Paul Verhoeven | Starship Troopers | TriStar Pictures | November 1997 | 129 minutes

With the benefit of nearly 30 years of hindsight and a world of context, it feels downright silly to consider that Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cult classic Starship Troopers was ever considered anything other than a clear satire of the military industrial complex and the role of propaganda in military recruitment. At the same time, I myself forget that the film came out two years after Showgirls, not two years before. The argument for Showgirls can be made, but it’s a notorious enough film that it trained critics and audiences to doubt Verhoeven, despite his consistent record of harsh yet progressive film work from his early Dutch language film days to the Hollywood dystopian satire of RoboCop and Total Recall. Time has vindicated Verhoeven: even his most lambasted work has seen a certain degree of re-evaluation and despite his more than 60 year directing career, he is one of only a handful of legacy directors whose skill has not demonstrably waned.

But in 1997, some critics thought Paul Verhoeven made a genuine pro-fascist Nazi propaganda film. Satire is tricky: if you announce too loudly, point too long at the thing you are critiquing, it’s hamfisted. It’s tacky. No art wants to be tacky. Conversely, if you embody the thing you have in your crosshairs too well, there are people who will accuse you of endorsing the very thing you oppose. Starship Troopers was faced with the latter problem. Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel itself was decidedly not satire and genuinely fascistic in nature, and the concept of adapting source material in a way that is critical of that source material was highly uncommon, and the rights would simply not be signed over if the criticism was too obvious. Starship Troopers the film is Verhoeven trolling a conservative ex-military sci-fi author as tactfully as possible. On its surface, Starship Troopers is a high-budget low-art action flick with groundbreaking-for-its-time but poorly-aged CGI, copious amounts of gore, a stiff script supported by stiffer acting, and a veritable sea of modelesque Aryan youths engaging in silly interpersonal drama they barely seem to care about in-between risking life and limb for their planet/country/race/whatever. It embodies very well, plays the role of an emotionally hollow advert for the glory and benefit of genocidal conquest very straight. But Verhoeven scribbles just enough between the lines that anyone paying attention should feel unsettled by how accurately Starship Troopers portrays propaganda – not just immediately recognizable fascist propaganda, but the slyer variants in democratized nations.

Generically handsome wet blanket Casper Van Dien plays Johnny Rico, a man far less cool than his name and jawline would otherwise imply. Early scenes introduce him – alongside schoolmates Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris), Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), and Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon) – as the lore of this universe is established: the entirety of Earth is governed by a stratocracy that does not demand military enlistment, but withholds basic rights such as the ability to vote or start a family unless one does. Predictably, all five sign up: Jenkins joins intelligence, Rico’s girlfriend Ibanez and his romantic rival Barcalow join the pilot division, and Rico, along with Flores (who harbors an intense crush on Rico), enlist in the Mobile Infantry. None really enlist because they go in believing in the cause – the cause being a war with an interstellar species of Arachnids. Flores is there for Rico, Rico is there for Ibanez, Ibanez is there because she thinks having a ship is neat, etc. There’s a shower scene later in the film where the members of the Mobile Infantry each list off their reasons for enlisting. Only Ace Levy (Jake Busey) is interested in career military: everyone else either wants to go to school, or get into politics, or have children. The military is simply the only option they have in order to live the lives they want. And this situates itself between different militaristic approaches from nations. Despite the obvious unfairness, this practice is less harsh than the mandatory conscription under penalty of imprisonment that Israel’s IDF employs, though more exploitative than America’s still questionable practices regarding youth recruitment attached to educational funding.

The point is, for a while, the Arachnids are a sort of abstract means to an end for a 90210 set up. The military is just the next playing field for high school politics, and the battlefield is just a football game. Sex and social standing are the primary motivators for nearly all new recruits until the Arachnids somehow send an asteroid to Buenos Aires. That phrase, that concept, is so plainly, unabashedly ridiculous that it is something that should be questioned. But it never really is. And that’s one of those big yet subtle nods to Starship Troopers being fundamentally about the function of propaganda, as opposed to a film that simply nods at it or splices in more obvious segments. Nobody asks questions – certainly not any good, probing ones – in Starship Troopers. Rico is a jock – the entire Mobile Infantry has the same mindset. The pilots are like preps, and intelligence are the nerds. Even intelligence is incurious about their purpose beyond the eradication of the Arachnids. Individuals are trained to cultivate skills and strength and information, but never to think critically. And thus, the schools of Starship Troopers and the military of Starship Troopers – which are one in the same – function as a systemic propaganda machine. If anything, the more obvious propaganda segments are the distraction from the true social programming.

By the end of the film, two of our five students-turned-soldiers are killed in horrific fashion, while the other three are propped up as idols, thoroughly integrated into the military industrial complex as more symbols than human beings. While it’s difficult to empathize with any of the characters beyond the abstract – they are already quite programmed when we first meet them –  there’s a sort of haunting wonder that permeates throughout the film. What if these people were just allowed to be people? There’s a series I especially love, also based on a comparatively younger Japanese novel called From the New World. In that series/book, the characters are similarly written flat, to illustrate how societal control has stripped them of their humanity. From the New World shows the cracks in the matrix, gives the viewer/reader glimpses into what these people might be otherwise, and it’s painful to realize what was lost. Starship Troopers doesn’t show those cracks, at least not as obviously. And yet in its own way, that may be even sadder.

No glory is earned here. Jenkins uses his own friends as bait and shows next to no remorse. The true “hero” of the Brain Bug mission at the climax of the film – one of the exceedingly few Black characters – is swept under the rug as his glory is passed on to an old white guy who was in the right place at the right time. Eulogies are cold: characters don’t even grieve in healthy ways off the battlefield. Everyone is reduced to a fleshy, imminently replaceable cog within the war machine. And yet there’s still the spin. That’s the true, lasting horror of Starship Troopers that has caused it to endure across the decades. Anyone can show you something horrible and convince you that it is. But when death and dehumanization becomes aspirational, that’s the ultimate terror.

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Travis Shosa is a writer from Spring, TX. They are the EIC and managing editor of Dodo Eraser. Their creative writing is featured in Stanchion, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, fifth wheel press, HAWKEYE, Some Words and lots of other cool places. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, Spectrum Culture, and others.