Starship Troopers Review: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to be Wrong.

In 1997 I saw a movie that tickled all of my primordial teenage senses, like the kind of senses that make every teenage boy think he can fight hordes of aliens in a spandex uniform. For its time Starship Troopers was a visual feast—with effects from Phil Tippet who gave us the Jurassic Park dinosaurs—and it was a gory sci-fi celebration of cartoonish violence, camaraderie, and a few cheeky snippets of nudity. What thirteen year old boy wouldn’t completely flip his lid in anticipation? Mothers would wrinkle their brows in disgust, censors would point fingers at violent video games, and all the while we happy teenage boys would watch again and again to relive its highlights. I’m twenty-six now, and it suffices to say that I, like many of you, have moved on from most of the irresponsible fantasies of my youth (except maybe for the occasional snippets part). So now I stand clutching a DVD case of this film with fifteen years of retrospect, two sequels, a cartoon series, and a copy of Robert E. Heinlein’s original book, and I find myself drawn to one conclusion: This movie outsmarted me. It outsmarted me, and it outsmarted the vast viewing majority. It outsmarted many of those critics that watched it just once, and even some of those who watched it twice. But what is really remarkable, and is possibly the film’s greatest quality, and greatest weakness is that somehow this film managed to outsmart itself.

So now I know that you think I’m crazy. Here we are talking about a movie that contains the line: “They sucked his brains out,” and I’m somehow supposed to convince you that this movie was too subtle for the mainstream audience, and even for a sizable part of the critical establishment that panned it for being either a big dumb blood fest, or for being a raving fascist’s wet dream. Even to this day I try to explain what an amazingly clever film this is to fellow writers, and find them looking at me like I’ve fallen out of a tree. So then, how is this big budget CGI showcase, and rightwing gunwank all that different to the modern schlockbusters of the Bay establishment? Well, when we take a moment to lay out all of the main features of ST, we find that the ingredients for a truly subversive piece of satire are actually quite obviously present. We first notice the combination of writer and renegade former-studio exec Ed Neumeier, and the legendary provocateur and sometimes filmmaker Paul Verhoeven. Given the joyous satirical romp that was Robocop—this pair’s previous venture—we should have all heard the claxons wailing, and the big red arrows directing us to the sign that says, “You are not meant to take this at face value”. Next we can take another look at the source material. The ST movie is quite famous for how greatly it diverges from the Heinlein novel, and in critical debates this has sometimes overshadowed the movie’s own qualities. Ever the topic of late night internet flame wars, and forum-based intellectual debate—with “your mum certainly thought so” being the typical clinching argument—the major differences between the film and book should have also be a sign that the we should not regard the film as a true adaptation of a book that is quite unambiguous in its militarist connotations.

Okay, so if it is actually a clever satire then what is this joke that we all apparently missed? To put it frankly, the joke here is that the movie was intentionally designed to make us root for a mindless swarm of violent monsters, and I’m not talking about the insects. As the film comes to its final moments we see our protagonist Johnny Rico has completed his development from a low scoring high school jock with no ambition, and no real grasp of the society he lives in, has evolved into a suicidally loyal soldier that honestly believes that his state’s cause is just, that his enemy is a grotesque and inferior life form, and that any one man can win the war. At this point the film kicks into its trademark newscast mode, blasts us with a bombastic score, and says “We need you, join up today!” This generally elicits a hooting cheer from the audience, myself included, and we all drain from the theatre filled with dreams of glory. As Paul Verhoeven says in the ST DVD commentary, “War makes fascists of us all”.

Okay, so to keep things clear, no, I did not just call you a Nazi. Much of the film’s critical backlash came in the form of critics that did recognize ST’s mock fascist connotations, or were unable to see them within the context of a satire. Perhaps the biggest reason for the film’s mixed reception is that it represents something that is very difficult for modern audiences and the critics to come to terms with. The film was purposely designed to be a complete reproduction of a war propaganda film, and to function in very much the same way. The film’s almost comical choice of perfect bodied, square jawed main actors, as well as its in-your face violence against a distant and dehumanized enemy, and its “one man can make the difference” theme make this film almost indistinguishable from the kind of wartime propaganda that dominated early twentieth century theatres. The film deliberately sets out to present the audience with a propaganda film about a future fascist society in a war against a far off and technologically inferior enemy, and despite all of our supposedly evolved sensibilities as a late twentieth century society—and now early twenty-first—the majority of the audience cheers, jumps onboard and say, “where do I sign up?” So jarring is this notion to most of the critics that watched this film during its theatre run that many were simply unable to see past the film’s outer layers of campy violence and fascist iconography. Such as the case of Synoptique.com film reviewer Owen Livermore who found himself “stunned and appalled” at the sight of audiences cheering a film he found so reminiscent of the 1934 German propaganda film Triumph of the Will.

So I guess now we find ourselves asking two questions, what is the point of such a filmmaking stunt, and how does this still affect us? Critical opinion of ST has shifted significantly over the past decade, and more critics are turning their heads to review this film retroactively. The previously mentioned Owen Livermore has reappraised the film, and recognized its satire, though he still questions its validity as a film that sets out to deceive its audience, and other film analysts, such as Robert Ager of collativelearning.com have completely changed stance altogether, regarding the film as a near-masterpiece of modern satire. So to address the question of what purpose the film serves, it is worth looking to the words of the creative team themselves. In the DVD commentary, Neumeier and Verhoeven call the film an attempt to warn the viewer of the seductive nature of fascism. In Ager’s analysis he points to a rather spooky coincidence regarding propaganda’s seductive qualities when he notes that the supposedly unprovoked bug meteor attack in the film sparks a massive propaganda driven outcry that leads to war against the bugs, which was designed to resemble the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the subsequent propaganda built around it. This contrasts quite shockingly to the terrorist attack of 9/11 that also led to an enormous increase in nationalist propaganda that left the majority of the population clamouring for revenge. He goes on to note that ST came out in 1997, which was a time when the Neo-Conservative movement was gaining ground in the US, and while the film didn’t literally predict 9/11, it certainly was a film that was aware of the new nationalist conservative mood in the US.  Now it is by no means the purpose of this analysis to dive into the politics of the current War on Terror, however, when one considers the raving rightwing nature of the original ST novel—described by Roger Ebert as a “right-wing sabre rattler”—the re-establishment of American hegemonic conservatism that was on the rise in 1997, and the provocateur natures of Neumeier and Verhoeven, it does occur to me that the “warning” that was supposedly the underlying message of this film was far more relevant than any of us might have predicted at the time.

Okay, so now that I’ve given this article its obligatory “9/11 analogy” let’s ask how this film continues to affect us today. I think I’ll start by talking about something that hits me a lot closer to home: video games. Stay with me on this. When I ask myself, “How does ST still affect me today?” I can’t help but look across modern media as a whole and notice that ST’s themes have lived on in endless video games aimed at teenagers, notably games where: noble, physically perfect specimens of manhood go out into the universe and slaughter inhuman beasties from beyond (for great justice). While video games have always copped a lot of heat over their violent content, and I have always stood up for their rights as a media form, I have started to see that not all is well in the world of video game gore. My attention was first grabbed by film analyst and pop culture expert “Movie Bob” Robert Chipman who noted that the popular Halo series of games portrayed its blank slate hero and his brand of soldier: the Spartan Trooper, as being genetically homogenous, emotionless killing machines, while the series villains represented a culturally diverse society with multiple races working in cooperation. He notes that the game’s attitude seems to revolve around the following theme: “Militaristic culture, visibly pretext on submission of individual-self to a quasi-fascist collective equals good, while multiple species working together to a common goal equals evil?” While the ST similarity is almost obnoxiously present within this science fiction context, the thing that isn’t present in Halo is irony. Halo and the majority of other mainstream game titles strive to capture the blood and guts crust of ST, and yet almost none of them seem to realize that ST does not set a societal template to follow, but to avoid. If this still seems a little distant, and like it has nothing to do with current events, then let’s try something a little more contemporary. The recent documentary Returning Fire examines the cross-platform blockbuster game series Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, and its legion of pretenders, and clone games, and points to the way that they thrust the player into perfectly simulated war environments, modelled on video footage sent back from Iraq, and Afghanistan. These games, though entertaining, are visual simulations of war that invite us to become desensitized to the strange environments and new technologies of war, and even the notion of killing via remote control. If any of this sounds familiar, then I might direct your attention to various newsfeed scenes throughout ST, namely the one where Dougie Houser methodically explains the how to terminate an entrapped arachnid warrior in a live public service announcement. To put this in slightly less ambiguous terms: a high ranking military officer shoots a captive enemy soldier on live television, and we didn’t feel a thing. This newsreel goes on to show school children being taught to stamp on cockroaches for fun, and then the children are given an opportunity to familiarize themselves with an assault rifle and take home their own bullet so they can be comfortable with them. The games I mentioned are largely targeted at teens and young adult males, the exact demographic that cheered in 1934, and 1997 respectively.

As I come to the end of my train of thought, I am forced to regress to my original statement on this matter. I said that this film didn’t just outsmart the regular movie-goer, and manage to shock critics into disbelief, or even denial, I also said that it managed to outsmart itself. The film’s weak critical reception was not purely a result of its confronting subject matter, but also it was due to the creative team’s decision to hide its true meaning under a blockbuster exterior, and make no attempt to hand-hold audiences by drawing attention to the notion that war and fascism are bad things. Making such a statement without any attempt at subtlety would have made it impossible to connect to the book at all, and likely have made the film come across as sanctimonious and preachy. By remaining ambiguous the film strayed into the awkward zone between blockbuster military wank—what it is typically mistaken for—and a more direct criticism of militarism such as Dr Strangelove, all of which led to the film being largely misunderstood, and even derided upon its release. An amusing, and perhaps even poignant moment in the film comes when an accused murderer is tried, and convicted to death on the public newsfeed, with his execution scheduled as prime time entertainment later that night. This cameo by Ed Neumeier always manages to bring a smile to my face, as I watch poor Ed hangs his head in resignation as he accepts his inevitable execution by the media. Maybe he didn’t outsmart himself after all. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing, but he just accepted the consequences. As Neumeier stated in a response to Mimi Brickmeyer’s 2003 article on ST, he believed that “Starship endures so successfully in its afterlife, finding a growing and loyal audience along with many re-appreciations by the critical community” and this is precisely because it did not treat us like fools that needed to be told what a terrible thing war is. Somehow, in not telling the truth, this film has actually succeeded in being more honest to its viewers. Watch it again sometime, and when the film asks you to join up, take a moment to think your answer through, because figuring things out for yourself is the only true freedom, make up your own mind. See you on the bounce trooper.