Review of Starship Troopers (1997) by Rico F — 16 Jan 2016

I have no idea what this film was trying to be. The first hour offers genuinely great world-building [apart from the jarring juxtaposition of a white-out cast and a Latin American setting], and a truly gripping and unsettling allegory of military life and the horrors of war. The second hour does a complete about-face and turns the film into a gratuitous, glorifying war flick; a "satire of fascism" it could be argued, perhaps, but if this was Verhoeven's purpose he certainly doesn't make it clear enough, and can claim only a confusing, schizophrenic work. It's unfortunate that Netflix does not show ratings from RT or IMDB, as I frequently find myself hitting not completely terrible films, but really odd cases like this.

Perhaps the most useful thing I got out of watching this film was learning that it is loosely based on a novel by Robert Heinlein, and that Robert Heinlein also wrote Stranger In a Strange Land and is a bizarre pro-war fascist.