Starship Troopers discourse I haven't seen: it's a pretty boring movie

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.

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.

No.

Football. Boobs. Card Tricks. Coed Showers. Guns. Spaceships. Busey. Bugs.

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 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.

the action sequences fall flat to me, too.

To me it has slasher appeal, where I'm watching all of these intolerable fash kids and waiting for the part where they start dying. Very satisfying when the bugs start eating them.

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?

Everyone getting hung up on themes but the best thing about ST is the look and feel, aided by the blend of practical effects and surprisingly solid early era CGI. The behind the scenes stuff on how they did it is worth checking out, though not as amazing a technical/budgetary achievement as Robocop. Verhoeven is/was a whiz at keeping his spectacles visually coherent.

yeah for sure. i'll rewatch robocop whenever, but i don't think i've bothered rewatching starship troopers more than once

I guarantee it's spicier than the original Starship Troopers book. Every time I try to remember a scene, I'm actually remembering Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. That said, I do love the Starship Troopers movie so take my opinions with the appropriate salt.

Because it's not really a typical satire, right? It's an example of a movie that a fascist society would make.

That was Verhoeven's idea, but the whole movie is overshadowed by what happened later in history. The US went and lived Starship Troopers. At the time it was made, America somewhat mirrored the pre-Asteroid section of the movie. War with the "bugs" was much like news media regarding Saddam Hussein, and there was the lingering question of military spending in the post-soviet world. Then 9/11 happened and fiction/satire became real. French became "Freedom" and arabs were talked about like bugs from the movie. Hell I'm watching footage from Isn'treal today that would fit happily in Starship Troopers propaganda inserts. However Starship Troopers is locked in that post-9/11 stasis (post- but before The Surge), so we never see what develops as the conflict plays out. The ending is a propaganda reel featuring the main characters, so the text of the movie would be how somebody would become a character in such a reel. This might leave you thirsty for some more material analysis.

In my mind this is where Haldeman's The Forever War shines; he goes through many of the Starship Troopers beats, but with some time dilation he paints a whole civilization's arc over the conflict right up to the conflict's conclusion.

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.

Opinions change. It happens.

yeah I know I'm in the minority on this site for disliking Starship Troopers so I don't usually bring it up but I guess I'll vent about it here: If I hadn't had chapos going on and on constantly about Starship Troopers being a satire for fascism then the satire would have gone completely over my head. I would have just thought it was a dumb pro-imperialist action movie like so many before it and turned it off halfway through. And there really were a couple times I was watching it that I thought how the fuck is this satire, this is just the rhetoric I'm exposed to on a daily basis. To me that's bad satire. If someone who agrees with your satire doesn't understand your movie as satire, it seems like surely the satire has failed? Or maybe I'm just a dumbass idk.

But also yeah, sorta boring movie otherwise. But I'm probably biased because I don't like those sorts of movies anyway. I only watched it because everyone kept saying it was some great satire of fascism so I watched it mostly for the politics, which was disappointing.

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 enjoy it. The news cutaways are a big part of that, I think they're quite well done, especially when compared to news cutaways in other movies.

I like the bugs

There can be no peace between us. On that appointed day we shall meet on the flat and level plain before the mouth of Hell and do battle such that, by strength of arms, we may prove which of us is deserving to see the face of God and know the peace of eternal rest and which of us will be cast into the outer dark, an unceasing lonely soul, made to wander the void for all eternity, their mind their sole companion (I haven’t seen the movie).

Watched it again this weekend and was smiling and chuckling the entire 2 hours of the movie. Even noticed some new details that I didn't get before, like how Johnny basically accepts his role as meaty cannon fodder but still is all gung ho about it in the last 30 minutes.

Wonderful movie.

Yeah, same