So Bad They're Good: Starship Troopers (1997)

1 year ago

So Bad They’re Good: Starship Troopers (1997)

SHOOT A NUKE DOWN A BUG HOLE, YOU GOT A LOT OF DEAD BUGS

by Sarah Malone

One of my college friends used to do purposefully bad impressions of director Paul Verhoeven’s DVD commentary for Starship Troopers, his loose adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s novel. “I don’t know why people call this movie fascist,” my friend would say, sounding more like Inspector Clouseau than like Verhoeven.

Troopers follows a cadre of recruits in an interstellar war between humans and the insect-like Arachnids (“the bugs”). It was marketed as action-adventure, with a trailer set to Blur’s “Song 2.”

But if you’re looking for battle, you’ll have to wait for an hour into the movie. After a brief, bloody snippet, we flash back to see our protagonists graduate from high school and enlist in Federal service (humanity has been united into a United Citizen Federation). Rich pretty boy Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) has his cap set for ace student and aspiring pilot Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), whom creepy, telepathic Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) gapes at while teasing Rico about his low math scores. Carl also teases Rico about Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who pursues Rico with horrible awkwardness and mystifying loyalty.

All four look close to thirty and act close to twelve. They’re attractive, but not particularly appealing: Rico is whiny, Carmen scornful, Carl creepy, and Dizzy pathetic. But they’re such vehicles for exposition, it starts to feel as though the movie doesn’t care what we think about them. It needs them to populate its scenes, but in Troopers force of character doesn’t transform situations. Troopers has no equivalent of Lieutenant Ripley, Captain Kirk or Han Solo. Even Rasczak (Michael Ironside), the recruits’ high school history teacher, who later chews scenery as Rico and Dizzy’s commanding officer, gets killed in a bug ambush. He, too, initially serves as a vehicle for delivering political philosophy.

Where are the bugs, we think. We were promised bugs!

Science fiction epics often start with slow-paced origins for perfunctory characters. Doesn’t it take more to make a movie truly bad?

Oh, we’ve got more.

The science underlying the movie’s basic set-up is terrible even by big-screen sci-fi standards. Unless they practice cannibalism, the bugs—many-legged metaphors—are completely implausible; hordes of them populate identical planets, which are utterly barren and have no visible food source. The bugs have colonized multiple solar systems by hurling their spores into space, apparently achieving faster-than-light-speed with plasma they expel from their rear ends. We need to fight them, we’re told, because they’re hurling asteroids at us from across the galaxy.

Dialogue is bad, delivery wooden. When a bug meteor hits Buenos Aires (our recruits’ hometown, though the sections we see look like Malibu and downtown Los Angeles), Rico just happens to be speaking with his parents on videophone. “My, what’s that?” his mother says. “Sure is dark,” his father says. Oh, the humanity!

The human society, while imagined in rich and often humorous detail, doesn’t leave the impression Verhoeven seems to want. The United Citizen Federation formed when—as Rasczak conveniently recaps for his class—“the veterans… took control… and formed the peace that’s lasted for generations.” Federation uniforms are uncomfortably reminiscent of Nazi Germany. Only citizens can vote, and only veterans can be citizens. But despite its militaristic culture, the Federation has primitive tactics and weaponry even compared to… well, compared to us. When its invasion of the bugs’ home world finally begins, it’s martial and stirring, gray ships ranging over the planet while the bugs launch blue plasma barrages (from their rear-ends!) and the recruits show genuine feeling that the movie rarely allows them elsewhere.

But the fleet keeps in such close formation that ships collide when hit by bug plasma (and they seem closer-bunched in some shots than in others). The troopers have so little time to board their landing ships that they have to run (though the women troopers have perfect make-up). Once the troopers land, they stampede. They carry nuclear grenades, but otherwise have nothing heavier than automatic rifles, which they fire from a few away from the bugs, within easy range of mandibles.

Rico and Dizzy’s boot camp instructor is enjoyably tough, but Carmen’s fleet training seems straight out of Hogwarts. She flies recklessly, talks back, and gets rewarded with smiles from her captain and a relationship with her flight instructor (left vague, like most sexuality is in Troopers. Verhoeven risks an NC-17 with a naked shower scene, but the movie has a PG-13 soul).

Rasczak is presented as “a real nut-buster” of a Lieutenant. “I only have one rule,” he says. “Everybody fights. No one quits.” (OK, so that’s two rules). But in his high school classroom he seems pretty lax about discipline. Rico and Carmen exchange pictures of lovers on their monitors (using Fed Paint, the government-sanctioned descendent of Photoshop). Dizzy cranes out of her seat to watch. If Troopers is fascist, it’s fascist in fashions and rhetoric. “When you vote, you’re exercising political authority; you’re using force,” Rasczak tells his class. “And force, my friends, is violence, the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.” Fascistic-sounding, but what’s it a fascistic rationale for? For a limited voting franchise?

Also, male and female recruits shower together, naked. You have heard about this scene, probably? It is gratuitous, and got a lot of mockery and negative press. But in Verhoeven’s future women make better pilots (even if we have to put up with being described as “hot on the stick” and being told by our flight instructors that we anticipate them, and know what they want).

All this would be merely ham-fisted if Verhoeven was presenting things at face value. But he frames Troopers as a broadcast on FedNet, a sort of government-run cable news channel. The entire movie is a big recruitment ad.

Troopers opens with a parade ground, hundreds of troopers, with an enormous superimposed message, “Join Up Now!” Join whom? (The Mobile Infantry.) To do what? (Save The World.) What year is it? (The Future!) What’s in it for us? (Service guarantees citizenship.) The ludicrousness of some of the voice-over sections, and the excessive martial stylization, should make clear Troopers isn’t endorsing the Federation. Carl joins Military Intelligence and next shows up in a Gestapo-style leather trench coat. Then there’s the nonsensical explanation of the bug meteors, and a PSA warning about Arachnids with footage of a bug dismembering a cow. Though by then we’ve already seen dozens of gruesome human deaths, the cow’s death is marked “censored.” Thanks, Federation! In early scenes, all the veterans seem to be missing limbs or have prosthetics. “Mobile infantry made me the man I am today,” says the soldier signing recruitment papers for Rico, Carmen, and Carl, who of course don’t realize they’re in a propaganda film.

But if we’re supposed to be suspicious of and even laugh at the Federation, who do we side with? The bugs are genuinely nightmarish, monstrous, absurdly huge yet able to tunnel underneath humans and burst forth at any moment, slicing them to bits (what do the bugs do when they’re not being attacked by the Federation?) In such nail-biting, edge-of-our seats scenes, the movie’s politics seem irrelevant. We’re clearly supposed to cheer on Rasczak, and Rico, who uses his high school sports moves to destroy a giant fire-spitting ‘tanker’ bug, and Dizzy, who proved herself tougher and gutsier than anyone in boot camp. When Dizzy and Rico, of course, end up getting together, the catch in her voice saying, “I love you, Johnny,” is well-played and touching. She says it correcting his casual, “We finally got together, Diz.” He only smiles. In the foreground is his shoulder tattoo, “Death.”

In the next battle a bug skewers Diz. Verhoeven lets her live, and speak, longer than her injuries would allow. Watching her die is horrendous, but I was relieved for some sorrow to attach to. Rico’s anger and loss finally make him, futilely, come of age and stop asking for and needing others’ guidance. He requests bombardment of the planet. But military higher-ups have other plans. We watch his face angrily knit.

Does satire destabilize if we empathize with characters whose values we’re supposed to critique? War makes us regard our enemies as bugs, Verheuven is saying, as less than human… but what if our enemies really are bugs?

In the first short battle clip, we see FedNet’s war correspondent. “It’s an ugly planet,” he says, “a bug planet, a planet hostile to life—” And boom, he’s seized in bug mandibles. We hear his screams, and just for a moment the movie keeps him off-screen and his comeuppance is funny. It wouldn’t be, were he being torn apart by lions, or by an angry mob. But giant bugs? Starship Troopers wants to simultaneously shock and overwhelm us, prompt in us the very lack of empathy it condemns, and let us off the hook. This is all pretend, it’s saying. Just giant bugs and over-the-top cable news. Let’s sit back and watch some killer CG animation!

Maybe this accounts for the viscerally negative response so many people have to Starship Troopers. Instead of accessing our empathetic imagination, it wants to shut something down. It makes us feel despite itself. It’s a postmodern pastiche, part satire and part war movie. It wants us to revolt from the sentiments that send us to war, but it wants us to enjoy the fighting.

But how much of what we’re shown is even “true”? We have only FedNet to go on. The movie ends abruptly when the humans, guided by telepathic Carl, capture a Brain Bug. Brain vs. brain! “Now we can learn how they think,” Carl says. Cut to Captain Carmen Ibanez (the previous captain has been killed) and Lieutenant Rico (Rasczak has been dead).

What if Verheuven has really been showing us 1984? Not a drab post-WWII London version, but a shiny morning in America version?

I remember two reactions from people leaving the theater after Troopers: frustration, that we didn’t see a conclusive battle, and derision for its Nazi get-up. But would we have called the movie fascist without it?

Sarah Malone writes fiction and teaches composition. She tumbls here.