Ill-Informed Gadfly

Pleasures rarely get guiltier or more pleasurable than Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent, tongue-in-cheek space opera. Hitler Youth vs. Space Bugs — need I say more? “Starship Troopers” is a sly indictment of fascism, peppered with excerpts from the state-run media that extol the superiority of humans over the massive, six- and eight-legged inhabitants of distant planets. The rallying cry for its soldiers is, “Do you want to live forever?” — the eagerness for immortality that characterizes believers in a totalitarian regime. In order to be a “citizen” of Earth, one must join the military; the rest are just “civilians.” Those who fight, the population is told, are a higher class of human, dedicated to perpetuating the survival of the species.

“Starship Troopers” doesn’t envision an Aryan nation, exactly — it takes place on a post-racial planet where the inhabitants of Buenos Aires speak flat, unaccented English. But Verhoeven casts actors for their European features — high cheekbones, thin lips — regardless of race. And he intentionally casts bad actors. Caspar Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Jake Busey — are these really the stars of a big-budget sci-fi epic? They’re beautiful and vapid and fantastically campy.

We’re better than the bugs, our heroes are convinced, but you get the sense that Verhoeven’s not sure. His ambiguity doesn’t stop him from crafting some of the first great CGI-driven action sequences in movie history (”Starship Troopers” was released in 1997). The movie is spectacularly bloody. The bugs use pincers and bladelike appendages to slice and impale; people are cut in half with alarming frequency. Oh, and the “brain bug” — the insect responsible for launching sophisticated counterattacks against the better-armed human invaders — inserts its proboscis into human skulls and sucks out the gray matter. The ultimate fate of the “brain bug” should leave no doubt that humans have devolved into a cruel and sadistic race — and fascism is clearly the root cause. The citizens may be saving the planet from the creepy-crawlies, but Verhoeven argues that humanity has already been wiped out.