Patron-exclusive: Starship Troopers

I enjoyed reading this

I just posted my comment and now I read yours. I am happy I wrote mine without reading yours, because I would not published mine. Fantastically worded and explained. Thank you!

Hi LFTS Team, I am so happy you decided to talk about my favorite movie director ever, Paul Verhoeven. I usually never write comments but listen to all your episodes, and I want to preface my long comment with a few things: 1. I am Dutch from a household of 3 boys. We watched Paul Verhoeven from his first Dutch tv show (Floris with Rutger Hauer) all the way up to his glorious 90s/00s sci-fi run and now in his French renaissance. My dad is a huge movie buff, our entire house is full of movie posters and to this day he still keeps a list of every movie he’s watched, including a star rating. 2. We watched Starship Troopers in the cinema when I was about 12 years old. The blood, guts, boobs and 8 year olds squashing bugs were firmly imprinted into my brain. My dad (a huge Verhoeven fan) absolutely hated the movie, that’s what I remember most. 3. My older brother and I thought it was the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen. We could not be convinced by our father, and we held our ground. We proceeded to rent it on VHS/DVD at least 20 times in the last 2 decades. I would love to give you a bit of background info about Verhoeven, his very Dutch approach to movie making and hopefully convince the rest of the gang that Trisha was 100% spot on in saying that Starship Troopers is 100% knowingly satire, including the Melrose Place flat lighting and wooden acting. I hope to do all of this without coming across like a fanatic or fanboy whilst doing so. When I listened to this episode it brought back so many memories and I just had to write something. To be honest this was the very first time I felt a bit frustrated when listening to an episode! Whilst listening I wanted to jump in in true “But actually…..” neckbeard fashion. I was taking a nice relaxing bath but something had to be done. I actually paused it half way, went out of the bath, made a double espresso and decided to write this comment. I do realize you literally watched the movie last night, and obviously you REALLY wanted to talk about Lady Bird. And that is fine. Totally fine. But listen to me when I say, Starship Troops and Verhoeven his entire body of work needs to be defended. And who better than a 35 year old, pasty white dude from the Netherlands jacked up on coffee to do it? (this is a rhetorical question, pls don’t answer) Now let me tell you what happened in the Netherlands when the movie came out and Verhoeven his interesting relationship with both the US and the Netherlands. Ok folks, story time.. When Starship Troopers came out Paul Verhoeven was already a spicy figure because he left the Netherlands to pursue a US career after a string of great movies that often got bad reviews. He got fed up with the Dutch movie critics not being able to pick up on satire, self reflection and the inability to look further than what’s shown on the screen (sounds familiar?). His Dutch movies did not focus on violence, facism and corporations, it focused on very Dutch social issues like sexual liberation, religion and “fake progressives” that clutched their pearls as soon as two dudes gave each other a little handy because they felt like it. He loved the closed mindedness of “progressive” Dutch culture and pointed that out time and time again whenever he did publicity for his movies. It was great! Eventually he grew tired of Dutch critics, and wanted to go bigger, using the same style of directing that proved to be so decisive in the Netherlands. By the time Starship Troopers came out he had won over Dutch critics because somehow they were perfectly able to laugh at all of those silly Americans who had no idea that they were watching satire. Glorifying violence into the extreme, making fun of deadly capitalism, shocking American audiences by showing a woman with 3 tits, it was absolutely brilliant according to them. When Paul took the time to tell them that’s it’s quite ironic that now he’s praised for highlighting what’s wrong with US culture, but got shat on by Dutch critics when he did the same about ours, there was awkward silence and the “Haha Paul, but actually now it’s more clear that it’s satire, right guys?”. Anyways Starship Troopers got great reviews in the Netherlands and I remember some great discussions on Dutch TV on how American critics simply did not “get” Verhoeven. They were too deep into their own culture that even the “WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE” commercials did not land at all. The fact that you had these beautiful young, picture perfect people who lived in Buenos Aires (most Nazis fled to Argentina, this is why Verhoeven chose this location) and getting caught up in these love triangles, whilst at the same time obviously being pushed into the meat grinder. For Dutch audiences and critics it was all quite clear and the intent of the movies for I’d say especially European audiences was clear from the moment it was released. The discussion centered more on Dutch critics complaining it was not subtle enough. They actually thought the satire was so obvious it lost it’s power, similar to how critics now talk about “Don’t Look Up”. Verhoeven did not agree and felt like he probably should have been more clear in his intent. He said he wanted wooden acting and soap opera scenes, and mixed shower scenes to make it clear that these young people were not actually living their lives, they are just puppets thinking they are living their lives. He wanted to draw direct parallels to Nazi Germany, outfits and all. He wanted kids being violent, happily squashing bugs with a smile on his face. At the same time he was already becoming increasingly honest in admitting to Dutch audiences that US culture was so violent and full of propaganda, he anticipated that it probably would not get picked up at all. Dutch critics (and audiences) could not phantom this. “They should be out having sex, doing drugs and being young, exactly the stuff you hated in my Dutch movies, instead they are getting being cut in half and their brains sucked out, for no purpose” he said on Dutch TV (obviously paraphrasing here.) Verhoeven turned out to be right and American critics shat all over the movie, and this also the end of Verhoeven his legendary sci-fi run. Let’s not get into that though, or else I might write a full blown novel. Anyways my point of all of this is.. I take GREAT OFFENSE with the critic Michael quotes. Paul Verhoeven, even in his failed attempts **cough Showgirls ** never ever does something because he has bad taste or poor judgment. That is completely dismissive of his filmography and his entire body of work has shown time and time again he’s uniquely capable of using smart, blunt, violent and sexual imagery to expose societal issues. This has been his entire spiel since his very first film. He managed to piss of Dutch critics, American critics and tons of audiences worldwide time and time again, whilst at the same time making some absolutely cold hard movie classics. Go watch his movies, see how incredibly visionary and smart they are, and realize to this day he manages to make movies that get people talking about his intent. That is not bad taste filmmaking, it’s brilliant filmmaking. It took me a damn long time to get there, but I hope you enjoyed my story. All to justify me saying favorite team of podcast creators something they need to hear “THAT CRITIC GUY WAS WRONG, AND TELL HIM TO GO WASH HIS MOUTH WITH SOAP” I absolutely love your podcast and if you ever want to talk about Paul Verhoeven, I’m your guy. Much love from the land of cheese, wooden shoes and prostitutes. Bowe

One of my true favourites.

Kodex

The trick that this movie pulls is genuinely brilliant, IMO. It tells you very blatantly in the beginning that this is satire, and that it's about media and propaganda. So you should have every defense mechanism up for what follows. Then the middle part is essentially just the propaganda itself, done only a bit tongue in cheek, and you can't help but be pulled into it. You switch your brain off, you cheer for dead bugs, you get distracted by the love triangle and the struggle and heroism of individual soldiers, and you like it. Then at the end it goes "notice how you cheered for the space nazis, that's how this works." Propaganda is not just lies, it's theatrics and sleight of hand, and misdirection. It slips in the big lies in the background while you're distracted by the shiny obvious thing on the foreground. The propaganda is not just the news clips, it's all of it. The love triangle is part of it. ...I feel people would understand this movie more easily if they understood that this movie is essentially what the government in the movie would make. That's why there can be no other POV. But I also think what the movie is doing might be more obvious to non-Americans, because we start with more emotional distance to Hollywood war movies. The movie is not doing "look at the space nazi's, aren't they evil and ridiculous" (like typical satire) it's doing "look at us"... but "us" is really USA and Hollywood, not really everyone, as the flavor of the movie in so many ways extremely American. (And very specifically late nineties Clinton-era flavor of "we're nice imperialists because we have liberal values!") A really good companion piece for this movie is Black Hawk Down, aka Starship Troopers in Somalia. It's basically the exact same movie done earnestly. (Minus the humor and soap opera, and with a modern style instead of parody of nineties teen drama.) The big lies about US involvement in that conflict are slipped in at the beginning and end. Much of the lying is just omission but the audience doesn't want to know more. The enemy is painted with extemely broad strokes with full "kick the dog" moments and often depicted as literal dark faceless hordes closing in on our handsome brave heroes. The heroism and self-sacrifice of the protagonists and the facelessness of the enemy stop you from asking questions about the waste of lives. The cinematography is great, the action is thrilling, it's fun to watch and ties up in an emotionally satisfying way. It doesn't leave you feeling like you want to know more. "It looks so real and much of it is based on real events, so surely I already got the gist of it, I don't feel a need to know more." (Also that would maybe make you sad. And maybe angry.) My special favorite thing to pick on BHD is when you have that one scene where they're supposedly humanizing the somali, the one "somali" with the speaking part does not even a little bit look like he's from East Africa. But he's black, so... that's all these is to African ethnicities I guess?

They do say that the bugs don’t have interstellar travel and they mention that a few humans have a dissenting opinion about the war. So there were more than a couple hints, to me, that the humans are the aggresors, wether or not there was an empathetic pov shift. I watched it recently not even anticipating this episode! Such a fun treat.

Jonathan Jones

Regarding casting choices, I saw this in the theatre and remember recognizing the new Sky Marshall as the actress who played the West Beverly High principal on 90210, along with three other actors who guested on 90210, and Doogie Howser.

andrew

https://www.redlettermedia.com/review/starship-troopers-review

andrew

Loved it! It was interesting to hear the opinions of people who had just seen it for the first time. My partner and I both grew up watching this movie (both our moms loved it an had it on VHS), so it's an all time classic for me.

Moonie

Excellent episode. I would like to know more!

Peter Desmet

Yesssss, it was this or wolf of wall street for me.

Jonathon Tankersley