Starship Troopers (

1997

)

It is difficult to get a handle on just what Robert A. Heinlein believed if your only guide is his fiction. If we take every idea expressed in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger in a Strange Land as the genuine expression of the author's sincerely held beliefs, then we'd have to assume he was a free-love hippie, deeply suspicious of all manner of authoritarianism. Yet, in-between those two books he wrote Starship Troopers, a story that positively depicts a future quasi-fascists society where the vote is tied to military service and mankind's only duty is to spread and conquer the galaxy until some alien species is able to stop us. To be fair human society is not racist, but it seems like that is only the case because we're too busy hating other sentient lifeforms to bother hating our fellow man anymore. Obviously, squaring these novels into a coherent ideology is impossible. Unlike most authors, Heinlein didn't preach his ideas in fiction, so much as explore possibilities and belief systems through his work. Indeed, the only way that such radically different belief systems make sense, is if we assume that Heinlein did not sincerely believe everything he wrote (lies from a professional liar, who would have guessed it?). A lot of people have trouble with this, which is why so many modern writers and thinkers dismiss Heinlein as a crypto-nazi, to their own disadvantage. I can't be sure if director Paul Verhoeven is one of them or not (though since he admitted to never bothering to finish reading the book I don't think he's overly interested in accurately capturing Heinlein's vision), because he seems more interested in crafting his own unique spin on the story. One that serves less like a vision of a possible militaristic future, and more of a satire of Nazi-era cinema and the way in which art can easily be transformed into sinister propaganda. While I'm still holding out hope for a fully faithful adaptation of Heinlein's novel, I'm not exactly disappointed with the film we got in its place.

Starship Troopers is a 90s era High School movie first and foremost, a revelation that left my wife (who has a particular love for this epoch and genre) pleasantly surprised. Indeed, when we first meet our main characters, Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanez, and Carl Jenkins are just three typical High School kids, hell it wouldn't be going too far to call them walking stereotypes. Rico is the rich asshole jock, Carmen is his secretly smart cheerleader girlfriend, and Carl Jenkins is the non-threatening, nerdy best friend. Now, a High School story wouldn't be complete without a healthy portion of pointless drama, and so naturally enough there are a few complications for Rico and Carmen's relationships coming in the form of Dizzy Flores (a classmate who has the hots for Rico) and Zander Barclaow, the captain of an opposing team's football team that has his eye on Carmen. Not only does the film spend the first thirty or forty minutes of its run-time in high school, dealing with such cliched subjects as the big game, final exams, and the prom but it maintains a distinctly High School movie vibe even after it has transitioned to a sci-fi war story. Part of this is just a byproduct of spending so long on the basic training segment, but even after that, the film maintains a focus on themes that are better suited to the tweest of YA slice-of-life novels than for a brutal and bloody military sci-fi story. The love rhombus mentioned above is the major conflict throughout the film, and holds more weight than the comparative subplot that is the actual war against the alien menace!

I quite admire this prologue, because it gives the film time to build the strange world that it takes place in. Most obvious are the propaganda news-broadcasts that play every so often, in particular, one where a murderer is immediately sentenced and then the newscaster promises a live execution to be broadcast later that night, talk about the right to a speedy trial! Then there are the speeches from political figures who seem to always be clad in uniform, and addressing their audience from in front of gigantic crest of an eagle. Less obvious, at least at first, is the troubling fact that the Buenos Aires of the film looks very little like the Buenos Aires of our own world. Most notably, the entire population seems to of European descent now (though to be fair, the Argentinians are very fair by South American standards, so there's no reason to assume some unstated historic genocide, though give the government we're dealing with on film no reason not to either). Finally, there's the school's civics class, where the students are lectured on the failures of the old forms of democracy and the rise of the new more militarized society where only soldiers and veterans hold voting rights. Anyone paying attention to all this, and not focused on asking when the sick-looking CGI insects are gonna show up, will draw the obvious conclusions about this future earth. At some point in the last few decades, earth has become a global fascist state. For those a bit slower, don't worry after a while you'll see that the officers in the military intelligence division dress exactly like their counterparts in the Waffen-SS.

This is, of course, the central joke of the film: That what we're dealing with here is not so much a straight-forward sci-fi action film but a parody of Nazi cinematic propaganda. For those unfamiliar with the genre, Nazi filmmakers opted for a more insidious and subtle form of propaganda than their Soviet counterparts. Whereas the Communist filmmakers favored overt messages, less their point be lost on the common people they held in such open contempt, fascist filmmakers kept their message in the background of their films. If you were to watch the average Nazi propaganda movie without paying close attention to it, you'd probably miss the message entirely, because the politics are never the focus. The logic went that the best way to indoctrinate people wasn't though overt propaganda pieces, which individuals watching could identify and reject, but through background details that supported your political ideology and influenced the viewer subconsciously while they were taking in an otherwise normal, entertaining film. It's a bold gamble on Verhoeven's part, sucker the audience in with bombastic action and then drip feed them exaggerated fascist agitprop in the background as comic relief. It demands a certain eye towards world-building and background details that most viewers simply lack. Unsurprisingly, general audiences saw this as just another dumb sci-fi action movie and reacted in turn, but more interestingly so did the professional critics who first reviewed the film. The fact that professional film critics are so completely blind to the importance of world-building goes some way towards explaining why modern films with shallow world-building (ahem, Disney Star Wars ahem) are lavished with such lofty praises. Still, those of us who are interested in such questions will find plenty to sink their teeth into throughout the course of Starship Troopers.

Upon graduation, Carmen decides to enlist in the fleet and Rico, who is still in love with her wants to follow her into the service. The only problem is Rico's math grades are about 50 points lower than anything the fleet would even think of accepting, so if he's going to join the service he'll have to be shunted off to the Mobile Infantry. Why he thinks he'll be able to maintain a relationship with Carmen while stationed across the galaxy from her and doing vastly different work than her is beyond me, but hey stupidity is a big part of being young and in love. Carl meanwhile, thanks to his latent psychic abilities is promptly snatched up by military intelligence. Ricos' family is enraged that their son is off to join the space marines instead of heading to Harvard (the fact that the school would accept someone with Rico's appalling academic history just because he comes from the right family tells me that despite a global fascist dictatorship not much has changed for Harvard) and Rico's father promptly disowns him when he refuses to reconsider. Rico very nearly drops out anyway after an error in judgment on his part causes one of his squad-mates to be killed, only reconsidering when a race of alien bugs destroys Buenos Aires with a meteorite.

The whole fleet and Mobile Infantry is mobilized and hurled against the bug homeworld of Klendathu. The invasion is a massive clusterfuck, that begins before any boots have even touched down when the fleet is hit by a massive salvo of plasma fire from the planet's surface. The Terran high command has criminally underestimated the abilities and defenses of the bugs, and the fleet pays a heavy price for this. Consequently, the MI troops that do make it through the AA fire in their drop pods are outnumbered and out of position. This combined with the fact that the bug troopers are tough, fearless, and completely obedient means that the casualties on the ground are appalling. Naturally, Rico survives the ordeal (he is the protagonist after all) but his unit is so crippled that he's shifted to another squad altogether: The Roughnecks. A group oddly enough under the command of his former civics teacher. This unit is sent on a new mission: Capture one of the bug leadership so the humans can better understand the abilities and strategies of their enemy.

There's a curious element to this quasi-fascist future earth that warrants closer examination: The fact that it is a strictly gender-neutral society. Women and men are seen in all roles in about equal measure, share common sleep quarters, bathrooms, and even communal showers and seemingly do not acknowledge any gender difference outside of dating and sex. Real-world fascist societies were hardly gender-neutral, either in theory or in practice (communist totalitarian countries like the USSR or China at least had an ideology that promoted gender equality, though the applications on the ground seldom lived up to this). I suspect that this is in part, meant to be the logical conclusion to a totalitarian society, rather a specific satire of an existing ideology. In a truly totalitarian society, there would be no distinction made on the basis of gender, because a truly totalitarian society would make no concessions whatsoever to any individual's personal attribute. Men and women are only of value in so much as they can be used by the state, so if the state needs soldiers there's no reason to discriminate on any other basis than the individual's fitness to serve. The bizarre gender politics of this world also has the added benefit of making the universe of the film seem strange and alien to the viewers and cluing slower viewers into the fact that this world is not the one we know.

Big nerds, like me, will probably be disappointed at the near-total absence of Starship Trooper's two great contributions to the military sci-fi sub-genre: Power armor and drop pods. I understand that people who aren't fans of Warhammer 40k, may regard this as less significant than I do, but to me adapting Starship Troopers without these elements feels not just like a missed opportunity, but close to pointless. There's also no reason not to, as the legions of CGI bugs will already require a small fortune to film so you might as well strap the Mobile Infantry into miniature Gundams while you're at it and get the full effect. It also makes some of the weapons used by the Mobile Infantry absurd. When a guy in a mech-suit uses a tactical nuke it makes a degree of sense, as presumably he'll be properly shielded from both the blast and the radioactive fallout of his weapons. However, seeing unarmored troops use the same weapon is downright galling, as unless their weapons have the range of artillery pieces, they are only going to vaporize themselves along with the enemy. Surely conventional explosives would be a better use for such circumstances. Now, I can understand that in order for the action sequences to be comprehensible, we need to be able to see and identify the individual soldiers, so I'm prepared to accept that maybe the power-armor isn't always viable (the alternative is to use helmet-less power armor which has got to be one of the dumbest tropes in military sci-fi as even WWI-era soldiers wore helmets). Still, there is no excusing the absence of proper drop pods. The ones in the film are basically shipping containers that are set down by aircraft. They look stupid, they move slow (thus making them easy targets for enemy anti-air artillery), and they lack the alien and exciting aspects of the drop pods in the book and later drop pods in sci-fi.

Indeed, in general, the action scenes in Starship Troopers are lacking particularly when compared to Verhoeven's earlier work. Since the people have guns and the bugs are just beasts with talons and teeth, battles always play out the same way with bugs charging the humans and the humans standing and firing back. There's no consistency to the durability of the bugs either, sometimes they get mowed down in waves by a handful of soldiers, otherwise, it takes the whole squad a few clips to kill just one of the bastards. The occasional appearance of tunneling and flying bugs livens up the action only slightly, but the larger bugs have a nasty tendency to look like something out of a PS2 video game, and consequently lose much of their menace. I suspect that Verhoeven's talent for cinematic violence is limited to small scale confrontations, perhaps involving only a handful of combats at the most, along the lines of what we saw in Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1991). Directing credible large-scale battles is a totally different talent, plenty of filmmakers are excellent at one while failing miserably at the other. Moreover the larger the battle the more attention it will draw more attention from those interest in battle tactics and military history, whereas smaller battles are under less scrutiny thanks to the conventions of heroic fiction that govern them. Despite the handicaps, Verhoeven manages at least one exciting set-piece battle when the Roughnecks are surrounded by a swarm of enemies and forced to hold a remote outpost al la Zulu (1964). For that scene at least everything works as it should, and it's a shame that the rest of the film doesn't manage to measure up because this places a serious chink in the film's effectiveness as satire. In order to successfully mock the Nazi propaganda style, you have to successfully ape it, and in this case, that means being consistently entertaining.