MUBI

Having rewatched this a few times I can honestly say that I find almost the entire first hour to be unnecessary. It’s by no means a masterpiece but I think the casting choices and the visual effects budget held it back immensely. It seems to flip flop between seriousness and comedic hyperbole at times. Its a movie made 4 years before 9/11 but having rewatched it afterwards the parallels are almost disturbing. Its one of my favorite movie soundtracks, especially in the latter half of the movie but that said I think overall it would have been much better if cheese factor was toned down slightly. I know the end result was probably close to exactly what the makers of the film were going for but I also think if it had been taken a little more seriously then I could have easily called it the best anti-war movie of all time and for sure one of my favorite war movies.

The synopsis currently on Flixster about the cast being “fresh-faced youths of the Archie Comics” influenced how I saw this movie. The love triangles with Dizzy (Meyer) and Carmen (Richards) fighting over Johnny Rico (Van Dien) and Johnny Rico and Zander (Muldoon) fighting over Carmen re-enforced this. They are too old to really be high school graduates embarking on their futures, but they are all unbelievably attractive, and so Verhoeven gives in to naughty exhibition of his stars’ bodies. The action and effects are pretty good. Everything is extremely bright. The movie is fun despite quite a bit of cheesiness.

I have heard the movie bears almost nothing in common with the book. What I really wasn’t expecting from this story was the satire. From what I understand the book plays the war story straight. The movie finds the hard line distinction between citizens and civilians to be wickedly funny. Citizenship is granted only through military/government service (“real Americans”). Civilians who do not serve, who may not support the high risk to life in the business of war, are not given the same rights. Now of course we’re talking about a space adventure, so citizens and civilians are intended on a global scale, while the foreign enemy is another solar system populated by giant bugs. To most humans, what could be more creepy crawly? Johnny Rico enlists for military service for the wrong reasons, but finds meaning and purpose in fighting when there is a 9/11 type attack (though the flick was made pre-9/11) on his home town. All the characters have tons of enthusiasm for going out and doing their part to kill bugs and defend Earth. The military propaganda advertisements that pop up at various points in the movie are full of especially biting satire of war efforts. The story is told from a flipped perspective compared to All’s Quiet on the Western Front, but the message is much the same. Still the movie leaves us with the bitter open ending where the troops cheer to find out the enemy is as scared of them as they are of it and the war propaganda becomes more incessant than ever.

Old thoughts from a blog of mine I thought I would share.

Starship Troopers is one of the greatest anti-war films ever made in my opinion, up there with many others. This is something that not many seem to recognize considering that, when it was first released, most critics seemed to have been somewhat disturbed by the fact that the `good guys’ resembled Nazis and that was about as far as they went before blowing it off as just another shoot-em-up and proceeded to sharpen their knives.

The Earth is at war with big ass insects. They’re inhuman, vicious. This is demonstrated through out but most notably via a propaganda website that the movie presents to us as a futuristic version of `Why We Fight’. At one point, a cow is lead into a pen holding one of these giant insects, which quickly cleaves the cow in two. We are horrified! These insects truly are far from human and really terrifying! Look what it did to that cow! They must be destroyed! (Yet how many of us had steak this week?) Then the website narrator proudly states that people on Earth are doing their part in the war effort as we watch a woman and her children dump Earth bugs on the ground and stomp on them. These bugs are native to our planet. Like so many other things, including other humans. How are the bug-stomping mother and her children any more humane and caring than the repulsive alien insects?

The film is preeetty violent and bloody. People are cut to pieces by the smaller creatures and slowly, painfully melted by a plasma the larger insects spray. However, the alien bugs fair no better. The people and cows getting hacked up relentlessly in this film horrify us but we cheer as machine rifles and grenades blow the giant insects apart. The body count is high on both sides. It is all literally and purposely utter, senseless violence. But then at one point a psychic uses his powers to read one of the alien’s emotions. He triumphantly yells, `It’s afraid!’ and a legion of human infantry cheer at this pronouncement. Who’s barbaric here? What is humanity? These bugs are clearly not `human’ yet they are intelligent, advanced, and most importantly they have feelings. If they can be afraid, can they not also be sad, happy, in love? These are questions the writer has left to us to ask with out leading us by the hand through what could have been a much more preachy film. So subtle infact that some people (like conservative adults, thinking it’s a kids flick with too much blood) use the amount of violence to say it’s bad cinema, that means either one of 2 things, a kid will prolly get the msg clearer that going off to fight, not thinking about it is actually a kindof bad thing more than the individual talking (goes for army generals and ahem, dare i say presidents aswell), or that they just don’t like the uncomfortable position it puts them in, to actually think about the forces at work in the films society, are appearing right now infront of us, with a school teacher pretty clearly proclaiming violence is the supreme authority, of which all other authorities derive. The director himself as a child grew up in nazi occupied Germany, he would prolly have a bit of a negative opinion on the kindof society in the movie I would think for some reason.

The action is all just a distraction though—like all the noise in real life—from the more important things said here, unfortunately it does such a good job, the visual action made people completely miss the point. Even the trailer and commercials for this movie were purposely misleading with Blur’s `Song #3’ blaring and the singer yelling `Whoo-hoo!’ as a stream of soldiers pour out of ships to go to battle. Every aspect of the film was one gigantic, satirical slap in the face of humanity and no one noticed or even ludicrously thought that it was actually being literal, to go off to war, war’s glamorous, all for fascism, crude etc (which i fail to see how anyone could miss the satire in a public execution being played on primetime tv proudly).

Some may suggest that the satire was not intended but that would be incredibly insulting to screenwriter Edward Neumeier because that’s what he excels at. I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the “Nazi” parallels drawn by other reviewers. What Verhoeven is putting across in this film is not a polemic on Nazi ideology, but commentary against Totalitarianism full stop, that’s German, Russian, and most espicially America, with the director openly saying this himself. He is satirising American crusades (the East call it Jihad, America calls it the war on Terror) against other countries, whose inhabitants are portrayed in the American press as no better than the Bugs in the film. The world is only completely brought together because of the (supposed) threat of the bug species. Perhaps people would’ve noticed it more if it was released after 9/11 and the bugs were renamed terrorists, and the main bug was Deemed osama bin laden. I can’t think of another action film you can attach “war makes fascists of us all” to.

To sum up it’s a prophetic film, with it’s own 911 moment, its own terrorists who hate freedom and are most certainly not defending themselves from a foreign invasion of their own lands—compare the U.S-backed regime in Saudi Arabia to Fort Ticonderoga in the movie, deep in the “Bug Quarantine Zone”—and with plenty of its own blind patriotism. The difference, however, between the film and the modern age is that the Starship Troopers win, as they have the intelligence to fight an actual enemy rather than the concept of terrorism, like us. The metaphor isn’t perfect, though, since the Starship Troopers don’t feel the need to occupy Klendathu and civilize—pardon me, democratize—the bugs.

On a final note, even if you don’t care for what it says subtly, no matter how much negative criticism it copped on release, the politics, etc, it was still yet nominated for an academy award for it’s visual work, which I’d put up there with Lord of the Rings, and Jurassic Park as the more successful uses of CGI stuff, which in my opinion was more a feat than titanic ever was visually wise, in the same year, and like so many other academy decisions, actual merit was not an issue.