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Starship Troopers (film)

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Starship Troopers is a 1997 film that tells the story of an interplanetary war between Earth and colonies of large insect-like aliens known as Bugs in the twenty-third century. It focuses on the experiences of Juan "Johnny" Rico, one of four friends who sign up to the military one year before Earth declares war on the aliens.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Edward Neumeier. Based on the original novel by Robert A. Heinlein.
A new kind of enemy. A new kind of war.(taglines)

Johnny Rico

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  • [addressing a reporter] Let me tell you something: I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say "Kill 'em all!"
  • [eulogizing Dizzy Flores] Somebody asked me if I knew the difference between a citizen and a civilian. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility. Dizzy was my friend. She was a soldier. But more than that, she was a citizen of the Federation.

Lieutenant Jean Rasczak

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Hold here! Hold what you got!
  • [to Rico at a party] Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom.
  • [to Rico after he destroys a Flame Bug] I need a corporal. You're it until you're dead or I find somebody better.
  • Listen up! I expect the best and I give the best. [opens pod and pulls out a beer keg] Here's the beer. [everybody cheers. opens another pod with sports gear and music equipment] Here's the entertainment. [throws football] Have fun. That's an order.
  • Hold here! Hold what you got!

Carl Jenkins

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  • [to Rico and Carmen after the Brain Bug is finally captured] We've got one of their Brains now. Pretty soon we'll know how they think. One day it will all be over. And everyone will forget that this was the moment. This was when it turned. It wasn't the mighty fleet, it wasn't some fancy new weapon. [they see the now-Private Zim being carried by the soldiers] It was a drill instructor named Zim, who captured a Brain.

Others

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  • Dizzy Flores: Mobile Infantry and Fleet don't mix.
  • Sky Marshall Diennes: [addressing the UCF Federal Council as it agrees to declare war against the Bugs] We must meet this threat with our valor, our blood, indeed with our very lives to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always!

Dialogue

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Jean Rasczak: All right, let's sum up. This year in history, we talked about the failure of democracy, how the social scientists of the 21st Century brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. We talked about the rights and privileges between those who served in the armed forces and those who haven't, therefore called citizens and civilians. [to a student] You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?
Student: It's a reward. Something the Federation gives you for doing federal service.
Rasczak: No. Something given has no basis in value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
Dizzy Flores: My mother always told me that violence doesn't solve anything.
Jean Rasczak: Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that. [to Carmen] You.
Carmen Ibanez: They wouldn't say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.
Rasczak: Correct. Naked force has resolved more issues throughout world history than any other factor. The contrary opinion that violence never solves anything is wishful thinking at its worst.
Ace Levy: Sir, I don't understand. Who needs a knife in a nuke fight, anyway? All you gotta do is press a button. Sir.
Career Sergeant Zim: Put your hand on that wall, trooper. [Ace hesitates] PUT YOUR HAND ON THAT WALL! [Zim throws a knife and hits Ace's hand, pinning it to the wall] The enemy cannot push a button... if you disable his hand. Medic!
John Rico: Hey, Kitten! What's going on?!
Kitten: War! We're going to war!
[After witnessing Dizzy trying to get Rico to dance with her after the day's action but he refuses and she dances with Watkins instead]
Lt Jean Rasczak: [taps him on the shoulder. Rico stands up] Rico, you once asked me for advice. You want some now?
Cpl. John Rico: Yes, sir!
Soldier: [to Rasczak] Lieutenant, HQ's on the com. [Rasczak nods in acknowledgement and the soldier leaves]
Rasczak: Never pass up a good thing!
Col. Carl Jenkins: You don't approve. Well, too bad! We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's simple numbers: they have more. And every day, I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths!
Cpl. John Rico: Didn't they tell you, Colonel? That's what the mobile infantry's good for.
Newsreel Announcer: We have the ships. We have the weapons. We need soldiers. Soldiers like Lieutenant Stack Lumbreiser.
Lt. Stack Lumbreiser: [aboard a warship] We're over the target area now, Captain.
Newsreel Announcer: And Captain Carmen Ibanez.
Capt. Carmen Ibanez: This is the Captain speaking. All personnel prepare to drop.
Newsreel Announcer: Soldiers like Private Ace Levy and Lieutenant John Rico.
Lt. John Rico: [to soldiers as they prepare to board dropships] Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?!
Newsreel Announcer: We need you all. Service guarantees citizenship.

About Starship Troopers (film)

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Militarism is another victim of Verhoeven's critical eye. There is no plan for the Federation forces. They are told to go in and kill anything with more than two legs, and when that invariably goes sideways they simply bring in more soldiers. The graphic scenes of the dead are an unwavering display of the horrors of war, a visual representation of the dangers of unchecked policy. The real kicker comes at the end. Whereas other films would have the main characters learn about the dark side of their leadership, even opting to fight against it, Starship Troopers' protagonists instead become part of the system, a vicious circle where they are now the stars in the propaganda. ~ Lloyd Farley
Heinlein’s book has been seen to suggest that “the best societies would be run by military dictatorships.” However, Verhoeven described Starship Troopers as “a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” ~ Darren Mooney
It’s a very rightwing book. And with the movie, we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be ‘Eat your cake and have it.’ All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’ ~ Paul Verhoeven
We were paraphrasing elements of Riefenstahl movies. Everybody seemed to be sculptures—I wanted these people to be like proto-Nazis, proto-Aryans. Their faces are kind of sculptures. So I thought to choose actors who would have streamlined faces, and certainly Johnny Rico has that. I think that was a necessity to make it believable to myself, the exaggeration. There’s no question, the bugs are fantasy and comic book-y! So if you use those kinds of elements, then you should be careful not to make your caricature around them completely real because they clash! If you have a caricature enemy you can’t have a very realistic protagonist. I think it was necessary to make them two comic book figures, that was the idea. ~ Paul Verhoeven
It was too difficult; I think they’ve never seen a movie, a really big Star Wars kind of movie with this message. I don’t think they were ready to accept the fact that the film was political. ~ Paul Verhoeven
  • When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers originally hit cinemas in 1997, the reviews were scathing. The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan argued that the Dutch director of Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct had delivered a space flick “rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence”, even suggesting that the film-maker had preserved the “fascist utopianism” of the 1959 Robert A Heinlein novel that it had been based on. “Troopers takes us to a militaristic future where video bulletins encourage young people to ‘Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world’,” wrote Turan. “Schools teach that ‘violence is the supreme authority’ and nothing solves problems with the efficacy of ‘naked force.’” The Washington Post described Verhoeven’s tone as “so inconsistent that it’s impossible to decide whether he’s sending up the Third Reich or in love with it”.
  • “It’s a very rightwing book,” the director told Empire magazine. “And with the movie, we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be ‘Eat your cake and have it.’ All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’
  • These days Starship Troopers sits easily alongside Verhoeven’s other sci-fi cult classics, Robocop and Total Recall, in a fabulous pantheon of futuristic, satirical silliness. Yes, these movies are violent, bloody, over-the-top and often hammily acted, but the director is very much in on the joke. Only an outsider like Verhoeven could have made films that overtly criticised the knuckleheaded excesses of 1980s and 90s American action cinema, yet somehow did a better job of delivering the era’s trademark trashy bombast than Hollywood itself.
  • Like his RoboCop, Verhoeven uses television clips and fake advertisements to take shots at society. But where RoboCop uses these moments to skewer Cold War politics and the American automotive industry, the ones in Troopers are more pointed. They are satirical extremes of military propaganda, showing happy citizens (not civilians), shots of children joyfully holding guns, all while pushing for enrollment into Federal Service. The ads dovetail into the depiction of a Nazi-like regime that is embraced and is working. The allusion to Nazism is so prevalent and over the top - from costuming to the use of a Nazi Eagle like symbol - that it clearly is satire to show the dangers of extremist policies, which somehow blew right past the critics of the day. Militarism is another victim of Verhoeven's critical eye. There is no plan for the Federation forces. They are told to go in and kill anything with more than two legs, and when that invariably goes sideways they simply bring in more soldiers. The graphic scenes of the dead are an unwavering display of the horrors of war, a visual representation of the dangers of unchecked policy. The real kicker comes at the end. Whereas other films would have the main characters learn about the dark side of their leadership, even opting to fight against it, Starship Troopers' protagonists instead become part of the system, a vicious circle where they are now the stars in the propaganda.
  • When Starship Troopers was released, critics panned it as a simplistic B-movie. Former film critic Janet Maslin called it “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys” in the New York Times. It’s not a totally unfair description of a movie in which most scenes involve characters being sprayed with lime-green alien guts. 
  • It’s hard not to draw a parallel with America’s 17-years-and-counting of engagement in the Middle East. What comes after the war? More war.
    This is a surprisingly radical message for a big budget ($100 million) studio film. “I don’t think that will be done again, a movie like that,” Verhoeven admits over the phone. “It’s so surprising that this was made. I don’t think anyone nowadays would dare to make a movie like that.”
  • In The New York Times, Janet Maslin complained that the film was nothing more than “crazed, lurid spectacle.” Roger Ebert described it as “totalitarian.” Reading those initial reviews, it seems as though Starship Troopers fell victim to Poe’s Law, the inevitability that at a certain point it becomes impossible to distinguish between an extreme example of a thing and a parody of that thing. Was Starship Troopers fascist propaganda or a parody of fascist propaganda? History has been somewhat kinder to Starship Troopers, as demonstrated by a slew of retrospective pieces that enthusiastically recognized it as “one of the most misunderstood movies ever” and a piece of social commentary that was “way ahead of its time.”
  • The layers that were there—especially with the most political movie, "Starship Troopers." It's never that we thought, We're going to do a representation of the United States as a metaphor. On the other hand, many elements of the movie came from American life ... it was all based on things that were vaguely there in American life. Especially in Texas and stuff like that ... but we never set out to do that. We needed something to put our point of view also there, you know? We don't think this is so great in anyway, this kind of, "let's go to war, let's kill."
  • 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!
    • Paul Verhoeven as quoted by Michael Ironside "Michael Ironside and Kristin Chenoweth". The Adam Carolla Show. 2014-11-13.
  • VERHOEVEN: We were making some statements underneath the movie. The peripheral layer is interwoven with the main narrative. It’s very much visible in the newsreels, which are all based on German fascism. I felt that this was talking about upcoming fascism, of course. Even the Germans, I would say 80 to 90 percent of the Germans, when all this happened, didn’t think that it was happening. You see all the newsreels from the streets of Berlin—they’re all of very happy looking guys or girls. They were not aware of the threats, the diabolical deaths underlining the politics of the government. At that point I did not feel, in all honesty, that this was really something of a possibility in the United States. Otherwise we would’ve been prophets.
  • VERHOEVEN: We were paraphrasing elements of Riefenstahl movies. Everybody seemed to be sculptures—I wanted these people to be like proto-Nazis, proto-Aryans. Their faces are kind of sculptures. So I thought to choose actors who would have streamlined faces, and certainly Johnny Rico has that. I think that was a necessity to make it believable to myself, the exaggeration. There’s no question, the bugs are fantasy and comic book-y! So if you use those kinds of elements, then you should be careful not to make your caricature around them completely real because they clash! If you have a caricature enemy you can’t have a very realistic protagonist. I think it was necessary to make them two comic book figures, that was the idea.
  • VERHOEVEN: It was too difficult; I think they’ve never seen a movie, a really big Star Wars kind of movie with this message. I don’t think they were ready to accept the fact that the film was political. You can see that it was political 15-20 years later, with all that’s happened. People have started to realize that a dominant layer of the movie was political. I thought it was very audacious what we did, but it didn’t pay off very well.

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022)

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Kenneth Lowe, “20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins”, Paste, (November 7, 2022)

Watch Starship Troopers through the lens of somebody in the world in which it’s set. Imagine you’re watching this as a denizen of this legitimately scary society. As Republican candidates for president in 2016 went on about possibly repealing birthright citizenship—a legal precedent established centuries ago that stands unquestioned in nearly every country in the New World—this a movie from 20 years ago paints a perfect picture of what a society without it would look like. The film’s newsreels and secondary characters repeat that “Service Guarantees Citizenship,” meaning that if you voluntarily enlist in the military, you are granted citizenship.
Nowhere in this sunny propaganda film of an action movie is there any mention of what not being a citizen means. This is a world where the fascists have already won. All society is geared around and idealizes the military.
It’s in Starship Troopers that Verhoeven does his job too well, essentially throwing a desperate warning at the audience that says, “The right action movie director can even make fascism look just this cool, guys.”
  • Starship Troopers has the most rock-dumb and dirt-simple plot of any science fiction feature in recent memory: Humanity is at war with gigantic creepy-crawlies from outer space, and a crew of determined youngsters must do battle with them.
  • But try this: Watch Starship Troopers through the lens of somebody in the world in which it’s set. Imagine you’re watching this as a denizen of this legitimately scary society. As Republican candidates for president in 2016 went on about possibly repealing birthright citizenship—a legal precedent established centuries ago that stands unquestioned in nearly every country in the New World—this a movie from 20 years ago paints a perfect picture of what a society without it would look like. The film’s newsreels and secondary characters repeat that “Service Guarantees Citizenship,” meaning that if you voluntarily enlist in the military, you are granted citizenship.
    Nowhere in this sunny propaganda film of an action movie is there any mention of what not being a citizen means. This is a world where the fascists have already won. All society is geared around and idealizes the military. In the film’s opening scenes, when Johnny and friends are finishing high school, we’re given glimpses into what this is doing to society. Their teachers are disfigured and unhinged war veterans. Michael Ironside plays an amputee who fills his students’ heads with war propaganda, flatly telling them that violence is the solution to political disputes, and maybe you should ask Hiroshima how being a peacenik works out, huh?
  • All fascism is about Us vs. Them at base. The most insidious regimes encourage this enmity not just toward other states, but toward other citizens. It’s in the film’s second reel, when the young cadets all head off to boot camp, that we get a few more details about who is the Us and who is the Them. Some of Johnny’s fellow recruits want to do things like have children or start businesses—but the government regulates all those things and only citizens are allowed, or at least fast-tracked to permission. If you aren’t out there sacrificing your limbs for the military’s dumb wars, you don’t deserve any of society’s other benefits. One of the cadets gives a little shrug—perhaps the same one you did when they imposed the indoor smoking ban in your state. That’s just the way it is now.
  • Even 20 years later, very few films’ endings have ever made me so completely question everything preceding them. It didn’t dawn on me the third or even the fifth time I saw this film that the ending is showing us that this has been, as I said before, a propaganda film from the opening shots. Are we seeing a movie that’s actually a dramatization of Johnny’s rise, starring some pampered actor and some disingenuous representation of the bugs? Is this the To Hell and Back of the Starship Troopers universe, with Johnny Rico playing himself, just as Audie Murphy did?
    I wasn’t old enough to “get” Starship Troopers when I first saw it. I found the violence shocking and off-putting as a teen. It wasn’t until later that the realization of why it’s such an ugly movie caught up with me. As a child, Verhoeven lived next to a Nazi military base in the Netherlands that became a target of allied bombings. The violence in his science fiction films is always brutal, but it’s the sickening sense of the characters being enveloped in a callous world over which they have no control that draws a line under the bullets and blood.
  • It’s in Starship Troopers that Verhoeven does his job too well, essentially throwing a desperate warning at the audience that says, “The right action movie director can even make fascism look just this cool, guys.”

Taglines

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  • Genocide doesn't compare to this.
  • Prepare for Battle
  • The paratroopers of the future are here... and their enemies aren't HUMAN
  • When you battle 6 trillion enemies that will eat you alive, there are only two rules... EVERYONE FIGHTS. NO ONE QUITS.
  • The only good bug is a dead bug
  • Mankind just became an endangered species
  • Forget the insecticide, bring on the nukes!
  • You can't step on these ones
  • In every age there is a cause worth fighting for, but in the future the greatest threat to our survival will not be man at all. Now the youth of tomorrow must travel across the stars to face an enemy more devastating than any ever imagined.
  • They came to our planet, they destroyed our cities. But on November 7, they'll learn, they messed with the wrong species.
  • This Fall, TriStar Pictures takes you to the front lines of the next frontier.

Cast

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