In the fall of 1997, the Paul Verhoeven-directed sorta-adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers left filmgoers as overwhelmed and befuddled as the sculpted and coiffed cannon fodder onscreen. Time, interpretation, and critical reassessments have been kinder to the film’s satirical aims, while current events have made its fascist 23rd century look uncomfortably closer to our own reality.
Never ones to let a movie’s good reputation get in the way of good jokes, the crew at RiffTrax first earned citizenship by blasting away at Arachnids in movie theaters in 2013. Now, with a much smaller adversary posing a threat to humankind, they’ve signed up for a second tour of duty, remotely, following up their Stranger Things riff from July with a Starship Troopers encore conducted via the Scener app on Tuesday, September 29—right before the film leaves Netflix.
Asked via email what made RiffTrax eager to revisit Starship Troopers, Michael J. Nelson replied, “Three reasons: Casper, Van, and Dien. Or is it Neil, Patrick, and Harris? Really, though, it’s just the goofy elements and the fact that it’s also very watchable.”
That’s one thing that’s easy to lose sight of when appreciating the finer points of Starship Troopers: It’s still a wildly entertaining movie, one where Van Dien, Harris, and Denise Richards get armed to the teeth in order to fight big insects in space. “It has plenty of satirical moments, some of them really good,” said RiffTrax’s Bill Corbett. “But this doesn’t seem like a big recent revelation, especially if you know Paul Verhoeven’s other stuff. And there’s also plenty in the movie that is played 100% straight, particularly the long action sequences. So it’s not Doctor Strangelove.”
“Starship Troopers cannot be hurt by us,” Corbett said. “It will exist and will still be enjoyed even after we at RiffTrax are, inevitably, killed by giant war-bugs.”
Another key to Starship Troopers’ RiffTrax compatibility lies in Nelson’s comment: Star Casper Van Dien fits a leading-man mold that’s ripe for riffing. In the role of Juan “Johnny” Rico (who’s from Buenos Aires, and who says “Kill ’em all”), Van Dien serves his part in the same handsome, heroic, chunkheaded lineage as RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan favorites like Miles O’Keefe and Reb “Big McLargehuge” Brown. Though, as Murphy pointed out, Van Dien—who’s also at the helm of the RiffTrax feature Star Raiders: The Adventures Of Saber Raine—isn’t without his unique attributes.
“Subtler than your Van Damme, less meaty than your Gerard Butler, considerably shorter than your Dolph,” Murphy said. “And to his credit, he always seems to enjoy what he’s doing, even when he’s watching his girlfriend get skewered by a giant insect.”
Tickets for RiffTrax: Starship Troopers are now available; a Netflix account and the Scener Chrome extension are required to join the stream night-of.
51 Comments
Anyone else think that movie looks more like it’s from the late ‘80s-early ’90s than 1997? Demolition Man was released in 1993 and I think that looks more mid-late ‘90s than Starship Troopers.
I saw it when it came out and I had the exact same feeling then.
I’ve read people online say that it was intentional, thathe was going for a Melrose Place/90210 soap opera feel. I have no idea if that’s true but it would explain why it looks that way and why everyone looks like they walked out of those shows. I hope it’s true, I dig that weird movie.
The thrust of that argument is that you, the viewer, are watching an in-universe propaganda film that has been exclusively cast with attractive young people to make military service seem glamorous. I don’t know that Verhoeven’s gone on record as saying that’s the case, but I’m 99% sure that it is.He has said, at least, that he originally wanted to cast younger actors in line with the characters’ ages, but faced studio pushback. I think this worked in his favor, since you get the great visual punchline at the end of the movie when you see Rico addressing the new recruits, who are all played by actual teenagers in ill-fitting costumes.
I’m with you, I definitely think that was the intent. Barbies and Kens getting torn apart all over the place. I love the satirical elements of the script.
And Harris visibly aging during the course of the film. He easily looks 20 years older by the end of the film. War does that.With today being the 75th anniversary of the surrender of Japan, I’ve been looking at old photos and film from WWII. All these men look old, but many were actually young men. The stress of the war aged them before their time. Even the oldest of the generals and admirals were relatively young men in their mid-50s at the start of the war.
Verhoeven wanted to do a 50’s style big bug movie. Starship Troopers just kinda plugged in. I think a lot of it was mirroring the studio system of putting in attractive if not talented actors and shoehorning in a love story to fill in between bug attacks.
No.
We should remember that Verhoeven also brought us Robocop.
It seems to me like his sci-fi aesthetic didn’t change much in the next 10 years.
Not much. While Robocop was technically a sci-fi action film on the surface, everything underneath was a satirical commentary on America in the ‘80s.
That’s why I used Demolition Man as a comparison, since that’s another satirical sci-fi action movie.
I don’t disagree with you. Demolition Man certainly skewered the ‘90s.
Are they under the impression Verhoeven didn’t know exactly what he was doing when he cast Van Dien?
Or Neil “Doogie” Patrick “Howser” Harris?
Doogie Howser: SS
“They are killing ze girl tonight old man, you can saver her…”
You may be giving them too much credit. Who are they anyway?
Is this my hatred of Neil Patrick Harris talking, or does he get too much credit credit for what he’s doing in that movie? I get that he’s Doogie Howser doing decidedly un-Doogie Howser things, but he was just Okay™.
He’s fine. He only has like two scenes (…right?) and in the last one, his eeeevil black trenchcoat does most of the work for him.
I think he had three scenes: high school, briefing Rico before the mission to go after the Brain Bug, and the finale where he explains the finale to Rico and the audience.
I forgot about the training film. That makes four scenes.
Yes, I thought they were gonna belt out “Springtime for Hitler” in that garb!
I think all the credit should go to the costume designer who made the perfect ersatz SS Officer outfit for NPH to wear when he returns in the third act. It’s the ultimate “If you didn’t get the joke by this point, here it is” signal flare, and probably what people remember most about his appearance in the movie (Since he’s otherwise not in it very much at all.)
I think the lime in the Rifftrax at that point is something like: “for this of you who still aren’t getting it, NPH will deliver the rest of his lines in German”
He’s smarmy as hell, so he does what was required of him.
I would counter that Neil Patrick Harris is the only member of the main cast capable of pulling off the kind of performance that actually supports the film’s satirical aims. Van Dien, Richards, and the rest come across as earnest rather than deadpan, and that undercuts the entire thrust of the movie.
I’d say Harris is the knife baked into the cake of that movie, though a close second was the amputee recruiter.
This man gets it. The movie falls apart like a blasted bug without his character, and his juicily deadpan. His delivery of these two scenes alone are the satirical glue that holds the whole thing together:1) Carl: Your basic Arachnid warrior isn’t too smart, but you can blow off a limb… [shoots an Arachnid warrior’s limb off]… and it’s still 86 percent combat effective. Here’s a tip: Aim for the nerve stem, and put it down for good. [demonstrates]2) Carl: You disapprove? Well, too bad! We’re in this war for the species, boys and girls. It’s simple numbers. They have more. And every day I have to make decisions that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths.What’s up with all the NPH hate, anyway?
True. Van Dien was undoubtedly playing it straight. Richards was honing the persona she later put to use in The World is Not Enough. Harris indeed has comic chops. Just look at his work in Undercover Brother, the Harold and Kumar movies, A Million Ways to Die in The West, and his long run on—waaiit forr iit…—How I Met Your Mother.
Denise Richards also worked pretty well in Undercover Brother…And in Drop Dead Gorgeous.I think she doesn’t get enough credit. I say this as someone who didn’t particularly like Wild Things, but did appreciate her effort in Tammy & the T-Rex
I can’t believe i forgot she was in Undercover Brother! Yes, she was actually funny in it too.
Richards has a sweet pair of tits, which support the thrust.
Van Dien, Richards, and the rest come across as earnest rather than deadpan, and that undercuts the entire thrust of the movie.I’m not even sure it’s the actors themselves as much as their plot. I find the idea someone else mentioned that theirs is a Melrose Place-but-propaganda role that services the larger satire… but geez, that’s like 95% film. The Harris scenes (and various other bits) are obviously satire, but it seems like a pretty straightforward film for most of its duration.
I think it’s that most of those actors were breaking in through Melrose Place and similar TV melodramas, where the whole point is playing absurd situations 100% straight. Satire doesn’t have to be overtly comedic, but the performers do need to be able to walk a fine line that presents the characters as sincere while still cluing the audience in to the subversive aspects.
Verhoeven wasn’t going for an actual satiric/comedic tone though. What makes it work is that it’s played completely straight.
He’s making a satire, so yeah he is going for a satiric tone, if that’s even a thing. It doesn’t have to be comedic, but when it’s not just the characters but the actors who seem to be playing everything at face value that doesn’t work. It creates a jarring disjunction between the propaganda clips (which are at times, IMO, too obviously satirical) and almost everything else that pits the movie against itself.
What I’m getting at is that, like a lot of Verhoeven satires, Starship Troopers is not “satire” in the way usual way we think of it in America, where it is fairly spelled out and filled specifically with ironic jokes that give the game away. A modern remake under a typical American director would have to have a bunch of lines where the characters question the fascist nature of the whole bug-killing enterprise, and being responded to with quippy lines making fun of the fascist ideology.
Starship Troopers has to be mostly played straight because the whole point of it is that it is supposed to be the type of film that would be created in a futuristic fascist society. So it wouldn’t have helped to have a ton of jokes that create an overall “satiric” tone. The playing it straight is the point. It is intentionally repulsing the audience by playing all our normal fascist-lite film tropes completely straight, but transplanting them into a situation that is obviously atrocious to our usual sensibilities. The point it’s making is that we just casually accept all these tropes and fascist tendencies in our culture and don’t even notice them until they’re placed in another context. Even the action scenes are intentionally not fun or exciting to watch in a traditional sense. The jokey parts with videos give the game away just enough that the audience can hopefully pick up on it, but it wouldn’t have helped for the whole film to be filled with jokes, or even that tone. It would have defeated the actual point and purpose of what Verhoeven was doing.
That is not at all what I’m talking about. If you think I’m saying the movie has to be jokey and lampshade every point it’s trying to make then you aren’t even reading my comments. I’m saying that what Verhoeven was going for requires *deadpan* performance, and Harris is the only actor out of the main cast who was capable of it at that point in their respective careers. Van Dien/Richards/Meyer play their roles *in earnest*, which is a different thing and is inherently anti-satirical. That earnestness is also 100% consistent with their previous experience as primarily TV melodrama actors. “Earnest satire” is an oxymoron, which is why those performances undercut that purpose of the film.
We agree on Verhoeven’s intent. Ninja Robot Pirate somehow singled out NPH as the flaw in the film’s cast, when in actuality he’s the only one of the principals playing his part the way it needs to be played.
I’m not sure there’s as much of a distinction between deadpan and earnest as you think there is, but Airplane!-style deadpan or whatever would absolutely not have worked, because it’s still obviously in a “comedy” mode. Even with those movies, they intentionally picked actors who were mostly known for dramatic work, but it’s still actors doing a slight variation on their usual mode. And that’s not what Starship Troopers is. Its satire is entirely through demonstration; it needs to be genuinely believable that in some alternate universe this could be an actual “real” movie. It’s almost beside the point whether any of the performances are good (most aren’t), because in movies like that the performances are often not good either. Verhoeven has outright stated that he didn’t really care whether he cast great actors in it as long as they looked the part, because that’s the actual thing that matters when making the type of fascism-lite, white-power fantasies that typify so many actual blockbuster films and propaganda pieces. He literally wanted actors who looked like they could be in the Third Reich, or more specifically, a film glorifying it. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t played totally earnestly by the actors. And honestly I would imagine most of them did assume they were just making a big fun action blockbuster.
I wouldn’t say NPH is “wrong” for the movie, and he’s a good comic actor in other contexts, but I think in *this* film that actually is almost beside the point. Because it’s not even really a comedy. It’s a satire, which is not inherently comedic.
There is absolutely a distinction between deadpan and earnest, and you just will not stop adding things I didn’t say to things I did say so that you can argue against points I didn’t make, so sayonara
While I don’t share your dislike of NPH, he’s barely in this movie, so any credit he gets for it is too much.
credit credit?
I find that these don’t work as well when it’s a movie most people like
Like why did they riff on Carnival of Souls and a ugly colorized version at that. The movie is low budget but it’s still good it’s considered a classic it’s in the Criterion Collection for peeks sake.
Armageddon’s also part of the Criterion DVD collection…and it’s still the highest grossing member.
(Trying to phrase that in a way to exclude the Laser Disc era…)
I went to a theater simulcast screening of this when Rifftrax did it live years ago and damn near bruised a rib from laughing non-stop.“You’re it, until you’re dead or I find someone better”“Aww, those were my wedding vows”
Oh, come on! You left out the best line of the movie! Michael Ironside’s delivery of: “They sucked his brains out!”
I would argue that my wife’s favorite line, “The bugs set a trap for us, didn’t they, sir?” was the best. She laughed until she cried. 😂
Imagine being so racist to compare the bugs to immigrants. Imagine thinking some dumb action movie was predicting the future. Imagine not being able to enjoy older entertainment withou judging it from today’s perspective. Imagine being so sad that you must dissect everything through a political and racial lens.