Film Trivia returns on Thursday, December 19 with our classic brand of infotainment quiz show fun, followed up by a screening of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), preceded by the short film Check Please.  

Originally released in 1997, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was originally both a box office and critical disappointment. Considered a hollow sci-fi action film, filled with wooden performances, and far too much violence, the biting satire that permeates all of Verhoeven’s Hollywood genre work was completely lost on the initial audience. 

While the audiences and critics then approached it mostly at face value as yet another ‘90s Special Effects Action Extravaganza along the lines of Independence Day or Demolition Man, the film was attempting something far more subversive from the start. The last of his Fascist Future Trilogy of big budget, Hollywood sci-fi films (including Robocop and Total Recall), Starship Troopers was, what he thought, his most blatant commentary on the ever-growing conservatism and violence of American society. As Verhoeven said about the film, “I borrowed from the films of Leni Riefenstahl to show that these soldiers were like something out of Nazi propaganda. I even put one in an SS uniform. But no one noticed.” American audiences in the ‘90s didn’t understand how humans fighting bugs could possibly be the bad guys. Or when they did, they couldn’t understand why Verhoeven didn’t take the time to wink at the camera and say “Hey guys, you see what I’m doing here? Fascism bad.” Perhaps they felt a little uneasy to find out they had been cheering on the bad guys all along.  

But sometime around the late ‘00s a country that was starting to question the point of a then 10 yearlong war started to come around to a film that centers around questioning militarism and warfare as the keystone of a nation and the critical tide turned in favor of the film and its Swiftian bite. But not in the case of everyone. In the 25+ years since its release Starship Troopers has become a kind of online litmus test for media literacy. Do you think it’s a cool movie about space war? Or do you realize that it’s playing with the idea that you’ve been conditioned to blindly root and cheer for the people who look more like you than the enemy by Hollywood media and mainstream culture? 

With a masterful use of the most cutting edge digital special effects of the time, Starship Troopers is also a time capsule of the popcorn munching, brain off, volume up ‘90s action film. The scenes of humans battling alien insects are done in the most entertaining way possible. Everyone in the film looks gorgeous and the camera is ready. Verhoeven updated the 1950s alien invasion picture for the 1990s. But it seems that audiences were expecting the same Cold War politics of America at the time, and not the perspective of a 60-year-old Dutch man who grew up under Nazi occupation. As equally entertaining as a mindless action extravaganza and razor-sharp political commentary, Starship Troopers is one of high marks of ‘90s Hollywood genre filmmaking.