Starship Troopers (1997)
Starship Troopers is one of the most misunderstood films of the 1990s and one of the most accomplished political satires in mainstream science fiction. The adaptation is loose in ways that have generated decades of argument.
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven made his name in the Netherlands with Turkish Delight and Soldier of Orange before moving to Hollywood, where he spent a decade making satires that American audiences largely took at face value. RoboCop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers are all extremely violent films arguing against the thing they depict, and the argument was widely missed.
Starship Troopers is the clearest case. Verhoeven, who grew up under German occupation, made a fascist recruitment film complete with newsreels and uniforms borrowed from the Wehrmacht, and reviewers called it a dumb bug movie. Its reputation has fully reversed since.
He returned to European filmmaking with Black Book and Elle, both of which are as provocative as the American work and were received as serious cinema instead of as trash, which says more about distribution than about the films.
