Starship Troopers |
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 • USA • 1997 • 129m •    • Directed by: Paul Verhoeven. • Starring: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Seth Gilliam, Patrick Muldoon, Michael Ironside, Rue McClanahan, Marshall Bell, Eric Bruskotter, Matt Levin. • Music by: Basil Poledouris.      The time is the future. Johnny Rico joins the military after graduation to become a citizen and for the love of his high school sweetheart. In the war against the bug aliens of Klendathu, the military is a very dangerous place to be. Johnny works his way through several battles and with the help of his friends and comrades, helps turn the tide of the war, and save the human race.
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The film repeatedly shows the viewer how a manipulative government can use nationalism to do practically anything. Rico and his friends are seduced into military service by a complex government system that teaches young people that service is the only way a person can truly be a first-class citizen. This message is spread through media propaganda, the school system, and peer pressure. The message is somewhat rejected by an audience member, but the film's characters buy into this manipulation earnestly. Our characters walk into the buzzsaw of war with such honest excitement that a reasonable viewer doesn't even know how to feel other than mildly disgusted.
When the earth is hit by the asteroid, the government again uses its ever-powerful propaganda machine to blame a colony of totally unintelligent insects for this "attack." Paradoxically, the government argues both that the "bugs" are responsible for the asteroid tragedy, and that all bugs are also worthless and totally unintelligent. If the bugs are unintelligent, how could they send an asteroid to earth? The answer is obvious to the viewer: the bugs had nothing to do with the asteroid and are being used as a political scapegoat. But, none of the characters in the film question this paradox. Instead, they unite under the maxim "the only good bug is a dead bug" and seek bloody revenge.
The parallels to the September 11 attacks and the 2003 Iraq invasion are uncanny. In both cases, one could say that the government used the outrage and fear of the people in the wake of a tragedy as an excuse to invade an irrelevant place, resulting in massive losses. Maybe Starship Troopers was Verhoeven's attempt at a warning against a growing culture of nationalism in America- or maybe it was just chance that the film came right before the war. Life imitates art, I guess.
In the military, the soldiers are absolutely dehumanized. In the film's first act, live rounds are used in boot camp training exercises, resulting in the death of a private. This man is not mourned at all and the film continues swiftly without much change. This shows how little the government cares about these soldiers. As the people in charge brush over this tragedy, all the other characters quickly forget about it as well. As the film goes on, this practice of ignoringforgetting the loss of soldiers only intensifies. In their first battle with the bugs, we see scores of soldiers brutally eviscerated, but the surviving soldiers proudly celebrate their minor strategic successes shortly afterward without even a thought for their fallen friends. This juxtaposition is repulsive to the audience, who can see the extent of the brainwashing that the soldiers have undergone.
(SPOILERS follow in this paragraph) Verhoeven's approach to this anti-war film is very unusual. The way I see it, the film intends to at first make its audience feel repulsed by the brutality of war and later make the audience accept the violence. By making the audience accept the violence, the film can show that even a reasonable viewer of the film can easily be subject to the same brainwashing as the characters. In the first few battles, loss and celebration are directly juxtaposed against each other in order to make the characters look like ignorant monsters with no empathy, but in the final battle, the pacing is laid out differently in an effort to get the audience themselves to legitimize the violence. In the film's climactic battle, two major characters are brutally killed: Rico's role model Lt. Rasczak and Rico's love interest Diz. Both characters have been established and developed well up to their deaths, and the audience reacts strongly to their loss. Both of these characters die early in the film's final battle, and their deaths are followed by 20-30 minutes of intense action, in which the humans finally begin to have major successes against the bugs. The audience is engaged through all of this, and feels pride and relief when the humans have their ultimate great success. By the end of the film, most of the main characters are reunited as heroes. At the film's final moments, Diz and Rasczak have been seemingly totally forgotten both by the characters and by the viewers. In essence, the viewer has become just as ignorant and apathetic as the characters.
Completely ignoring the political subtext, Starship Troopers is a perfectly good actionwar movie. The characters are intended to be somewhat shallow and stupid, but at the same time they always appear to be honest, and the viewer finds himself rooting for them at every stage of the movie. The effects are impressive for the film's era and the action is executed very well.
In total, Starship Troopers is both a solid action movie and a weighty piece on the ills of nationalism. I would highly recommend the film to anyone who can stomach some extreme violence.
Review by Peter Welch from the Internet Movie Database.
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