Starship troopers: a
Maligned Classic
“Someone asked me once
if I knew the difference between a civilian and a citizen. I know now. A
citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal
responsibility.”
John Rico
Starship troopers is one of the
most maligned films of all time, panned by critics on its release, 17 years
ago, they called it a “nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that
it makes even the most brainless summer block buster look intelligent” in the Deseret News and the New
York Post called it a “Crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring
“raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Even Roger Ebert
who had lorded the social satire of Robocop
said that the movie was a “one dimensional trivial nothing pitched at 11 year
old sci-fi fans.” But is that all it
really is?
I feel that the critics have
missed the mark somewhat; Starship troopers was, and is, a searing incitement
of right wing militaristic culture. Even
though the film is 17 years old now (yes I feel old too RBD) the message is
still as clear as a bell and that message can be summed up simply as “War makes
fascists of us all.” The movie comes out and says that violence is “the supreme
authority from which all others are derived” and that “Naked force has resolved
more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion,
that violence doesn't solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People
who forget that always die” these are not the words of a military recruitment
officer or of a drill sergeant but the words of a teacher in a high
school. The director of the film, Paul
Verhoeven, (he of Robocop
and Total Recall fame) is on record as saying that the film was playing with
fascism and fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American
culture. And one can’t help but see a comparison
between the gung-ho jingoism of the propaganda films and the rightwing media in
the states, especially fox news.
Set in the far of future where mankind has reached out to the stars and
started to colonize alien planets. This rabid colonialism has provoked an
otherwise peaceful race of insect-like aliens to lash out against earth, which
it suddenly and quite rightly now sees as hostile. Seeing fairly obvious
self-defense tactics as further gestures of aggression Humankind musters its
global forces and charges headlong into a grossly outmatched interstellar war,
the film uses this as a spring board for a satire on the first Gulf war but it
really works for any war that the USA has fought in since the end of the second
world war, with the well trained and well equipped troops of Earth representing
the states and the poorly equipped and not at all trained bugs representing the
Vietnamese or the Iraqis The film is loosely based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Robert
A Heinlein the book was meant to be more of a political Essay than a
work of pure fiction with large a large portion set in a school classroom the
charicters debate with there History and moral philosophy teacher(played by the
awesomely understated Michael Ironside), who many consider to
be speaking in Heinlein’s own voice. The script itself was a totally unrelated entity
called ‘bug hunt at outpost nine’ Paul
Verhoeven admits to not being able to finish the book as he found it
‘depressing and boring’. The film can
also be seen as a work on ‘paradise lost’ with the innocents of youth replaced
with the hell of war.
Even by todays standard the
special effects look good, partly because they used real models, it took over a
year for model builders, and special effect artists boss film Sony image works
and good old industrial light and magic to make the ships that you see on
screen. The movie offers up a beautiful
totalitarian state where all the children are beautiful wide eyed and innocent,
whereas the adults by contrast are usually maimed in some way from there
service. The world itself feels fully
fleshed out with different types of alien fulfilling different roles put
together the world feels rich and detailed, if somewhat unsettling.
The movie concerns the lives of three high school friends, all of whom sign
up for military service after leaving high school. Denise
Richards plays Carman a
high flyer who wants to pilot starships, Casper Van Dean plays Johnny Rico her boyfriend who
doesn’t really want to join the military but signs on to impress his girlfriend,
and there mutual friend Carl, played by Neil Patrick Harris
who joins up because… well they never say but it is strongly implied that
career choices are limited. So the three
join up, Carmen goes to fleet to learn how to fly, Johnny goes into the Mobile
infantry to learn how to kill and Carl goes into military intelligence to learn
how to commit genocide and the film then follows John Rico’s journey from being
a fairly amiable high school jock hero to being a cold blooded killing machine.
Our hero loses the love of his life when
she decides to make a career out of being a pilot, as opposed to just fulfilling
her two year service as Rico intended on doing, then an accident on the
training field see him take ten lashes as punishment, his dues paid he decides
to wash out and quit before he finishes his term of service and to give the fascist
state in the movie its due they allow him to, that is until his hometown, Buenos
Aires, is whipped of the face of the planet by a meteorite. It is then at our heroes lowest ebb that he
reaches inside himself and is reborn, now a man. It is worth mentioning that there is no concrete
proof that the meteorite strike was in fact an attack by the ‘bugs’ and could
have in reality just been a random regular act of god, but the all-powerful
Earth government treated it as a hostile action and used it as justification to
go to war.
