Rate - Starship Troopers (1997)

I give it a 7 for execution but another point for the spfx (which still hold up great--good use of cgi).

I didn't like the film when it came out-didn't really understand it and thought the 90120 in space story annoying---but after 911 and even more recently I can see the subversiveness in the story. More intellectual depth than it seems at first.



Jean Rasczak: This year in history, we talked about the failure of democracy, how the social scientists of the 21st Century brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. We talked about the rights and privileges between those who served in the armed forces and those who haven’t, therefore called citizens and civilians. [to a student] You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It’s a reward. Something the federation gives you for doing federal service.

Jean Rasczak: No. Something given has no basis in value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

5/10.

Awesome popcorn movie and a great model how our society should be run. I hope Trump has seen it.

In an interview with Paul M. Sammon for The Making of Starship Troopers, Verhoeven commented:

“So I think the essence of my interest in this so-called fascism of Heinlein’s, or pseudo-fascism, the real reason I wanted to transfer that to film was that at this moment there are voices in the United States that would actually embrace this form of policy. Which is another reason I wanted to do this film. To carry over the fascist framework from the book to the movie. It’s a metaphor, you see—for that part of the American society which would like to have something like the government portrayed in Starship Troopers in power in the United States today. It would also be interesting. I felt, to have the film of Starship Troopers make this statement: “This quasi-fascist society we’re showing you works. On a certain level, anyway.” (p. 138)


There is a quote on wikipedia's page:

In a 2014 interview on The Adam Carolla Show, actor Michael Ironside, who read the book as a youth, said he asked Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, "Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?" Verhoeven replied, "If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing fucking bugs!"


I trust the first Verhoeven quote to be more accurate than the Ironside anecdote.

Robert Heinlen’s critiques of liberal democracy were meant to be taken seriously. Heinlein said of the book:

The central theme is expanded in many ways and many sub-propositions consistent with or corollary to the main one are show: (a) that nothing worth having is ever free; it must be paid for; (b) that authority always carries with it responsibility, even if a man tries to refuse it; (c) that “natural right” are not God-given but must be earned... (f) that a man’s noblest act is to die for his fellow man, that such death is not suicidal, not wasted, but is the highest and most human form of survival behavior. [The Authorized Biography, Robert Heinlein: Volume 2, by William Patterson, Jr., p. 181]

7.5/10

A movie 4 years before its time.