Day 3 - Starship Troopers (1997)

Towards the end of the 1980s, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven began to make a name for himself as a purveyor of spectacle - high-concept, big-budget popcorn flicks seasoned with just a sprinkling of genuine mischief. Robocop was followed by Total Recall was followed by Basic Instinct, each film receiving a slightly chillier critical reception than the previous one. These titles are all still instantly memorable today, but the more discerning cinephiles of the period seemed consumed by a single huge worry: what if the sleaze and splatter weren't there to highlight some deeper message? What if they, the viewers, had been titillated unironically? 

A mere handful of years later, the same questions would be asked of Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino, however, never received anything like the same levels of opprobrium. Some would argue, justifiably, that this is because Tarantino was the better director; I contend, however, that Tarantino eventually got away with material for which Verhoeven would have been villified simply because Tarantino has, indisputably, always been one of the cool kids.

By the mid-90s, meanwhile, Verhoeven's star was definitely fading. Audiences were starting to remember him less for the hard sci-fi and more for the softcore porn, and Basic Instinct was reduced in the public memory to Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs with no knickers on. This was compounded by 1995's Showgirls, a dull, depressing orgy of flesh and misogyny that stood for a long time as the most miserable cinematic experience of my life, only being replaced nearly 20 years later by Captain America: The Winter Soldier*.

Possibly the director was hoping for a return to form with 1997's Starship Troopers, a cheerful adaptation of author Robert A. Heinlein's most lurid fascistic fantasies that gleefully sent up the source material by simply playing it straighter than straight. It was, however, not to be - the cartoonish violence wreaked on squeaky-clean all-American child soldiers proved too much for the delicate sensibilities of the mainstream media, who presented it as evidence of Verhoeven's own moral degeneracy.

I didn't see Starship Troopers around its time of release - I was a sensitive kid who grew into a sensitive twentysomething, and its reputation for extreme gore was instantly offputting. Now, though, after nearly fifteen years as a professional librarian and amateur adult, most of the wuss has been knocked out of me. There were rumours circulating that one person's gratuitous splatterfest might actually be another's nifty little political satire, and I felt this merited further investigation. 

The good

Looking down at my notes for Starship Troopers, I see a lot of very telling adjectives. Joyous, for one, and cheerful. Gleeful features largely, too. Leaving all the weightier questions aside, I had an absolute blast with this one. Of course Verhoeven isn't the Messiah, but at his best, he's undeniably a Very Naughty Boy. 

The cast of photogenic teens do a perfectly serviceable job of smiling winningly and dying horribly, and when little else is required of them, who's complaining? Male lead Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien) is as square of jaw as one could hope for, one of the Commando Elite from Joe Dante's Small Soldiers made flesh. Disappointingly, the two films were released a little too close together for the resemblance to have been anything other than coincidental. 

The design of the alien bugs, however, is one I recognise from countless more modern video games; it's a good one, and bears repeating. Without faces or humanoid characteristics to make them seem sympathetic, they are mindless evil, leaving us with little choice but to sympathise with our protagonists even as beautifully-judged news bulletins slyly remind us of the deeply disturbing political climate within which they exist. The soundtrack plays along, too, with all the wide-eyed wonder of Star Trek as, say, a young pilot learns to pilot a ship which will soon be ferrying thousands of high-school graduates to their instant, messy doom.

This is a war movie that hits every single cliche during its fall from the top of the trope tree, and meticulously so. Every single box ticked is one more knowing reminder from Verhoeven about the monumentally disturbing nature of Heinlein's glorious military vision.

The bad

It's a Paul Verhoeven film, which means that graphic violence and gratuitous nudity are more or less an inevitability; whether this is a positive or a negative is something that comes down to individual preference. For my own part, I did find the second half of the movie slightly too relentless; I think it could maybe have stood to lose ten or fifteen minutes of troopers wandering across lunar landscapes and then being chopped in half, but obviously, your mileage is going to vary on this one.

While the alien menace itself is beautifully rendered, the space travel scenes seem to have received far less attention to detail; I'm not sure whether or not this was deliberate, but this sort of shoddy model work and lazy superimpositions look deeply out of place in a film released in the same year as The Fifth Element and Men In Black.

Not much to complain about on the political correctness front here - Heinlein's own universe was a meritocracy where colour and gender played second fiddle to loyalty and obedience, and this has been faithfully recreated within the movie. I was, however, disturbed by scenes of real-life bug trampling; cruelty is cruelty whether to a puppy or a cockroach, and somehow I doubt the roaches had stunt doubles.

The verdict

A big-budget B-movie boasting a brain beneath the buckets of blood, Starship Troopers is enjoyable on the intellectual level as well as the, well, visceral. It's probably not something I'll be coming back to in a hurry because I'm simply not that much of a gorehound, but anybody looking for a guilt-free cinematic rollercoaster ride could do a whole lot worse than to hunt this one down.

*See that? That's controversy, folks!