Movie Review: Starship Troopers (1997) by Paul Verhoeven -- Fun Anti-Fascist Satire, If You Can Stomach It

 

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Casper van Dien, Clancy Brown, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Ironside

Studio(s): TriStar Pictures

Release Date: November 7, 1997

MPAA Rating: R

I am a fan of Paul Verhoeven's work. He made fun, campy science fiction films like Robocop and Total Recall, which are known for their satirical nature and their intermittent shock-value instances of violence. Verhoeven also made other films, like Basic Instinct and the stripper film Showgirls (which I am never going to see). His science fiction films are undeniably the ones he is most known for. The equally campy, nitty-gritty feel of those films give them a memorable tone. Robocop's blood and gore really take home the idea that it is still a violent crime thriller, despite the inclusion of things like funny in-universe commercials and the very cool design of Robocop himself and the security robots. Total Recall keeps in the spirit of the surreal Philip K. Dick style mindscrew (which that movie was based on one of Dick's short stories), but is also famous for its sequences where Arnold Schwarzenegger's character's face gets nightmarishly bloated every time he struggles to breathe when exposed to the thin Martian atmosphere. Starship Troopers seems like the third film to cap off a trilogy of different films with the ludicrous and gory Verhoeven style. It is certainly set in space like Total Recall, and involves the high-octane, practical feel of Robocop style gunfights, but it is also on a totally different plane than either of the two. 

Starship Troopers is a loose adaptation of the book by Robert Heinlein, whom Verhoeven tried reading only to just toss it aside and basically say, "Screw it! I'm making a military space opera of my own!". This was certainly a problem that many critics addressed back in 1997. Verhoeven's film is not an adaptation. It is just an original film beneath the bits and pieces he gleaned from the book (the giant killer bugs of Klendathu, characters like Johnny Rico, an authoritarian Terran Republic, etc.). The Starship Troopers title and likeness was only slapped on it for marketing purposes. 

It is not hard to see why this film bombed on release. The movie, unlike the book, seeks to lampoon the image of the fascist government as being authoritarian, but with generally lousy soldiers.

 

The whole spectacle of the movie is how horrific an alien bug war truly is. Since Starship Troopers came out in the days when CGI was yet to fully dominate blockbuster filmmaking, the CGI bugs are a remarkable achievement in visual effects. It surely looked hard to create hundreds of various fighting insects for the battles on Klendathu, but even with the now long outdated technology, this movie's battle scenes had a level of scale largely unconceived of in earlier films. Especially for Paul Verhoeven films. Starship Troopers is easily the broadest in scale for his work, and it remains untopped to this day. The CGI for the bugs has aged so well because they are almost always against a barren alien landscape. They seem to blend so well with the barren landscape in a manner that the additions added into the Special Editions of the Star Wars Original Trilogy could never manage. The only time where the CGI for the bugs looks unconvincing is when we see some solitary individuals in captivity.

The movie's awesome visual charm is a product of stop-motion and animation master Phil Tippett. Funny enough, he is most famously known for his work on the Star Wars franchise, which Starship Troopers has some of that Star Wars feel in the gritty, rough-surfaced starships and space structures. Even the sound design encapsulates the hybrid feel of the movie, with staccato more fitting for Robocop or Total Recall often side by side with the wonderful space opera battle sounds characteristic of Star Wars. The older-looking camera quality (meant to mimic that of old teen comedies/soap operas; see below) helps bridge the gap between the older world of practical-effects action movies that Verhoeven gained his American appeal from and the newer, increasingly sterile and sleek digital visualization that would define most blockbuster filmmaking from the late 1990s onward. Basil Poledouris's score also captures the forboding, sinister feel of the surface of Klendathu. 

Unlike Star Wars, however, Starship Troopers was never made for broad audience appeal.

The whole selling point of the movie is how woefully unprepared the humans are in this war. Even when serving in the army of the Terran Federation would give them privileges, like citizenship, or to even make nice life-changing points in their lives more feasible, there's no guarantee they would receive them. take for example, these couple lines from one of those ill-fated recruits during a military group shower scene:

Katrina: I wanna to be a mom. It's easier to get a license if you've served. 

Considering you're going on what is basically a suicide mission, it seems very likely that having a husband, kids, cat, dog and picket fence will be out of the question. Just saying.

But to say that any naive volunteer would survive a bug war is being kind. The one thing Verhoeven is famous for is for taking a very hard, cynical satirical slant for his work. In his science fiction work, this is obvious. But Starship Troopers captures this in a truly horrifying degree. The alien insects the humans have to fight are giant, almost totally senseless beasts who love to tear their prey apart limb from limb. The arachnids, the basic killing units of the bugs, are the unholy bastard children of a spider and a giant lopper imbued with the Killer Rabbit's psychotic bloodlust. This is best demonstrated by an experiment where a human scientist quickly pushes a cow into a cell holding one of the arachnids.  The CENSORED bar is too small to sufficiently conceal the carnage. 

The humans' invasion of Klendathu is an unending horror show that makes the Omaha Beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan look like a round of Fortnite. The arachnids enthusiastically shear apart their human enemies, often sending body parts flying. and if they fail to kill them, they still leave nasty wounds in their foes. Johnny Rico, for example, receives a nasty gouge in his leg. The many ways the humans die in the war are too grisly to fully count. In comparison, one trainee who dies in a training session from being badly shot in the head, and the various soldiers who get stranded around in space from the dropships and larger cruisers being blown up luckily get to die quickly. 

This is the whole point of the movie. War is hell. I don't need to watch a movie like this to know how brutal warfare really is. I've read enough history. But the movie is an anti-Star Wars. It is not about the great derring-do of our hero soldiers, but rather about them trying to survive a horrific alien war, and hopefully return home having done something noble for humanity. The "television advertisements" convey a patriotic, jolly message for humanity to play their part, but the war itself (especially the bit of footage captured during the initial landing at the beginning of the film, which plays again at the actual invasion in the middle of the film) plays out in its spectacular carnage. And another fact: Most of the soldiers themselves are very young, being college-age young adults with typical pop culture college-age mentalities. Compared to many other films around that time, Starship Troopers has a film quality more reminiscent of teen comedies, with a grainy feel. It is all meant to look jarring. Especially when a song such as "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star, which has such an audio quality that feels out of place in the film, is used during a scene where our heroes are having fun before they embark on the invasion. 

The bugs of Klendathu are evil, of course, but I did not hate them. I rooted for the humans because of how many of them died horribly on the surface. The sheer brutality of the bugs was enough to make me wish the movie would end sooner. It is pretty clear, though, that the whole "fascists are lousy soldiers who only want to torture their enemies" theme is omnipresent. From the propaganda films and the martial way of life a commoner had to go through to achieve citizenship to the fact that Neil Patrick Harris's colonel character was obviously wearing a tweaked up SS Waffen uniform, the metaphors are obvious at times.

It was easy for me to see the movie's themes, but I did not really care much about the characters. The story may be very easy to follow, but the majority of the characters are not really well developed. Michael Ironside's Lieutenant Jean Rasczak and Clancy Brown's Sergeant Zim at least have more personality than the other characters, but I realize that the whole point of the movie is that war is hell, and fascism is bad. There is not much else to the movie. Man wins, gets to take their brain bug queen to take samples from it, figuring out a means to defeat the whole of them. But I do like it that the humans were being sensible, to a degree, and that the insects had the capacity to outsmart them numerous times. It's just a kind of movie that is entertaining if you're willing to accept that it is extremely gross and violent to easily sit through (I managed to do so while eating, and felt a little sick for a day afterwards).

Scribner's Score: 7.5/10