I have trouble seeing Starship Troopers as an anti-fascist film?

lifa-cobex

Member
Is that really facist or just something that will happen when war is looming?

We’ve seen it in the past, and to me it just comes down to survival.

That’s the problem with these labels.
It’s like if we applied facism to staying home due to Covid, it’s something we had to do.

I can stick a knife in you to make a point.
All out war wasn't announced at this point in the film either.
He litrally put a knife through a caddets hand just to make a point.

We all did indeed have to stay home and keep our distance from our loved ones during Covid under the threat of arrest.
But the goverment didn't adhear to it.

I don't belive in black and white facisim. In comes in many flavours.
Here in the UK. We have very notible points that I would say lean into facisim.



The main parallel i'm trying to make out of these points are...
Fear those above you and don't question them or else.
These are somthing I definatly note as a facist doctrine.
 
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Cringe redditors like the writer and the director?
Correct. In his own Hollywood-addled mind he may actually believe he made a film that is some sort of profound statement about war and fascism. You need to understand that these people are generally out of touch with reality and are often in denial about their own artistic capacity. This is the same director that brought you Showgirls, by the way. In reality, Verhoeven made a popcorn flick about hot people killing bugs that incorporates elements of WW2 era propaganda in cheeky fashion. Or at least the studio saw to it that he did. You can't claim your movie is "anti-fascist" when the supposed fascists achieve a triumphant victory and look glorious as they do it. All you did was make a pro-fascist film. If you started with All Quiet On the Western Front, an actual anti-fascist book/film, and worked backwards to engineer the complete opposite message, you would get something resembling Starship Troopers.

Still never ceases to amaze me how people can watch this kino and sympathize with the bugs. Absolute broken humans. Please relocate to the bug colony at your earliest convenience.

K4VDKeD.png
 
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Hoddi

Member
Correct. In his own Hollywood-addled mind he may actually believe he made a film that is some sort of profound statement about war and fascism. You need to understand that these people are generally out of touch with reality and are often in denial about their own artistic capacity. This is the same director that brought you Showgirls, by the way. In reality, Verhoeven made a popcorn flick about hot people killing bugs that incorporates elements of WW2 era propaganda in cheeky fashion. Or at least the studio saw to it that he did. You can't claim your movie is "anti-fascist" when the supposed fascists achieve a triumphant victory and look glorious as they do it. All you did was make a pro-fascist film. If you started with All Quiet On the Western Front, an actual anti-fascist book/film, and worked backwards to engineer the complete opposite message, you would get something resembling Starship Troopers.

Still never ceases to amaze me how people can watch this kino and sympathize with the bugs. Absolute broken humans. Please relocate to the bug colony at your earliest convenience.

K4VDKeD.png
Bit of a red herring to say that people sympathize with the bugs. Verhoeven is also Dutch and born in 1938 so he probably has pretty strong feelings about Nazism that have little to do with Hollywood.

I also don't think it's coincidence so many people are talking about this film nowadays. Right or not, people think they see analogies and being worried about that should be a positive thing.
 
It's important to realize that Paul Verhoeven never actually read the book Starship Troopers and scarcely understood anything it was about

He projected his own feelings about World War II and Nazism onto the script of the film without know anything about the underlying source material

I like the movie Starship Troopers and still feel it is a valid satire of the "ideal militaristic society" that Robert Heinlein envisioned but it's important to not mistake it as a review, a criticism, or a work that supports or rejects the book because Verhoeven literally has never read it
 

violence

Member
It's important to realize that Paul Verhoeven never actually read the book Starship Troopers and scarcely understood anything it was about

He projected his own feelings about World War II and Nazism onto the script of the film without know anything about the underlying source material

I like the movie Starship Troopers and still feel it is a valid satire of the "ideal militaristic society" that Robert Heinlein envisioned but it's important to not mistake it as a review, a criticism, or a work that supports or rejects the book because Verhoeven literally has never read it
He never finished it. He claimed it made him very depressed.
 
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Since virtually nobody who has seen the movie has actually read the book, I'll just touch on a couple things about it and Robert Heinlein

The book has almost no action. The first and last chapters have actual bug fighting. The whole rest of the book is about Heinlein's philosophy, as told through the eyes of Juan "Johnnie" Rico as he goes through basic training. I might add that Rico was a Filipino in the book, he was played by Casper van Dien in the movie because Verhoeven didn't think a brown skinned dude would be credible in the fascistic society he wanted for the movie

Robert Heinlein was a Navy veteran who fought in World War II. He wrote Starship Troopers as a response to the growing anti-militarism of it's time (the 1950's) and it is something like a treatise on why a military is a necessary thing, for the obvious reason that defeating Nazi Germany is actually a good thing that happened in history

Starship Troopers, at it's heart, is a book about how nation-states tend to decay when it's citizens no longer are invested in the success of the nation-state. Does this sound familiar to modern people? It should. Modern nation-states are decaying today at a terrific rate

His proposed solution, such as it is, was to make it so you had to serve in the military to gain suffrage, the right to vote. This is properly represented in the movie as 'SERVICE GUARANTEES CITZENSHIP' and it reflects on his belief that if the people of a nation haven't invested themselves in some way and don't care about it, it's decline and fall is inevitable. The entire classroom scene in the movie, one of the few things reproduced almost verbatim from the book, summarizes this philosophy pretty accurately and straightforwardly

People today, including Paul Verhoeven when he made the movie, superimposed modern politics onto a book from the 1950's and tried to make it about modern politics. It isn't, and never was. It was about politics in the 1950's, and much of what is actually in the book reflects that time

If a reboot film is actually made today and tries to be about politics in 2025 and nobody understands what the book was about, it's going to be a piece of shit
 
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It's been a long time since I read the book but Heinleins glowing defense of whipping as effective punishment, how it's better in the long run for everyone felt really fucked up.
 

Tams

Member
It's been a long time since I read the book but Heinleins glowing defense of whipping as effective punishment, how it's better in the long run for everyone felt really fucked up.

If you can't take a piece of work a if its time, then that's on you.

And it's really rather pathetic that Paul Verhoeven couldn't go beyond the first chapter because it was too 'depressing'. It's certainly not some jolly, but to not finish a book your basing a film on...
 

jason10mm

Gold Member
-What about you, son?
-Infantry, sir.
-Good for you! Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!

>is missing one arm and both legs

What did Verhoeven mean by this
The implication is that while he became a proud citizen with higher access to government (voting, probably a pension, etc) it cost him parts of his humanity, physically manifest in his amputations. Service is DANGEROUS, either deliberately made so (notice how callous the training was?) or because the nation had deadly things to fight.

Wanna vote? Wanna enjoy higher responsibility? Well, you gotta put your life on the line and EARN it. Its a supremely anti-entitlement philosophy, which is why it's so at odds with certain viewpoints.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
Correct. In his own Hollywood-addled mind he may actually believe he made a film that is some sort of profound statement about war and fascism. You need to understand that these people are generally out of touch with reality and are often in denial about their own artistic capacity. This is the same director that brought you Showgirls, by the way. In reality, Verhoeven made a popcorn flick about hot people killing bugs that incorporates elements of WW2 era propaganda in cheeky fashion. Or at least the studio saw to it that he did. You can't claim your movie is "anti-fascist" when the supposed fascists achieve a triumphant victory and look glorious as they do it. All you did was make a pro-fascist film. If you started with All Quiet On the Western Front, an actual anti-fascist book/film, and worked backwards to engineer the complete opposite message, you would get something resembling Starship Troopers.

Still never ceases to amaze me how people can watch this kino and sympathize with the bugs. Absolute broken humans. Please relocate to the bug colony at your earliest convenience.

K4VDKeD.png
I didn’t say it was amazing satire, but it was an attempt at it and that’s not from Reddit it’s from the creators.

I knew the entire tone of the film is set by a clearly satirical “propaganda campaign” narrator who chimes in every 10 minutes.

I actually just watched the movie like a month ago and it’s mostly only enjoyable as an action film with titties and I agree there’s nothing particularly deep about it’s “satire” but it is…satire.
 

violence

Member
-What about you, son?
-Infantry, sir.
-Good for you! Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!

>is missing one arm and both legs

What did Verhoeven mean by this
Having not read the book I can only infer by what I’ve learned. The book is sincere in it’s message, saying “This system works and is worth defending” whereas the movie says “This system is ridiculous, look closer”
 
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GateofD

Member
Obviously that is what Verhoeven was going for....but

I have trouble of this "parody" of fascism when the alien bugs dropped an asteroid in Argentina killing billions and are hyper evolved killing machines. It feels like undermines any message of the film for me.

People/audience falling for the propaganda is what makes it good. Do you really think that a bunch of bugs heaved an asteroid thru space and it taking x how long to reach and finally hit earth? Do you think the bugs thru it at warp speed that the human starships have to go into to reach the big planets
 
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violence

Member
Not sure now if Mr. Apoc is trolling but this goes by so quick that it’s easy to miss. Bug world is on the other side of the galaxy. The precision and the amount of time needed makes it clearly a false flag. Lol.

2OBP3Ia.jpeg
 
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Trunx81

Member
Not sure now if Mr. Apoc is trolling but this goes by so quick that it’s easy to miss. Bug world is on the other side of the galaxy. The precision and the amount of time needed makes it clearly a false flag. Lol.

2OBP3Ia.jpeg
If I recall right they´ve sent the asteroid through hyper space.
 

Wildebeest

Member
Starship Troopers is a satire on Starship Troopers. The novel Starship Troopers itself had quite extreme politics and view of the world, and many people swallowed it uncritically.
 
Obviously that is what Verhoeven was going for....but

I have trouble of this "parody" of fascism when the alien bugs dropped an asteroid in Argentina killing billions and are hyper evolved killing machines. It feels like undermines any message of the film for me.
The federation and the arachnids are two cheeks of the same arse.

Space Mormons were breaking the quarantine zone. There is no compromise, one species has to become dominant eventually.

There is a clear caste/hierarchical system in play between both species. MI/drones on the bottom, sacrificed in the millions by the psychic military intelligence/brain bugs.

Rico turns unsettlingly bugmen/hive mind like by the end of the film, verbatim copying his teachers mannerisms word for word.

Humans are 'hyper evolved killing machines' like the bugs with it's society ran by military veterans. To keep it's regime and MIC going they end up feeding kids into the meat grinder on planet P, a species literally sacrificing it's young to keep the war marching ever onwards.

Great film.
 
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StueyDuck

Member
isn't it less about anti-facism and more about the American military-industrial complex.

Paul Verhoeven was very anti-America, which is why things like Robocop were about how much power corporations and police have.

I think like in many cases of modern "activism", he was a bit of a smooth brain and thought everything was fascism.

It was definitely a commentary on the US military though, 100%
 
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