Small note: This post is fairly long (but with lots of pictures!), and to read the whole thing you’ll have to click through to the actual substack site because gmail truncates messages above a pretty small length. Why? I don’t know, it sucks. But just click through and enjoy. :)
Context for those who don’t know: “Starship Troopers” is a cult classic Sci Fi alien-war movie directed by Paul Verhoeven, which centers on a group of Argentinian high-school kids who graduate and sign up to fight in the war against “The Arachnids” (Hereafter “Bugs”).
The film was a commercial and critical failure when it debuted in 1997, but has since stood the test of time in a strange way, and as the Milennial generation becomes the primary American cohort, it has found its place among the firmament of pop culture errata.
When I was a child, my grandmother had illegal cable that gave her all the PPV channels, and she would record Arnie and Sly and other action classics that I probably was “too young” to watch on VHS cassettes and send them to me. This was one of them, and quickly became a favorite of mine. VHS is now a forgotten relic, those tapes are gone, but the affinity remains. It’s been 25 years since the release, and because Hollywood never misses a chance at nostalgia, Starship Troopers has returned to Hulu. Thus, my wife and I sat down on Thursday to revisit a classic…
Let us begin…
(I remember thinking as a kid—”Is this movie about a guy struggling to poop and the two women it’s bumming out?”)
7:18 PM - Sitting down to watch this staple of my childhood for the first time in 20+ years, and I’m geeked. I unironically loved this movie when I was a kid, and it completely missed me with the satire. (It is satire, right?)
7:19 - Amazing expositional approach, just do the whole thing as a news report. The way it’s done is very 90s, but they still use this exact approach all the time. Direct reference to “Apocalypse Now” except they’re fighting Bugs so there’s no moral dilemma about it. It just dawned on me that Verhoeven (the director) is probably going to make lots of war movie references that went completely over my head at 14.
7:20 - And there he is. Good God is this man handsome. I even realized that when I was a little kid. Can’t remember his name but you gotta know it’s something like Johnny or Ricky.
(Just the chins in this movie are worth the ticket price, look at that thing!)
7:21 - Now they’re in class (28-year-old-looking-ass high-school students, I swear to God one of these actors is in his forties). The grizzled war veteran/teacher calls the lead “Rico” and I’d accept that as a macho-enough first name, but I’m pretty sure that’s his last name, which is just insane. Johnny-Utah-Level names in this movie.
7:22 - My goodness, Denise Richards. This movie definitely awakened something in me.
(I dreamed this dream for most of 1998.)
7:23 - Neil Patrick Harris plays a math genius who has trained his Ferret to annoy his mom, and I swear this man has not aged since 1997. Doogie Howser found a good plastic surgeon. Meanwhile Rico looks up his math scores and he scores a 35%—Infantry bound!—and his first initial is “J”. I think it might really be Johnny Rico!!
7:25 - I never realized at the time but the fact that this is all set up as being in Buenos Aires is so weird and unnecessary and (by today’s standards) problematic. Like these are all obviously white people! Just make it set in Los Angeles or whatever. But they go out of their way to make them all Argentinian for no apparent reason whatsoever. Just an odd choice.
(I looked it up—from left to right: Dutch heritage, French heritage, German/Scottish heritage. Buenos Aires seems like the obvious choice, I stand corrected.)
7:28 - I forgot how many great cliches they put in here! There’s literally a high-school-football game! Rico’s rival’s name is “Xander” and he literally says “All’s fair in Love and War” as they line up across the field from each other. This movie *slaps*.
7:30 - Rico, of course, vanquishes the execrable Xander, and wins the big game as time expires, after which we cut straight to him getting ready for prom, which is literally the day before he ships out for the army—unless his dad can talk him into going to Harvard! All this is hilariously on the nose, in a way that works great to balance the absolute weirdness of the world we’re about to be plunged into.
(Forget about Denise Richards not looking like a high school student, there’s multiple people in this shot who are clearly middle-aged!)
7:32 - The other thing about this movie is that it MAKES SENSE from a plot perspective. It’s weird and cliche in turn, but it’s absolutely not the least bit confusing, despite the breakneck pace of the setup.
7:34 - There’s also a weirdly muted sexuality at play here. They’re all SO hot, and they totally make eyes at each other and kiss, and compete for status, and the other accoutrements—in fact they’re all so suave and confident that it’s absurd to think they could be in high-school—but anything sexual beyond kissing is off-screen in the literal and metaphorical sense. We’re at the dance, they kiss on the dance floor like we’re in “Pretty in Pink”, there’s an extremely 90s dissolve, and they’re at military signups—where Rico finds out he’s in the Infantry, Carmen (Denise Richards) finds out she’s going to be a pilot, and Neil Patrick Harris (I didn’t get his name so he’ll be Doogie) finds out he’s been recruited to be a genius. They all swear to be friends forever and disappear into their separate life tracks without ever really discussing whether they’re afraid to die. Like there’s “Are you scared?” but nobody really *addresses* the fact that there’s a serious war happening. Carmen won’t even say she loves him until he literally tells her to do it for Pete’s sake! Weird emotional underplay throughout this first act that would never happen today, even in a satire.
(The amount of acting taking place in this shot is really extraordinary. They are acting so f’ing hard somebody’s gonna pull a muscle, and the war hasn’t even started yet!)
7:40 - Speaking of satire, the interstitial, satirical parts like news programs and advertisements for televised executions are the best, most vibrant part of this movie. Genuinely funny and weird and fresh after all these years. They’re also the only part of the movie that reads as actual satire—the rest of this seems really earnest.
7:42 - Basic training is ripped off from Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, down to the individual beats of the scenes. Then they go further though, and the Sergeant literally starts fighting the recruits! Honestly really hard to tell how old these people are supposed to be, a bunch of them were in high school yesterday and now they’re all like 20s and 30s and trained fighters. It’s all over the place but there sure is a lot of testosterone flying around!
(Every girl I went to high school with, a week after graduation—we were tougher before Instagram!)
7:45 - The one genuinely great emotional thread in this movie is Rico’s friend “Diz” deciding to join the Infantry just to try to get him to date her. It’s stupid, foolhardy, and we love her for it. There’s real pathos here and thank goodness cause otherwise this movie would have no center.
7:47 - Now there’s a shower scene, where they all talk about why they joined the infantry, and they’re all naked, and it’s still so weirdly non-sexual! Like they’re talking about their emotions and sort of talking about each other’s bodies and stuff, but there’s absolutely no sexual chemistry on scene at all. And it’s not like they had to tone it down, this movie is rated-R and earns it with insane gore and violence, but so far the characters have the sexuality of wet paper towels. It’s not like Paul Verhoeven can’t do sexy—the guy directed Basic Instinct!!)
7:49 - Hottest-Pilot-In-The-Galaxy Denise Richards shows her stuff by flying a spaceship through some tight turns. The special effects from the 90s sort of hold up better than some early-2000s stuff in my opinion, because they still just committed to models (which were a mature technology) as opposed to CGI (which wasn’t quite yet even in its infancy). Her acting, on the other hand… woof. It “doesn’t even not hold up” so to speak.
(This is from later in the movie but sums up Denise’s acting throughout.)
7:55 - Pretty bad lasertag scene there where they’re training, and Diz tells Rico to run a play from their high-school football team so he “can score”. Like, what? How? My God does she want him, though, like once Carmen breaks up with him, this movie might actually get sexual. Diz talks like she’s in a smartly-written porno.
7:58 - The emotional dynamics of this movie mystify me. Rico joined up for Carmen, and she breaks up with him, and he’s surprised even though it’s by far the most likely outcome of the situation. It makes sense since he’s a high-schooler, but absolutely *nothing* else—from the casual violence to the casual co-ed showers to the one-liner banter—suggests that he’s under 30.
8:01 - Rico gets a squadmate killed—they literally show his head getting blown off, like this movie could have some sex in it!—and he gets ten lashes (!) as punishment, and it’s like a 2-minute scene in the whole movie that (if I recall correctly) doesn’t ever come back into the story. It’s just like a Jesus-moment in the whole panoply of insanity that is this movie.
(There’s a Jesus metaphor throughout this movie, except it never really goes anywhere because the movie is literally, actually about killer Bugs.)
8:10 - Denise Richards genius-acting-moment: She’s piloting the ship for like the first time, and an asteroid almost destroys them and the ship is in an emergency but the Captain gives her some praise for it not being worse, and she grins like a five-year-old who just got handed a sweet even though they’re still in terrible danger.
(I don’t want to keep harping on how bad of an actress she is, but on the other hand it’s so fun to make fun of her and she’s a multi-millionaire so I’ll just go ahead.)
8:13 - Rico is about to wash out and quit the Infantry, but then a bomb from the Bugs wipes out the entire city he’s from, including his parents. I forgot how *brutal* this movie is—it’s freaking metal. Also Rico is like a Buddha, he takes all this without a tear and just goes back into the service and joins up again. It’s tempting to think of it as just bad acting, but it’s amazing to think of it as a choice to play the part as, well, basically Jesus.
(“If you’re covering my chin with this stupid strap then I’m damn well showing my giant teeth! HOW ELSE WILL THEY KNOW I’M ACTING?!?!”)
8:16 - The commercials are still the best part. Just so many good gags. Kids on earth stomping on cockroaches with instructions to “do your part”, and the kids’ faces are in rictus—the exaggerated smiles of a David Lynch film.
(Stuff like this is what people remember so fondly. It’s funny because they’re weird-looking!)
8:17 - The main characters do make their way around this war. They keep running into each other! It’s like 5 years have gone by but in the world of the movie it’s been like 3 months I think. The pace of this movie is incredible. They’re bar-brawling and then they’re getting tattoos and then they’re in space and then they’re in battle on a distant planet and it takes about 30 seconds. Still, we’re an hour in and they’re just going to battle for the first time! They’ve gone fast but they’ve gone a long ways, and hokey though some of it is, the characters are actually developed and it’s working.
8:24 - Boom! First glimpse of the Bugs and they look GREAT. I can see why people didn’t get the irony and satire of this movie, because it actually works pretty well just as like an actual war-movie, except it’s totally insane and in the strangest tone. Roger Ebert called it “The most violent kiddie movie ever made” and that’s actually fair—the personal storylines are all very child-like, almost saccharine. But it has an insane logic that throws into relief the fact that *wars are actually fought largely by kids*—though of course the movie betrays this premise by casting 28-year-olds in these parts, but you can’t have everything.
8:29 - That was a 9-minute battle scene that had about the same level of violence as “Braveheart” and ended with the implied death of the main character. Some kiddie movie!
8:31 - They showed the casualty lists from the battle and the main character is on there and they show his full name and it’s actually Johnny! LOL I can’t believe I guessed. I guess maybe I subliminally remembered but I swear it wasn’t in my mind, he just looked like a Johnny. Johnny Rico!!
8:33 - Not much keeps Johnny Rico down. Continuing the Christ metaphor, 2 minutes after being “dead” Johnny Rico is not only alive again, he’s striding down the hallway looking like a million bucks and you can just tell they’re never even going to mention the fact that he was just almost dead. Couple days in some kind of tank and he’s good as new, and in some new kind of unit called “The Roughnecks”. Finally, some tough guys! Will there be macho posturing? I sure hope there will be macho posturing!
8:35 - Well that didn’t take long—there was macho posturing. Now they’re killing Bugs with nuclear weapons on some other weird planet. (“Nuke ‘em Rico!” yells a character, and then *he literally does*.) This movie does not dwell on much!
8:40 - A giant bug comes up from under the earth, and the Special Effects are SO good! Honestly very impressed for the time. Rico kills it with a football move (“I was Captain of the team, Sir” *eyeroll*) and gets promoted to Corporal.
(For 14-year-old me, this was as good as it got.)
8:43 - At what can only be described as a Bug-Battle Afterparty, Rico finally realizes that since Diz is super hot and after him like a hooker, and since Carmen isn’t coming back and is a terrible actress anyway, his obvious choice is to screw while the screwing is good, and there’s finally some sex in this movie. Bizarre that it took so long.
(Not for nothing, but nipple play? This is the go-to move for these hard-bodied high school Infantry-folk when they finally get some “them time”? This entire aspect of this movie is so bizarre.)
8:44 - I think that what’s fundamentally weird about this movie is that it’s this war epic, that follows these characters from high-school students to grizzled war veterans, EXCEPT the acting never changes, the characters look the same all the way through, and there’s no real emotional range to any of it. Their *behavior* changes (Rico goes from less sexual and more interested in status to being with Diz just for the sex and companionship, with no status sought or available) but the whole time he looks like exactly the same dreamy, jut-jawed movie star, and he has about the same expression in every scene. He can do “angry”, or he can do “regular”, but everything is in one of those two categories. And all the actors are like that, to the point that it has to be a deliberate choice. Denise Richards looks like Denise Richards no matter what she wears or where she flies a space ship. Diz has more range but she’s a secondary character and unfortunately underwritten (she would be the main character today, and the movie would be better for it). But besides her even the secondary characters are static! It’s all character actors and extras you’ve seen in a million things, and they move through a landscape of horror and violence strangely *blank* to it all. The Bugs are a force they’re holding back, like a tide, and the injuries aren’t personal. It’s not tragic. It’s very video-game-like and exciting, and that’s why little me loved it so much.
8:53 - The movie is starting to drag at the end of the second act, as the dizzying pace just sort of fragments my attention. But now we’re at this fortress set piece that I remembered all these 25 years, and it’s still every bit as badass as I remember. They’re in an abandoned fort on a hostile planet, and they Bugs are closing in from every side, and you don’t care that the characters are flat because the *situation* is so compelling that anyone would be terrified. And then Denise Richards’ hot ass drops out of the sky just like we knew she would just before the Bugs overwhelm them, and even Xander gets a chance to be a hero for a second as he comes out and shoots at the Bugs. Sure, Diz gets killed right after she and Johnny got together finally, but as she says “It’s okay… because I got to have you.” (That’s some grade-A 90s cringe right there. Yuck.) Still, that scene kicked a generous helping of booty. More importantly, Johnny Rico is now in command of their unit, and we are officially into the third act.
(By the end of 1998 I had wargamed this sort of scenario pretty exhaustively, it was something of a passion project to distract from my lack of dating success at the time.)
9:02 - Neil Patrick Harris *finally* comes back into this movie a half-hour before the end. I had remembered Doogie as a bigger character, but he’s actually barely in this thing. He only talks for like 2 minutes, too. Not even really a character.
9:04 - Okay, woof, this is getting pretty tough here, Rico is giving a speech like his drill Sergeant gave him, except the actor that played the drill Sergeant did it way better and the comparison is not favorable.
9:08 - Rico himself is played by Casper Van Dien, whose career I had assumed killed by being in this critical stinker and box office flop. The only other thing he’s been that I saw was “Sleepy Hollow” in 1999, but his IMDB has 150 credits listed, so joke’s on me, the guy has worked steadily. Goes to show that the movies we all remember are the absolute tip of the Hollywood iceberg—most movies by far, you have not heard of.
9:11 - For fans of “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad” there are some fun cameos. Seth Gilliam, a.k.a. “Lieutenant Carver”, plays a mad-dog private who shoots into a Bug corpse until it fountains blood into his screaming mouth, and Dean Norris, a.k.a. “Hank Schraeder” himself plays a pissed off general or marshal of some stripe. Not surprisingly, they’re the two most believable actors in the movie.
(“They’re minerals, Rico!”)
9:13 - BRAIN BUG! BRAIN BUG BRAIN BUG BRAIN BUG! Poor Xander, with an all-time sci fi horror death—getting his brain sucked out through the forehead—that is definitely his best moment of the film. Somebody has to be the heel. (Also I guess the brain bug can just automatically speak English? Rico is holding a nuke and threatening it aloud, but he makes a “blow up” hand gesture as he spoke so I’m not sure what he thinks is happening, communication-wise. He looks more like a racist Orange County house-husband talking to his maid than he does a war-weary Argentinian 19-year-old. Still, BRAIN BUG!
9:17 - They blew it up with a nuke, but they were inside the cave it went off in, but they’re fine. We’re just not gonna think too hard about the science in this movie. They go outside, the army has captured a brain bug, Doogie comes down to meet it and communes with it for a second and literally reads its mind. The usual stuff.
(Did I mention this movie is freaking metal?)
9:19 - The question remains: What is the satirical premise of this movie? I’m trying to identify it. I want to be on board with Verhoeven’s vision, because there’s lots that is fun about Starship Troopers, but in order for it to deserve the cult reputation it’s acquired, for me it needs to have been a misunderstood piece of art. Like I can totally believe that the director was trying to do something subtle and the public and critics just missed it, but that needs to be the case. And I’m just not sure I see it in this movie.
9:24 - Discussed with Amy. She agrees about the lack of satirical premise. “Hokey” was her word, and it’s a good one, but also “it was a good movie”. It’s okay for movies to be hokey.
9:26 - It is a good movie. But it’s not satire. And the acting is truly awful. So why is it good? I’m going to sleep on it and write more tomorrow.
THE NEXT DAY - What’s great about this movie is that it just commits to being totally off the rails. Like there’s no pretense that it’s not insane, and they just invite you along for the ride of insanity and keep the pace high and put lots of pretty people and ugly bugs on screen. There’s no half-measures, and that works in cinema, even when the acting is terrible. But I don’t think it’s actually satire, I think it’s just a movie about killer Bugs. Also, this alternate poster owns pretty hard: