When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers originally hit cinemas in 1997, the reviews were scathing. The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan argued that the Dutch director of Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct had delivered a space flick “rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence”, even suggesting that the film-maker had preserved the “fascist utopianism” of the 1959 Robert A Heinlein novel that it had been based on. “Troopers takes us to a militaristic future where video bulletins encourage young people to ‘Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world’,” wrote Turan. “Schools teach that ‘violence is the supreme authority’ and nothing solves problems with the efficacy of ‘naked force.’” The Washington Post described Verhoeven’s tone as “so inconsistent that it’s impossible to decide whether he’s sending up the Third Reich or in love with it”.
Starship Troopers failed to make its money back at the box office, and after one more Hollywood film, 2000’s under-par Hollow Man, Verhoeven would return to Europe, his credentials as a blockbuster film-maker shattered.
Twenty-five years on, it is hard to see how anyone watching Starship Troopers at the time, let alone film critics with knowledge of its director’s previous work, failed to spot that Verhoeven was doing irony. The movie imagines a future in which Earth’s Terran Federation is united in militaristic, fascistic hatred of the alien “bugs”, an insect-like alien race with which it is in open warfare. Verhoeven cast gorgeous ingenues such as Beverly Hills 90210’s Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer and Denise Richards in a nod to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films and their depiction of flourishing, square-jawed Aryan youth. The film even features regular propaganda clips, disguised as news reports of the latest crushing human victories. At one point Neil Patrick Harris wears a uniform so reminiscent of an SS officer’s that he was reputedly known on set as “Doogie Himmler” whenever he wore it.
There is never a moment, even when the insects manage to destroy Buenos Aires, when teenage infantryman Johnny Rico and his brave troopers do not believe that they will wipe out the entire alien race and march triumphantly across the cosmos in some horrifying space opera take on Triumph of the Will. So much so, that it is ultimately the bugs that the audiences feels sorry for, as Verhoeven no doubt intended.
“It’s a very rightwing book,” the director told Empire magazine. “And with the movie, we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be ‘Eat your cake and have it.’ All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’”
Perhaps critics were too distracted by the catastrophic failure of Verhoeven’s 1995 film, Showgirls, to realise that the director had made a return to form. Troopers does share a queasy fondness for nudity with its predecessor, though the Dutchman does not just show his male and female infantrymen sharing shower cubicles to titillate the audience. He also wants to make the point that they are far too obsessed with the righteous destruction of the perfidious insect enemy to be looking at each other’s naughty bits.
These days Starship Troopers sits easily alongside Verhoeven’s other sci-fi cult classics, Robocop and Total Recall, in a fabulous pantheon of futuristic, satirical silliness. Yes, these movies are violent, bloody, over-the-top and often hammily acted, but the director is very much in on the joke. Only an outsider like Verhoeven could have made films that overtly criticised the knuckleheaded excesses of 1980s and 90s American action cinema, yet somehow did a better job of delivering the era’s trademark trashy bombast than Hollywood itself.
When Hollywood suits tried to reverse the flow by putting remakes of Robocop and Total Recall into cinemas decades later, the result was a pair of watered-down, insipid retreads that emerged bereft of any spice or meaning, as if somebody had decided to make a cheeseburger without meat, dairy products or relish. There are also reports of a planned remake of Starship Troopers, with at least one iteration proposing to go back to Heinlein’s source novel. As Twitter noted at the time: “A non-satirical Starship Troopers reboot is about the worst goddamn idea I’ve ever heard.”
It rather beggars belief that so many critics in 1997 really thought this was the movie they were watching. If the only good bug is a dead bug, as Starship Troopers would have us believe, then perhaps the only bad movies are the ones that don’t end up being good ones with the benefit of perspective and a quarter century of hindsight.
