I was recently listening to some of the previous podcasts and was shocked when I heard a great deal of hate towards Paul Verhooven’s rendition of Starship Troopers. How could it be that defenders of such camp classics as Xena and Transformers thumb their noses at what has to be one of the most insane social commentaries that ever countermanded it’s source material?
I first read Starship Troopers when I was 13 and was blown away by the action and the intensity of the events of the book. So when I heard that a movie was being made of it, I had to see it opening weekend. The movie was nothing like the book, but I appreciated it’s campiness. Eventually, I wasn’t impressed by said camp and turned away from the movie. Then I re-read the book and fell in love with Heinlein’s work. Then one day I found it on Instant Watch on my DVR and decided to show it to my girlfriend at the time. It was on that viewing that I fully realized what Verhooven was doing. And I realized that this is one of the best satires ever made.
First off, it needs to be said that Verhooven either doesn’t like the intent of the source material or completely hates it. The novel was straight-forward in it’s politics and how it sees the military as the arm of this fascistic world. Rico comes from privilage in both the book and the film. Heinlein sees Rico as the earnest young man setting out to become something. Verhooven sees Rico as a stupid boy who doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, pretty much joining up to stay close to his girlfriend. Heinlein shows the world of the future to be one of efficiency and strict class structure. Verhooven sees this as a facsade to hide the fact that the military is pretty much running everything. Notice how all members of the ruling class wear uniforms not unlike military officers. Verhooven uses a trick he learned in RoboCop, news and advertising features to expand this concept. Propaganda is in every frame conveying that someone else is taking care of the problem but you need to help out. And this is before the bugs.
You can tell that Heinlein was interested in using the boot camp to show his political positions, considering how much of the book details rules, structure, and the way of things. Verhooven isn’t interested in such things except to convey a pre-crisis system as a counterpoint to the way the system will behave once the bug attack happens. Heinlein uses the bug attack as a means to show off the lessons learned, a trial by fire. Verhooven considers the bug attack as a means to shed the fascade. Watch how the news shows veer drastically from playful reminders to do your part to a new more aggressive approach, making the war effort a political tool. When the first engagement occurs and humans are torn apart on live camera, notice how the media is still conveying the party line.
Now let’s look at the enemy; the bugs. Heinlein doesn’t give them a name because the enemy wasn’t important for his intentions. Verhooven uses the name both to convey the expected simplicity of their defeat (when you think of the word, you’re usually thinking of nothing larger than a cochroach) and the obsurdity of the threat. At best, this was a territory dispute concerning Fort Joseph Smith. Verhooven leads us to believe that the humans were simply using the bugs as means to rally humanity towards a cause. What they were not expecting was a real fight on their hands.
In a way, Verhooven was using Heinlein’s own work against him. He was making a dark satire in the same vein as RoboCop, except that after 9/11, Verhooven appears to have stumbled however unintentionally onto universal truths about political powers and the exploitation of tragedies. He seemed to convey a Bush America almost 4 years prior, showing a military where the leaders are incompetent and cowardly, gladly sending young men and women to their deaths for reasons that are not very clear. If Heinlein was presenting his ideal of what the perfect future will be, Verhooven turned it into an Orwellian dystopia.
