Paul
Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is an exemplary action-fantasy, frame
after frame overflowing with compositional exactitude and beyond-the-call-of-duty
detail; there’s never a moment of apparent corner-cutting, of Verhoeven’s
immense focus and willpower even momentarily faltering. If it’s generally
viewed (despite major defenders) as lying outside the top drawer of modern
genre classics, that’s partly because of the relative blandness of the
foreground, relying on somewhat blandly attractive leads put through
conventional narrative arcs of self-discovery. But that’s also the source of
some of the film’s most mind-boggling resonances: the sense of young and
inexperienced recruits thrown into situations for which they’re barely prepared
(and which, in some cases, they have little rational chance of surviving)
suggests that the war of the future, however technologically advanced, will demonstrate little moral or ethical advance on our brutal past (modern-day debates about
the propriety of drone warfare are beyond the movie’s scope). Even more
remarkable is the evocation of Fascism, most explicitly in the scientist
character played by Neil Patrick Harris (!), strutting around in black leather and
justifying any amount of human loss for the sake of strategic advancement, focused
specifically on sinister scientific experiments, all of this ultimately
presented as positive and virtuous, and intertwining with a bracing notion of
“citizenship” as something that’s no longer a matter of birthright, but that
has to be earned through various forms of service, most prominently the
military kind. The film concludes on a note of interim rather than total
success, which seems here less like laying the ground for sequels (although of
course it does that too) than leaving the viewer somewhat off-balance, with
every indication that the splashy celebration of military triumph will be paid
for in part with wrongs and atrocities elsewhere, daring us not to succumb to
the momentary sense of triumph.
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