. Other fans recognize that Heinlein's books were to some degree experimental (it's science fiction!) and enjoy the joke. I've always been surprised at how many people who knew the book didn't get it, but that's life.

The object of the film's satire became front page all around the world in 2001. Until then it was easier to take it at face value. For example, in the 80s it was common to portray torture as a suitable, non controversial means of war in films with well known action stars, without satire or criticism.

Think of it now as Starship Troopers, the George W Bush's cut, without any actual edits having taken place.

Quite, if you wanted to make a satire then start with a blank slate.

Do not take a known work (of which the audience will have their pre-conceptions if they read it) then eviscerate it for your own satirical needs then act surprised when said audience gets pissed off for the butchery.

I've never understood the praise for Old Man's War; I read it, and it felt like a Heinlein tribute act, with no creativity or originality, and saying nothing that Heinlein and his contemporaries hadn't already said. Did I miss the point?

"The screenplay, by Robocop writer Edward Neumeier, furnished the old-fashioned science-fiction framework of Robert A. Heinlein’s notoriously militaristic novel with archetypes on loan from teen soaps and young adult-fiction, undermining the self-serious saber-rattling of the source text."

I only recently read the book, and I was surprised just how different from the movie it was, and better.

The book is a good read.

I don't know about that. Heinlein seems pretty keen on his notion of citizenship through military service, albeit perhaps as a means of preventing "unnecessary" wars rather than enabling them. Either way, it's a pretty terrible political philosophy.

That aspect of serious advocacy is completely absent from the movie.

It's not just a different story; the book has some political points to make which, I think, the movie is trying to directly rebut. Feels a bit tasteless to use the book license for this purpose, to me, but then again I'm a Heinlein fan and I thought Robocop was dumb.

One of the big issues in the book is that patriotism isn't just a rhetorical trick to get naive young boys to volunteer for a meatgrinder (though of course Verhoeven and Neumeier are right, it does that too). If no one stands up for a society, then that society is vulnerable to predators. Sometimes it's foreign invasion, sometimes it's internal predators like corruption and profiteering. I think this call to have a little backbone is relevant in every era. (This position is straightforwardly argued by the mouthpiece character, Dubois.)

And another issue, a little less prominent but often-criticized, is the idea of only giving the franchise to those who earn it. Heinlein later wrote that he wasn't so much advocating this particular plan for the franchise, (e.g. forwarding an alternative: only give the franchise to mothers!), but that he felt that democracy was going in a bad direction (bread, circuses, demagoguery, and holy-war-style partisanship), and that maybe this "franchise-for-all" premise should be revisited.

Why do I think Verhoeven was spitting in Heinlein's face? I probably shouldn't try to paraphrase Heinlein, because he was a complex guy with complex political opinions, but I think he generally favored military strength (though he generally did not favor a strong central government). I'm not as familiar with the Verhoeven oeuvre, but seems to be focused against military-industrial complex (though that's more straightforwardly a Robocop thing), and his anti-war rhetoric is so un-nuanced (it's so slapstick that some people thought it was pro-war) that it's tempting to believe he's anti-all-war (contrasting with people who think the phrase "just war" is meaningful, a group I feel confident includes Heinlein). As I said earlier, I think it's a bit tasteless to try to make a franchise work into a direct attack on the original.

For some contrast: IIRC, Haldeman wrote The Forever War in part as a direct reply to Starship Troopers. Haldeman had lots of direct combat experience, too (as contrasted with Heinlein, who I think never saw combat), which partially informed his views on books like Heinlein's. Personally, I think The Forever War is too good at raising new issues to be seen entirely as a reply to anything, but I understand that was a motivator.

> I'm surprised the author never even mentions the book by Robert Heinlein. Granted the movie tells a different story than the book but they share the similarity in that on the surface they both preach of the virtues and nobility of war but upon closer inspection, we see that they're telling a different story entirely.

Except that the "we" that see that in the case of the book excludes many of its critics (and, notably, the creators of the movie), and that, in the case of the movie, it doesn't actually take "closer inspection" to see that, since it pretty much hits you over the head with it.

I lost most of mine when he said "video games can never be art" http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-nev...

Not that I had a lot prior to that, for a variety of reasons (Starship Troopers and other "really? you didn't notice that? you caught it in X" moments). But still.

I strongly suspect Ebert and the other critics were in on the joke. They knew if they played it straight and panned the movie, even more unwitting teenagers would pour into the theaters on opening weekend.

(At least, I had no idea the movie was satire until the opening scene started playing. The early internet reaction was mostly nerdrage from Heinlein fans.)

Edit: In retrospect, I was very familiar with Verhoeven's films, but somehow still bought into the hype that he may have 'sold out' until the movie started playing. This movie really had some great marketing/pr.

This. The moichendizing was a riot - "It's a good day to... buy!"

What if the creator just wants to reach a particular 1%... and maybe some of the other 99%, when they're a bit older and wiser?

Neither creator nor audience has 'failed'... they just aren't yet right for each other.

I watched Robocop as a boy, a film about a cop that gets "killed" and comes back as a robot. Awesome.

I watched Starship Troopers as a Uni student, a film criticising the military-political attitudes and that prevail in [Western] society. Awesome.

If however I'd watched ST as a child then it too, I imagine, would have merely been a film about soldiers who go in to space to fight bugs.

The inability of a viewer/reader to understand the message being conveyed doesn't mean that a writer should dumb it down. It's grown-up food.

Presumably the ability to read Animal Farm as a story about farm animals means, for you, that Orwell failed?

The genocidal aliens were the humans. Seemed pretty subversive to me.

No-one else has noted that Paul Verhoeven was a young boy in Nazi occupied Holland. There's no way he didn't know what he was conveying...

Have you seen the movie? Did you see Neil Patrick Harris's outfit in the movie? You would have to be clinically braindead to not pick up on the satire.

Actually, it's quite the opposite. Starship was a tongue-in-cheek war satire. NBK was a hyper-saturated parody of satire.

I mean, there are some really terrible sci-fi B-movies out there. It's sometimes hard to tell satire from actual terribleness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

I didn't really see it as satire until I read articles saying it was. I thought it was just a really campy military sci-fi movie. I also don't really see how the movie portrayed the bugs as acting in self-defense. The movie begins with them slinging an asteroid that destroys Buenos Aires.

This is a country that took the original Red Dawn as a serious drama. Nicaraguans invading the Rockies.

There's nothing too ridiculous a good portion won't buy.

Going on a couple of years now.