Somehow, I missed this movie in my youth. I thought I had seen it but after firing up the 4K blu-ray recently, my wife and I couldn’t recall any of it.
There were a lot of competing films that year and it was originally considered a flop. Starship Troopers made only $54 million domestically against a budget of $105 million, which was a massive failure for a movie with a major studio like Sony behind it.
Critical response was lukewarm and Titantic was hogging up all of the ticket buyers. There was also The Fifth Element and Jurassic Park The Lost World released around the same time.
Over time Starship Troopers has gained a cult following and even had a few spin off movies, video games and an animated series.
Based on the 1950s novel by Robert Heinlein. The movie under the direction off director Paul Verhoeven takes the source material in to the relm of satirical fascism which is very relevant today.
In the world of Starship Troopers, high school kids yearn to join the ranks of the Mobile Space Force and battle the alien bugs which live billions of lightyears away. They strive to become “citizens”.
In this militarized society, only people who have served in the military become full citizens. Civilians are merely “legal residents,” barred from voting or working in the government.
After all, according the morals in Starship Trooper society, “Citizenship is limited because things are only valued if they come at a price; without truly winning, being awarded the prize for a competition is worthless.”
No participation awards in the world of Starship Troopers!
Starship Troopers is a hoot of a movie. You have a classic rebellious rich kid who could live a life of lesisure and go on vacation with his parents on the rings of Saturn or join his school chums with a stint in the military in the only unit his evaluation qualifies him for – the front lines against the alien bugs.
You get teen love triangles, a steamy co-ed nude shower scene, great practical effecs and sets, unexpected violence taken to the extreme like in another Paul Verhoeven classic – Robocop.
The storyline plays out like a video game, light on plot, heavy on the visuals and Doom-like warfare. The characters are simple. The jock infantry guy, the hot girl, the ex-girl friend who cheats on the jock with a fellow pilot in training, the standard issue sadistic drill sargent and the vetran school teacher.
That school teacher who keeps showing up in combat, I expected to be a robot or some kind of regenerating video game character but the future medical tech available seems to be able to sew people up easily enough or at least give them some robotic limbs.
Like any military based fascist society, the leadership needs a constant war to keep everything moving along. Just when the star of the movie “Johnny Rico” is about to quit the military because his poor leadership caused the death of a fellow soldier during training, his parents along with the entire population of Buenos Aires is wiped on by an astoroid.
Was it an accident? A freak force of nature? Oh course not, it had to be those pesky alien bugs (even if we’ve never seen their ability to toss giant asteroids across vast space before).
Fascists always need an enemy to justify their build up of military personal and equipment. They need wars to use up the human and non-human supplies so they can order more and keep the war machine humming along.
I was seriously expecting to find at the end of the movie that their were no bugs at all and the troops were all fighting this war in a simulation or in a dream induced state of hypersleep. Kind of like the non-existant “weapons of mass destruction” that lead to the Iraq war or the “countries taking advantage of us” in the current trade war.
The original Starship Troopers in glorious 4k!
This video does a good job of point out that the bugs have no technology so it seems that they couldn’t have launched an asteroid at Earth. More likely the goal is colonization and making the aliens appear to have no redeeming value helps with that goal.