Starship Troopers

With the exception of Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven’s studio sci-fi extravaganzas are all slathered in sociopolitical satire, and this one is arguably the most overt, with Verhoeven, recalling his childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, saying in an interview:

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.

Starship Troopers’ fascists sure do kill a lot of huge alien bugs—and vice versa—and there are more than a few not-so-subtle hints that the militarized autocratic utopia they’re fighting for is not such a great place. But the film has always felt lopsided to me, its focus on action spectacle diluting its satire. If the runtime of maybe 20–25 percent of the frenetic, hyper-violent battle scenes had been instead devoted to additional ideological world-building, I think that might have been a better balance.

That aside, this is the first time I’ve seen this movie in a long time, and I was impressed by how well most of the digital effects hold up.