Starship Troopers: The Satire Everyone Took Straight

The reception of Starship Troopers in 1997 is one of the great critical misfires of the decade, a case study in an entire industry watching a film denounce fascism and concluding that the film was fascist. Paul Verhoeven made a two-hour recruitment advertisement for a militarised society, complete with beautiful young soldiers, thrilling bug-slaughter and mock news broadcasts urging citizens to do their part, and he made it so slick and so seductive that the joke sailed clean over the heads of most reviewers, who called it stupid, jingoistic and morally bankrupt. They were describing the surface Verhoeven built on purpose, and mistaking it for the film.

Time has done its work. The picture that critics buried is now widely understood as one of the sharpest political satires Hollywood ever smuggled onto multiplex screens, and the reappraisal is so complete that it has almost overcorrected into cliché. What is worth doing on a revisit is being precise about how the satire actually functions, because “it was satire all along” has become a slogan people repeat without examining the machinery, and the machinery is the whole achievement.

The Dutchman who read the propaganda

Verhoeven grew up in the Netherlands under German occupation, a childhood spent watching a fascist state operate at close range, and he brought that memory to a story that could hardly have been more different in its politics from his own. The source, Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel, is an earnest, admiring vision of a future society in which full citizenship must be earned through military service, and it presents that arrangement with a straight face and considerable enthusiasm. Verhoeven, by his own account, found the book so militaristic that he could not finish it, and read only a few chapters before deciding to film its exact opposite: the same plot, the same institutions, played as a warning rather than a recommendation.

This is the crucial fact that unlocks the film. Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier, who had already helped him hide a corporate critique inside RoboCop, did not adapt Heinlein so much as answer him. They kept the society Heinlein admired and filmed it with the visual grammar of the propaganda Verhoeven remembered, borrowing compositions and rhythms from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will, dressing the intelligence officers in coats cut to evoke the SS, and staging the whole thing with the gleaming, upbeat sheen of a state that adores itself. The film never editorialises against the Federation. It simply shows it accurately, in the Federation’s own flattering language, and trusts the audience to feel the chill.

The mock-broadcasts that carry the whole argument

The satire’s delivery system is the recurring “Federal Network” segments, the propaganda newsreels that punctuate the film with cheery bulletins about the war effort, executions broadcast as entertainment, children stamping on insects to do their bit, and the perky sign-off inviting viewers to learn more. These interludes are the key that decodes everything around them. Played in the bright, participatory register of state media, they reveal that the entire film we are watching is styled as an artefact produced by this society about itself, which means every heroic image is quietly suspect.

This is the same disarming technique Verhoeven used in RoboCop’s satirical adverts and that Terry Gilliam ran through the antic surface of Brazil, the trick of hiding an indictment inside entertainment so pleasurable that the audience lowers its guard. The mock-broadcasts let Verhoeven have the spectacle and critique the spectacle in the same breath, because the news segments are not commentary bolted on from outside; they are the film’s own aesthetic held up to the light. When the reviewers of 1997 enjoyed the bug battles and missed the propaganda framing, they were performing the exact behaviour the film was built to expose, which is the willingness of an audience to be thrilled by militarism as long as the production values are high enough.

Why it works as spectacle, which is the point

None of the satire would function if the film were not also, on its surface, a genuinely rousing science-fiction war movie, and this is where the reappraisal often gets lazy. Starship Troopers is not a clumsy film that happens to be ironic; it is a superbly made action picture whose excellence is itself the argument. Phil Tippett’s effects work, blending practical creatures with then-cutting-edge digital, produced arachnid enemies with real weight and menace, and the combat sequences are staged with total conviction, chaotic, terrifying and exciting in equal measure. The cast, led by Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico and rounded out by Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris and a magnificently grim Michael Ironside, plays everything with the guileless sincerity of actors in an actual recruitment film.

The seduction has to work for the critique to work. If the film held the militarism at an ironic arm’s length, signalling its disapproval, it would let the audience off the hook, allowing us to feel superior to the propaganda while enjoying it. Verhoeven refuses that comfort. He makes the fascist spectacle genuinely thrilling so that our own excitement becomes evidence, so that we catch ourselves cheering the very thing the film is warning us about. That implication of the viewer is the deepest layer of the satire, and it explains why the film could only ever have divided its first audience, some feeling the chill and some simply cheering. The design guarantees both responses, which is exactly what a great piece of satirical propaganda-about-propaganda should do.

The film’s use of the alien enemy as a mirror for human politics puts it in a specific lineage of science fiction that hides its real subject in plain sight, the lineage that runs most sharply through Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and its apartheid allegory. Both films use the bug or the “prawn” to talk about how societies manufacture an enemy to justify their own brutality, though Blomkamp aims at segregation and Verhoeven at militarism. Watch the two together and you see the range of what the alien-invasion frame can carry once a director decides the monsters are a way of talking about us.

Where it sits now

The correction of the record is essentially complete, and Starship Troopers now sits securely among the best political satires American genre cinema has produced, its stock rising every year that its warnings about media, militarism and the pleasures of state-sponsored violence look less like the past. The irony of its journey is almost too neat: a film about how easily an audience can be manipulated by slick pro-war imagery was, on release, misread by an audience manipulated by its own slick imagery, and only recognised once the culture had time to catch up to what it was doing.

That is the verdict. This is Verhoeven’s most complete and most dangerous satire, a film that works entirely as a bug-hunt war movie and works underneath as a merciless anatomy of fascism’s appeal, and the two readings do not sit side by side so much as the second is smuggled inside the first. It rewards the viewer who takes it straight with a great action film and rewards the viewer who reads it closely with a warning, and the fact that so many took only the first for so long is the strongest proof of how well the machine was built.

Watch it as the centre of Verhoeven’s American satirical run, flanked by RoboCop on one side and Total Recall on the other, three Trojan horses that hid their cargo in gunfire and gore. Then chase District 9 for the alien as social mirror, and if you want the full effect, read a chapter of Heinlein first, so you can feel exactly what Verhoeven was answering.

Spoilers below

Everything above is safe. The arc and its darkest turn are below.

The trajectory of Johnny Rico is the satire’s clinching move, because the film is structured as a coming-of-age success story, and the success is horrifying. Rico begins as a callow high-school athlete who joins the Mobile Infantry mostly to impress a girl, suffers through brutal training, loses friends in catastrophic combat, and rises through the ranks to become a decorated officer and leader of men. Read as straight heroism, it is a satisfying arc. Read as the film intends, it is the story of a decent young man fully processed into an instrument of a fascist state, ending the film more committed to the Federation than when he started, his individuality burned away and replaced by the uniform.

The reveal that seals the reading is the fate of Carl Jenkins, Rico’s brainy childhood friend played by Neil Patrick Harris. Carl surfaces late in the film as a high-ranking military intelligence officer, and he appears in a long leather coat unmistakably modelled on the SS, psychic, cold and smiling, the boy next door transformed into the smiling face of the security state. When he telepathically probes a captured Bug and announces to a cheering command centre that “it’s afraid”, the film delivers its bleakest joke: the triumphant human moment is an act of torture on a possibly sentient creature, celebrated as a victory, broadcast as propaganda. The heroes are thrilled. The Federal Network will run it as good news.

The final propaganda broadcast then folds the whole film shut. The closing Federal Network segment recruits the next wave of young soldiers using footage of the very characters we have followed, presenting their suffering as glorious and inviting new recruits to join up and do their part, complete with the film’s recurring sign-off. Verhoeven ends by revealing that everything we have watched has been, in effect, the recruitment film it always looked like, and that the story of Rico’s heroism exists to sell the war to the next batch of Ricos. The loop is the point. The society reproduces itself by turning its own casualties into advertising, and the audience that cheered Rico’s rise has just been shown, gently and without a single line of editorial, that it has been watching an enlistment reel the entire time.