"Starship Troopers" - Film Review

Starship Troopers is a film that’s often hard to read. It’s intended as a satire but it’s satirical in a genre, sci-fi, that rubs up against this tone in strange ways. The film is so often peppy and upbeat in the face of its carnage and its macho action. This makes it sometimes hard to wonder whether you’re supposed to be simply be bemused or actually laugh at things. Enough content is played straight that it could be mistaken as serious. But it becomes clear from the strange interspersed “television clips” from the programs played in this far flung futuristic society (these are some of the film’s most hilarious moments).

Like other films by director Paul Verhoeven, such as Robocop, Starship Troopers is having fun at the expense of its excessive violence. The blood, guts and goo is played up for some delightful excess. The troopers find themselves fighting some villainous insect aliens. The film’s other excesses come in the form of society’s military complex which has come to engulf everything (fascistically so). Jingoism runs amok in the Starship Troopers universe. 

The film drags in spots, especially towards the end which repeats a number of earlier ideas to diminishing returns. But on the whole Starship Trooper’s satire is thoroughly unique and consistently funny. The production design is filled with intentionally chintzy and silly elements that add up to a sort of campy, lovable charm. Though because of how Verhoeven plays so much of the material, it’s often hard to know what to make of what we’re seeing, it’s at least never boring.   

Grade: B