Starship Troopers

High school graduates Johnny Rico, Dizzy, Carmen and Carl enlist in the armed forces of the Federation. Training takes its toll, and Johnny is on the point of throwing in the towel when space insects wipe out his home town Buenos Aires. The infantry are dispatched to the outer limits of the galaxy to give ’em what for, but… you guessed it.

An adaptation of a Robert A Heinlein novel, this replays World War II as sci-fi spectacular — and this time we’re rooting for the Nazis. Verhoeven’s totalitarian utopia looks like a daytime soap: bright, clean, empty. And his lead players might be caricatures of Aryan perfection. It falls to Michael Ironside’s motivational teacher/commander, Rasczak, to whip them into shape (“If you don’t do your job, I shoot you!”). The bugs make up in numbers what they lack in charm, the scale of the battle scenes takes the breath away, and the violence is unremittingly gruesome. On the surface, this is grotesque, reactionary trash (which is how critics in 1997 saw it), yet by the end, when Verhoeven turns a giant brain-sucking maggot into an object of pity, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer perversity of the enterprise.

Intro by Marc Staehling

A jaw-dropping experience, so rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence it’s hard not to be astonished and even mesmerized by what is on the screen.

Kenneth Turan, LA Times

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