STARSHIP TROOPERS
Article by Steve Biodrowski
STARSHIP TROOPERS, like James Cameron's TITANIC, showed what Hollywood could do at its best: provide all the production value and spectacle that money can buy, while anchoring it to a solid piece of storytelling. Director Paul Verhoeven, working from Ed Neumeier's adaptation of Robert Heinlein's novel, created an exciting epic that exploited audience appetite for armed combat while subtly undermining the very mind-set that makes such violence seem noble.
Widely reviled at the time of its release for over-the-top special effects and violence, STARSHIP TROOPERS hardly seems so excessive after SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. The difference, of course, is Steven Spielberg was dehumanizing a human enemy (which apparently is morally okay), whereas Verhoeven`s bug enemy was inhuman to begin with. Anyway, the film cleverly undermines the right wing rhetoric of Robert Heinlein`s novel by apparently endorsing it (with an almost propagandistic zeal) and then serving up a heavy doses of irony. Or to put it another way, the first half will make you want to enlist (in what turns out to be a morally dubious war), and the second half will have you thinking, `Was I crazy to be swept up in this jingoistic fervor?` If anything, the film's theme became more relevent in the post-September 11 world, when the Republican part in general and the White House adminstrtion of George W. Bush in particular use propaganda and scare tactics to push the U.S. population into embracing an irrelevent invasion of Iraq War, with tragic consequences. Unfortunately, critics (and apparently many viewers) saw only a special effects show filled with giant bugs, but this was actually a tremendous achievement in science-fiction filmmaking, one whose reputation is steadily growing over the ensuing years. DIRECTOR INTERVIEW Part of the problem that STARSHIP TROOPERS seemed to have with audiences and critics alike is that viewers seemed to take it at face value as a piece of propagandistic battle porn, rather than as a subversive, satircal statement on unthinking patriotism. A few years after the film's release, director Paul Verhoeven addressed this topic during a press conference to promote his next feature film, the disappointing HOLLOW MAN. QUESTION: IN STARSHIP TROOPERS, THE AUDIENCE DIDN’T GET THE JOKE. PAUL VERHOEVEN: No, they didn’t. But they get it better now than when it came out. The way people look at STARSHIP TROOPERS has improved. There seems to be more interest and understanding for what they did. I mean, that movie would never have been made if there was a normal studio system operating at this studio [Columbia/TriStar]. It was because every six months the main guy left, until we got a steady regime now; but before that, four or five were in and out of the studio, and nobody really had time to look at STARSHIP TROOPERS. That movie, with the darkness and the cynical, non-Hollywood narrative where the best people die and the worst people survive—to a certain degree—where there is an intense criticism of Fascist society, be it European or even American, if you want to use that word, or Imperialism or whatever you want to call it—with all those levels that are there, that would not have been possible for the price that it cost if people had even looked at the movie more precisely. (If you’d have done it for $30-million, that would have been different, but that was not the price, of course.) We got the movie done, and it’s a really unique movie, for being so expensive. It’s not unique that it got made, but for so much money. PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS A JOHN MILIUS MOVIE, NOT A PAUL VERHOEVEN MOVIE. It was very ironic. It was basically saying, “Come on. Let’s do a great job for the Fatherland—and die!” THE VIOLENCE IN STARSHIP TROOPERS DREW A LOT OF CRITICISM, YET IT WAS ONLY A SHORT WHILE LATER THAT ANOTHER WAR FILM, SET IN THE PAST, WAS AT LEAST AS VIOLENT, AND DIDN’T DRAW THE SAME CRITICISM. OF COURSE, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN DIDN’T GET THAT REACTION AT ALL. DO YOU HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT WHY CRITICS WOULD OBJECT TO THE VIOLENCE IN YOUR FILM AS BEING OFFENSIVE AND YET SEE THAT IN THE SPIELBERG FILM AS BEING AN ARTISTIC STATEMENT? [laugher all around] You’d have to ask the MPAA how that film got through the way it was, and we had all the problems getting it [TROOPERS] through. But I think basically the rhetoric behind it is that STARSHIP TROOPERS is not true, and D-Day is true. So you can say, okay, so many people died, and basically nobody went to Planet P or whatever and died there. So if it’s not true, you cannot basically show someone dying gruesomely. If it’s true, then perhaps you can go much further, because you can say “These are all people dying for the Fatherland.”
