Starship Troopers (1997)

I’m starting a new project. A few years ago, I made a project of watching movies that were made before 1978. The goal was to learn more about movies that weren’t recent releases, and to form a habit of seeking out movies that weren’t just easy to find—movies made by women, and movies not made in the U.S., to start. I watched at least one movie a week that met my pre-1978, “this movie is somehow influential” criteria. I want to do something similar for this project, but this time, I’m sticking with science fiction, a genre very close to my heart.

I grew up on science fiction and fantasy. I stuck fairly close to the properties my parents liked—Star Wars, of course, as well as Firefly and Lord of the Rings and other similar stories about good v. evil. I didn’t watch many B-movies, and I wasn’t aware of the context of the stories I grew up steeped in. My tastes have branched out, but for various reasons, I’m missing a lot of cornerstone science fiction, as well as some of the contemporary work that I was just too young to see when it first came out. I’ve started a small list on Letterboxd of science fiction blindspots. I’ll be updating it with more movies to watch as I go along; the list right now is by no means inclusive. I’m not planning to limit this project to a single year, like I did with my previous watching project; I’ll keep watching and writing so long as I have blindspots. I’m also not planning to force myself to watch something new every week, although it’s a goal I’d like to aim for. I’ll be blogging about these movies in more depth than my usual Letterboxd reviews.

Starship Troopers was, until this afternoon, one such blindspot. I was far too young to see it when it was released. I also hate war movies, and I’ve always been a little nervous about Paul Verhoeven: three strikes in all.

I suppose I was primed for the movie’s anti-fascist satire angle, and I expected a somewhat cheeky, very violent tone. I hadn’t expected its shiny plastic quality, nor the sinuous camera movements. The set design feels reminiscent of 50s-era science fiction, with its big, silver columns and grates and ramps, but it all looks expensive, not cheap, like someone in the Federation was paid to airbrush over the setting’s faults. The stars, too, look like they just strode out of a propaganda poster, with clean, shiny faces, perfect hair, strong jaws. Perfect specimens of humanity, earnestly enacting the dictates of their fascist culture, lining up to slaughter aliens that they’ll never understand. I couldn’t tell if the movie was earnestly ironic, or ironically earnest, and the resulting whiplash made me feel sick.