Midnight Movie: Starship Troopers

If the Third Reich had won World War II, pop entertainment would look a lot like Paul Verhoeven’s gleefully sardonic send-up of Gulf War-era jingoism — a poker-faced paean to the citizen soldier as propaganda-snowed meathead. Representing the forces of good, in a futuristic war for the fate of man, are human Velveeta sculpture Casper Van Dien, his bud Neil Patrick Harris (in a Casablanca Nazi get-up) and dozens of the most clean-scrubbed, square-jawed, expendable recruits you’ve ever seen. The baddies — brain-hungry insects so loathsome you may miss the minor detail that they’re not the aggressors — set about beheading, spearing, quartering, disemboweling and skull-sucking anyone within reach of their mandibles. (This was easily the goriest big-budget major-studio picture to date in 1996.) In much the spirit of their sci-fi satire Robocop, Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier (adapting a Robert A. Heinlein book) adopt the flag-waving tone of a 1940s rally-the-troops tubthumper, only to subvert the jollity with buckets of blood, pervasive kink and lip-smacking sadism. The movie wasn’t a hit when released, but Verhoeven’s berserk irony, coupled with all that ultraviolence, has made it a late-night favorite — and subsequent years of saber-rattling have only made it look better.write your comment