Starship Troopers (film)

Starship Troopers (1997) is an over the top liberal parody of Robert Heinlein's quintessential conservative science fiction novel, which attempts to satirize the ideas of militarism, and some political ideas, such as citizenship being given out by the government, rather than a right from being born in a country. It also satirizes the idea of who should be allowed to go to war, why people should go to war, and the intentions behind war.

For example, the nation's justification behind waging war against Klendathu, a planet populated by giant hostile insectoids, was designed to be shaky at best, yet the human empire, known as The Federation, go in with all the troops in, not holding back. Furthermore, the soldiers are almost all teenagers in nature, and fight for incredibly childish reasons. For example, Rico, the main character, justified the war by saying "my parents were in Rio!", the city destroyed by the loose asteroid. Even if the asteroid was fired by the insectoids, which is unlikely as the insectoids had no technology, the reason for war was retaliatory and for revenge. The intelligentsia of the government are further satirized as the main government official simply dismisses all arguments against him, and states he "finds the idea of thinking bugs offensive".

In addition, there were a lot of elements in the movie that had thinly disguised comparisons between the Federation and Nazi Germany, with the opening scene of the film even being modeled after Leni Riefensthal's propaganda film Triumph of the Will, specifically an outdoor rally for the Reichsarbeitsdienst, as well as various uniforms being modeled after the Nazi regime (including the SS). This element was deliberately intended to be such by the film's director, Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch leftist, who had an axe to grind against the book for being "fascist" and "right wing". When questioned by one of the stars, Michael Ironside, for why he made a film adaptation of the book despite the latter's politics, Verhoeven answered "If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no one will listen to me. So I'm going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it's only good for killing ******* bugs!"

## External links[edit]

* Starship Troopers at IMDb