It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe. In the bloody, satirical sci-fi films that made his name with American audiences, Verhoeven dealt in a singularly unappealing vision of the future, one both luridly inventive and careful about where not to be imaginative. “RoboCop,” from 1987, set in a futuristic Detroit, is a gleeful exaggeration of the anxieties of Reagan-era urban life: the office towers are even more isolated, and their boardrooms more brazenly sociopathic; the popular culture is a tick or two more savage and leering; the police are more overmatched and the streets more ungovernable. “Total Recall,” released in 1990 and adapted from a short story by Philip K. Dick, does feature humans living on Mars, a private company that implants bespoke memories in its clients, and a brassy three-breasted space prostitute, but its vision of 2084 is in other respects familiar. Mars is dirty, violent, and unequal, and the colony is overseen by the private security force of a capitalist who has staked out a monopoly on oxygen itself. Few directors who have spent as much screen time in the future have taken as relentlessly dim a view of the prospect.
Where “RoboCop” and “Total Recall” exist in grimy, crowded, dangerous futures that look and feel like degraded versions of the already degrading present, Verhoeven’s bizarre masterwork “Starship Troopers,” from 1997, is set in the more distant days of the twenty-third century—and, it quickly emerges, long after the end of history. “This year, we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos,” Rasczak, a history teacher (played by the Verhoeven favorite Michael Ironside), barks at his high-school students in an early scene. “We talked about the veterans and how they took control, and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.” Rasczak himself is a disfigured war veteran, as are all of his fellow-teachers, and their job is to steer their students toward enlisting in a galaxy-wide war against a species of giant, lethal bug. In this universe, humankind is divided into “civilians” and “citizens”; only citizens have the right to vote, and citizenship can be won only through “federal service” in the military. “Something given has no value,” Rasczak explains. “When you vote, you are exercising political authority. You are using force. And force, my friends, is violence—the supreme authority from which all other authorities derive.” Daily life in the Federation may be cleaner and brighter than in any of Verhoeven’s other futures, but every ambiguity has been displaced by the certitudes, coercions, and doublespeak of endless, totalizing conflict.
To defend the Federation, some suspiciously adult-looking teens leave behind their comfortable space-bourgeois youth for a chance to earn citizenship and enjoy some adventures killing bugs on a faraway planet. We meet them at the end of their school days in Buenos Aires, and see their arena football games and glossy proms: star wide receiver Johnny (Casper Van Dien) has a crush on Carmen (Denise Richards), who is interested in the rival football star and rising flyboy Zander (Patrick Muldoon); Dizzy (Dina Meyer), the team’s quarterback, has an unrequited crush on Johnny; Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) is a chipper egghead who might also be psychic. Everyone is beautiful and selfish and mostly awful to each other, both in the thoughtless ways that teen-agers are and because their society is designed to channel them toward awfulness. Each of them will find a way to serve the colonial war: Johnny and Dizzy join the mobile infantry (where a drill sergeant welcomes Dizzy to the unit by pressing his knee into her throat until she falls unconscious); Carmen and Zander win spots in flight school; Carl’s gifts allow him to disappear into military intelligence.
The Federation is, to all appearances, losing the permanent war, and much of “Starship Troopers” is given over to watching the teens as they fight and die for the cause. One of Verhoeven’s main goals is to depict a society whose fixation on force has left it preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak. This state manifests as endless columns of cultishly revered and supremely well-equipped violence workers who know how to do only one thing, and a culture that exists exclusively to celebrate their efforts. If it’s unsettling to recognize similarities between the crumbling futures of “RoboCop” and “Total Recall” and our own cultural moment, it’s terrifying how familiar the thudding martial beats of “Starship Troopers” are to contemporary ears. It’s a comedy, of course.
“It’s an idiotic story: young people go to fight bugs,” Verhoeven told the Guardian in 2018, long after the film, which met with puzzled and mostly negative reactions upon release, had undergone a full reappraisal and become a cult classic. Ed Neumeier, screenwriter of “RoboCop,” adapted “Starship Troopers” from the 1959 science-fiction novel of the same name, by Robert A. Heinlein; that book, which the director found “militaristic, if not fascistic,” was dedicated “to all sergeants anywhen who have labored to make men out of boys.” Verhoeven told Empire, in 2014, that he couldn’t finish reading it. With the possible exception of Mary Harron’s “American Psycho,” it’s hard to think of a film adaptation that’s more invested in refuting and satirizing its source. The anti-Fascism of “Starship Troopers” is mordant and merciless, but Verhoeven advances his argument by making its every frame lavishly, overbearingly Fascist. (When studio executives complained that the Federation’s banner was “a Nazi flag,” Verhoeven reassured them: “No . . . it’s completely different colors.”) The movie’s biggest laughs come from following ultra-hoary war-movie conventions to their most savage and illogical conclusions, but the whole project is stilted and off-putting by design. Other war films try to give viewers some humanity to hang on to. Verhoeven offers only sheer surfaces and one clenched fist after another.
And screens—lots of screens. The Federal Network has queasy affinities with Fox News, which débuted thirteen months before “Starship Troopers” arrived in theatres. Every machine-tooled chunk of media on the ubiquitous propaganda network ends with the words “Would you like to know more?” (More than YouTube’s algorithm bothers to ask.) The programming is strident and sappy in saluting the troops, and more ardent in its manic villainizing of the enemy. The debate-shaped play-fights on the Federal Network unfold along familiar beats. When a scientist suggests that the Arachnid enemy are capable of thought, her priggish interlocutor blusters, “Insects with intelligence? Have you ever met one? I can’t believe I’m hearing this nonsense.” Presented with evidence that “brain bugs” might inform the actions of the insect infantry that had just demolished the first human offensive against them, the bow-tied anti-expert pouts, “Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive.” The film’s climax-of-sorts also hinges on the bugs’ state of mind. When Johnny’s squadron avenges a fallen comrade with a heroic assault on a bug stronghold, Carl, now kitted out in full S.S.-officer regalia, uses his Federation-honed psychic powers to ascertain that humanity’s Arachnid enemies are now afraid. Everyone cheers.
Although Phil Tippett’s visual effects deliver some memorable creatures—the Arachnids attack in sudden skittering hordes, or erupt through the sand, or belch out punishment from pulsating blue bladders—the film’s broader loathsomeness flattens the impact significantly. The mobile infantry’s strategy amounts to blasting away at endless ravening waves of Arachnids, because their leaders persistently underestimate the enemy and because it’s all the space grunts have ever been trained to do. In short, the fighting isn’t much fun to watch—intentionally so, it seems. “With a title like Starship Troopers, people were expecting a new Star Wars,” Verhoeven told the Guardian. “They got that, but not really: it stuck in your throat. It said: ‘Here are your heroes and your heroines, but, by the way—they’re fascists.’ ” Verhoeven borrows from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda documentaries “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will,” not just in individual moments and shots but also in what is exalted and what is left out. The film covers Susan Sontag’s list of the ruling fetishes of Nazism, from her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” (“the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect”), but also slyly plays up what’s missing elsewhere. When Johnny wins a training exercise at boot camp, Verhoeven shows him triumphantly waving a flag in a backlit, low-angle shot, then matches it from another, more distant angle. The first shot is startlingly well-replicated Riefenstahl iconography. The second is just a square-jawed young jock on a platform, yelling.
