Netflix Movie of the Day: Starship Troopers is a science fiction satire that destroys insects and is far from subtle
Spaceship Trooperslike it Fight club And American psychopath, is part of a select group of films whose satirical intentions sailed right over the heads of many moviegoers. It’s a deliberately exaggerated take on the war movie as militaristic propaganda, a film that takes the mickey with its cast of beautiful, sexy people with beautiful, sexy bodies, beautiful, sexy teeth and beautiful, sexy weapons set in a future America where you can only vote if you served in the military and agree that violence is the answer to pretty much everything. If you played Hell divers 2this is where that game got all its ideas (and its deadly alien bugs) from.
A high school movie with a huge body count
Spaceship Troopers is based on the novel of the same name by Robert A Heinlein. That novel, published in the late 1950s, is quite fascist. But the film takes the source material and subverts it. Director Paul Verhoeven absolutely hated the novel, which he said was “pretty bad” and “very right-wing”. So he amplified fascism and made it so exaggerated that only someone very stupid would interpret it as a celebration of militarism.
To write Shamesays Jason Bailey that “in the early scenes, Troopers is basically a silly high school movie, complete with love triangles, a big game, and a school dance (and sex) afterwards. Once they start infantry training, the machismo can become so exaggerated that it can only be satire.” The LA Times said it is “a cheerfully lobotomized, always-watchable experience that has the simplicity of a live-action comic book, without any spoken words that wouldn’t look right at home in a funny paper dialogue bubble. Not just one comic book both, but an unlikely and delirious combination by Weird science, Betty and Veronica And Sergeant Rock and his howling commandos.”
Like Ian Nathan from rich I noted that this is a Paul Verhoeven film with all that entails: it’s “broad, brash and ultra-violent.” Like the Austin Chronicle put it this way: it has “a special effects budget that would put the Pentagon to shame, catastrophic violence, a high level of ambient horniness, and a complete lack of pretense for any purpose higher than pure, mindless fun .”