by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

Back when Starship Troopers first came out, I was 11 years old. I remember at the time that it was ravaged by critics. It didn’t do great at the box office. It was, for all intents and purposes, a disappointment. Audiences and critics alike seemed pretty unanimous on it just being a dumb movie.

I was sort of bummed, because I thought the advertisements looked cool. I thought it looked like a slam dunk to me. Hell, I loved RoboCop, and all the ads kept touting that it was made by the same guy.

Starship Troopers was kind of a monumental movie for me at that age, because it really did come out at a time in my life where I was just beginning to decide what it was that I liked. What it was that I thought was cool. And I decided, you know what? Fuck it. If it sucks, it sucks. No big deal. So, I rented the damn thing when it came out on tape and I. Was. Mesmerized. I loved every minute of it, from beginning to end.

Even at the time, I knew it was going over people’s heads. They weren’t understanding the satire. And even though I didn’t quite know what irony was, or I couldn’t define it in tangible terms, I understood that the irony was there–there was another word I didn’t quite know yet: Subtext. I knew the movie was more sly, smarter and funnier than people were giving it credit for. I’d seen enough giant bug movies on TV to know what the movie was satirizing. It was basically a giant bug movie given a modern budget, cutting-edge special effects (that still look great to this day) and left to its makers' wildest imaginations.

On a purely entertainment level, Starship Troopers is fantastic stuff. It’s so bright and big and brimming with life. The special effects, as I’ve mentioned, have aged very well–it’s not solely reliant on CGI. It has massive, complex practical effects, too. All of these elements are seamlessly integrated. The action is over the top, but never relentless. The sequences of mayhem and spectacle never overstay their welcome. The actors play up their hammy dialogue perfectly, and each role is cast so well.

Denise Richards doesn’t get enough credit for her skills as an actor. Here, and in 1998’s Wild Things, she shows a mastery of the craft. She’s in total control, confident and has fun with everything that’s been given to her. Casper Van Dien, I think, had all the makings of an action star. He was great in this and in Sleepy Hollow. That he never made it is kind of a mystery to me. He’s handsome, can act, and has a great screen presence. Oh, well. Cinema’s loss, I suppose.

It wasn’t until years and years later that I had realized how great Starship Troopers was as a piece of commentary. See, as a kid, I just thought it was a “brave space soldiers kill evil space bugs” movie–not unlike Aliens (whose own social commentary similarly also went soaring over my young head). I rooted for who I thought were the good guys, and wanted to see them defeat the bad guys. It had never occurred to me that the “good guys” were shitty fascists waging a war to spread their rancid ideology. Their uniforms, their coats–straight out of the SS. Their commercials and infotainment segments–pure propaganda. The beginning of Starship Troopers even touts earth’s ability to shoot meteors out of the sky, yet one is allowed to pass through these defenses and destroy a city to give the fascist military an excuse to invade and conquer a series of planets populated by arachnid aliens.

Starship Troopers feels more like a sequel to RoboCop than any of the actual sequels do. Not coincidentally, they share not only the director, Paul Verhoeven, but also the screenwriter, Ed Neumeier. It uses a lot of the same exposition techniques, as though we’re watching a television special about the series of events unfolding. We’ll see commercials and other bits fleshing out the universe, with biting, cynical humor. I’ll never not laugh at that shot of schoolchildren fighting over who gets to play with a machine gun.

Watching Starship Troopers as a kid was a great excuse to see soldiers battle bugs on faraway planets, with bloody results. Watching Starship Troopers as an adult, you can see the scathing commentary on how fascism is allowed to flourish. It flourishes in spreading fear, and by pushing the belief that the only cure for that fear is to give yourself entirely to the system. Starship Troopers knows the mechanisms of fascistic totalitarianism, and knows the power of propaganda. It sells its plot and its war against the bugs with pizzazz, and cutting-edge special effects. It looks so cool and it’s so entertaining, we root for these space Nazis. And then we’re taken aback by what we’re rooting for. But that was the point all along, wasn’t it?

Verhoeven is at the top of his game here. He has a lot of hits and a lot of misses in his career, but when he hits. Oh, man. What a wild ride.

What a fantastic movie.