It's packed with mock-earnest details, clichéd scenes so hoary that they should've sent flags flying for 1997 viewers: the homecoming football game, the sweethearts' graduation farewell, the lip-biting argument between the army-bound young hotshot and his parents, who don't want him to ruin his future. (The screenplay is credited to Edward Neumeier Verhoeven, for his part, says he tried to read the novel but got bored and tossed it aside.) In the film, a war-mutilated high school history teacher walks about the classroom dead-seriously extolling the virtues of naked violence, officers wear Nazi headgear, troopers freely paraphrase Hitler, drill sergeants regularly mutilate their troops to make a training point, and whole scenes and hunks of dialogue are robbed from the paradigmatic colonialist melodrama Zulu (1964). The subversive wit on display is startling. An ultra-conservative ex-Naval officer and vocal arms-race proponent, Heinlein had caught a lot of static for it over the years, but Verhoeven's movie, made over a decade after Heinlein's death, amounts to a flat-out rebuttal. Rather, the novel is an outrageous tract that rather unambiguously expounds the virtues of militaristic might, fascist order, violence and "earned" (not our Constitution's "self-evident" and "unalienable") social rights. There were loads of cheesy pulp novels intended for 12-year-olds like this written in the '50s, but Heinlein's book wasn't one of them.
They train, travel the galaxy, combat monster-bugs, mature, experience casualties, triumph. If all that isn't ludicrous enough, our protagonists are idealistic high schoolers hot to do their part: the jock, his bodacious girlfriend, the nerd, the opportunistic schemer, the dumb goofball, the girl who loves the football star but who stands silently aside. In this film's pointed but absurd idea of the future, the world has one fascist government, society is divided between the rabble "civilians" and the elite, vote-bearing "citizens," and the former can become the latter only by performing a term of service with the Mobile Infantry, an interstellar army devoted to battling "bugs," an alien race of house-sized arachnids who hurl their spore into space and thereby direct meteors toward Earth. All satire runs the risk of evading an inattentive audience and being mistaken for the very thing it mocks, but few American movies have been as extreme in their methods and at the same time as miscomprehended as Verhoeven's. What didn't dawn on everyone at the time of Starship Troopers's abbreviated theatrical run was that it was a comedy a vicious, all-barrels-firing piece of social satire and by far the funniest Hollywood film of 1997. (In retrospective interviews, Verhoeven agrees that audiences "didn't get it.") Word got out, ticket-buyers steered clear, and the film quickly vanished.
Audiences went gingerly during its opening weekend, expecting to have their baser instincts blandly excited, and were dumbfounded. That's definitely how it was marketed by a rather clueless studio (Sony/Columbia/Tri-Star), and that's how critics understood it both Roger Ebert and the New York Times' Janet Maslin dismissed it as gory, stolid trash. Heinlein novel first published in 1959, and featuring enough gadzooks digital imagery to fill a mainframe, Troopers had all the earmarks of a typically boorish, straight-faced trip to action-movie hell, all boom, boom, splat and aargghh. Whatever else it is, which is plenty, Paul Verhoeven's eye-popping 1997 epic Starship Troopers has to be the most misunderstood and underappreciated sci-fi blockbuster of all time.