I really liked Starship Troopers as a kid. Pretty sure I said it was my favorite movie for a time. Last year or so, I had the chance to watch it again with some friends, and I was excited because now I could watch it with my Adult Knowledge that it’s actually a satire of fascism. I was honestly bored out of my mind, and I wanted to turn it off halfway through.
Because it’s not really a typical satire, right? It’s an example of a movie that a fascist society would make. This kind of necessarily means that the movie needs to be trite and shallow. Neither the characters nor plot is compelling. Because of this, the action sequences fall flat to me, too.
I watched robocop the day before, and I actually liked it way more than when I was younger. I can also enjoy other satire of fascism like Warhammer 40k which I think is ridiculous enough to be fun.
I don’t know, it sucks for the people who genuinely uphold it as a fascist piece of art because… Damn, it’s really childish and boring when taken at face value.
Anyone with me on this? I honestly found it disappointing.
Yeah, that tracks. Robocop is a satire of 80s white flight and drug hysteria, but it has a plot, Murphy’s lost humanity, enslavement, and struggle to define who he is gives him some depth and pathos. The badguys are ridiculously ghoulish and over the top, everyone is chewing the scenery, the special effects are fun.
But with starship troopers, fash media is fash media, so once you get the joke, the impact is made and i can see how it’d lose a lot of it’s appeal.
For me, there’s a lot of nostalgia and quotability to it, that’s a lot of what I like, rather than watching it for plot.
fash media is fash media, so once you get the joke, the impact is made and i can see how it’d lose a lot of it’s appeal.
Yeah, I think this is it
when i was a kid and saw it i thought it was a satire or homage to 1940s era U.S. war propaganda movies.
but like same diff right?
I agree, as a piece of art I think it’s interesting, but as a piece of entertainment it’s easily the weakest of Verhoeven’s action films.
I was old enough to have seen it in cinemas when it came out. I didn’t, because the promo stuff made it look like generic sci fi garbage. All the chuds in my class loved it and I thought; yeah, not for me.
This was in a fairly backwater town in like '97, so the discourse around it didn’t go much further than that and I forgot about it for about 10 years.
Eventually one of the punks I lived with at the time gave me his sketchy bootleg VCD collection to go thru and there was a copy in there. I threw it on to see what all the fuss was about back in the day. I thought it was utter garbage until part way into the second disk and I realised that was on purpose.
So yeah, mission accomplished, Verhoeven.
No.
Football. Boobs. Card Tricks. Coed Showers. Guns. Spaceships. Busey. Bugs.
That movie is mostly remembered today by people going, “unlike you plebs, I knew it was a satire from the very beginning.” The actual movie is meh. It was cool seeing bugs owning humans in 1997, but in 2024 where I can just watch some SC/W40K/Halo cinematic of the zerg/tyrannids/flood owning the terrans/imperial guard/UNSC, the novelty is completely gone.
It was cool watching the fire bug destroy this dude’s arm when I was a kid, but why sit through mediocre acting when I could just watch Marines vs EVERY ZERG GROUND UNIT at 2x speed?
I’ve always loathed ironic, satirical movies that are supposed to be bad for intellectual reasons. A bad movie is a bad movie regardless of authorial intention imo.
I’d say Starship Troopers is on par with most war movie shlock. The bugs make for interesting setpieces, the love square between Johnny/Diz/Carmen/the other guy is fun to watch play out, there are a lot of memorable and funny moments. Yeah Johnny’s character arc of “becomes a fascist” sucks but it’s not like the average movie hero’s arc of “becomes a cop” is much better. Verhoeven was targeting Hollywood war movie slop and he fukken nailed it to the wall with a throwing knife - they’re almost all really shallow and childish, they just play at being adult oriented by having a lot of gore.
