War satire was bonkers brilliance

Graeme Tuckett

When Starship Troopers arrived in cinemas in 1997, no-one had any idea what to make of it. If the critics had remembered that Dutch maverick Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Basic Instinct) was behind the film, maybe they would have thought a bit harder.

But the marketing was promising something like a Battlestar Galactica 90210, with a cast of impossibly buff 20-somethings doing battle with interstellar, err, insects, who are threatening all life on Earth by – no really – throwing rocks at us.

So much about Starship Troopers is absolutely bonkers, you really need to go back to its origins to understand how it arrived in the shape it did.

Robert Heinlein’s novel had been published in 1959 and it sold by the truckload.

The book centred around an army recruit in a future society called the Terran Republic.

On the page, Starship Troopers is a militaristic fantasy. But Verhoeven was having none of that.

Verhoeven spent his childhood in the Germanoccupied

Netherlands. He remembers seeing Nazi officers strutting outside his home – and also the bombs that rained down.

Verhoeven’s collaborator Edward Neumeier (Robocop) had written a script and the two old friends started turning Heinlein’s queasy source material inside out.

On the screen, Starship Troopers is just flat-out nuts.

Verhoeven cast it like he was making a weaponised Baywatch, with daytime soap actor Casper Van Dien elevated to a leading role – and actual Beverly Hills 90210 star Dina Meyer and former model Denise Richards as the two wa¯ hine toa fighting for his attention.

Of the leads, Meyer would go on to a smart and varied career. But Van Dien and Richards are just next- level here. Van Dien hands in a kind of KenDoll-but-without-the-depth performance that never gets old, while Richards takes turning-and-lookingat-things to a whole new level. All Richards does in the entire film is to turn – and see something. If it’s a bug, she is horrified. And if its Casper, or one of the other male leads, she will be delighted.

Richards parlayed this superpower into a lead role in the demented bonk-fest Wild Things and then as a nuclear physicist and Bond woman in The World Is Not Enough. Respect, I reckon, is due.

Meanwhile, Verhoeven and his crew were having all the fun the Wyoming desert could provide, parodying Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, blowing the hell out of the sand, the extras, a load of animatronics and just generally making the war film he had promised the studio.

Even while he was also pouring kids’ favourite Doogie Howser M.D. (actor Neil Patrick Harris) into a blatant Nazi officer’s uniform – as one of the ‘‘good guys’’ – and staging a mixed-gender, all-nude shower scene that was tougher to get past the censors and studio then any amount of dismembered human corpses.

Brilliantly, Dina Meyer told Verhoeven she would only do the scene if the director and camera operator stripped as well. Cinematographer Jost Vacano and Verhoeven immediately agreed and that R18 rating was assured.

Twenty-five years down the track, Starship Troopers is a hell of a lot of fun. I can’t even imagine how the critics of the day missed that it was a satire. I saw it when it came out and it was obvious to me even then. It is not the masterpiece some people have tried to re-cast it as – although I reckon Verhoeven’s 1987 Robocop is – but neither is it the nonsense that it was dismissed as.

Starship Troopers is an artefact of the 1990s. It is a mischievous, gleeful and funny-as-hell reminder of that time a mad, Dutch, blitzkrieg survivor came to Hollywood and reminded us all just how silly – and how serious – a war film could be.

Starship Troopers is now available to stream on Disney+.