When Paul Verhoeven’s gory adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 science fiction novel first opened in 1997, it was met with a critical broadside potentially more damaging than anything fired from the colossal spaceships seen in the film. Some airily dismissed it as big budget trash while others railed against the use of fascist imagery, the lousy acting and the extraordinary level of violence, dismemberment and gung-ho military savagery. Over time, its perceived faults have started to look more like strengths as it’s become increasingly clear that the film is in fact satire, and for the most part, very effective satire at that.

It’s the 23rd century and the United Citizen federation of Earth is at war with an unnamed insectoid species dubbed “arachnids” or “bugs”. From their homeworld of Klendathu, the bugs are firing asteroids across space to target the Earth and only a technologically advanced military machine stands against them. In this fascistic world, privileged citizenship is earned by military service and clearly too-old-to-still-be-there Buenos Aires high schoolers Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), his girlfriend Carmen Ibáñez (Denise Richards) and their psychic best friend Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) decide to sign up. Carmen becomes a spaceship pilot, Carl is assigned to Military Intelligence while Johnny joins the Mobile Infantry along with Isabelle “Dizzy” Flores (Dina Meyer), a classmate with a barely concealed crush on him. Under the tutelage of Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown) Johnny, Dizzy and fellow new recruits including Ace Levy (Jake Busey) progress nicely, Johnny earning rapid promotion to squad leader. The accidental death of a man in his command during a live-fire exercise causes Johnny to consider leaving the military but when an arachnid asteroid destroys Buenos Aires, killing his parents, he enthusiastically embraces the potentially suicidal military campaign against the enemy. An attack on the bug homeworld ends in disaster and Johnny, Ace, and Dizzy are reassigned to the elite squad “Roughnecks”, commanded by Johnny’s former teacher Lt. Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside). The squad are sent to an outpost on Planet “P”, where they become part of a mission to track down an intelligent “Brain Bug” that Carl believes is directing the arachnid operations, a mission from which not all of them are going to return.

Verhoeven’s use of what looks to be overtly fascist uniforms and symbolism was repeated mistaken – perhaps wilfully so – for some sort of endorsement or glorification of authoritarian ideals when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Verhoeven, born in 1938, had spent his earliest years under the yolk of Nazi Germany which had occupied him Dutch homeland and experienced for himself, at first hand, the real horrors of what extremist ideologies can do. It’s unlikely that he would have blindly included such provocative imagery had it not been for the express reasons of satire.

“War makes fascists of us all,” is the message that Verhoeven and his RoboCop (1987) screenwriter Edward Neumeier were trying to convey with Starship Troopers, the idea that if we keep being bombarded with militaristic imagery and start to believe that we’re fighting the good fight, then nationalism and totalitarianism can’t be far behind. The film isn’t glorifying fascism as some commentators have suggested – it’s warning us that in the heat of war, we’re all just one atrocity becoming fascists ourselves. Why is it that that so many real-life dictators and wannabe despots have provoked wars to foster jingoistic sentiments that prop up their regimes? The News Net inserts are both hilariously awful and terrifyingly familiar – anyone who’s seen Nazi propaganda from World War II can’t help but be chilled while simultaneously laughing at the absurdity of the “do you want to know more?” videos.

It’s suggested in the film that the war between the bugs of Klendathu and the United Citizen Federation began after human’s intruded on their territory and that the ongoing mayhem may all be the fault of the human race. Given that the human race is noticeably American here, it’s been suggested that the film is satirising American foreign policies over the years, particularly the then still-recent Gulf War. One can’t help feel that for all their savagery, the arachnids don’t want this war but perhaps the human race does.

Some of the charges levelled at the film could easily and more understandably aimed at Heinlein’s original novel, a militarist piece aimed at teenagers that has ben accused of sexism and racism. Still controversial in science fiction circles all these years later, the book was the last of Heinlein’s “juveniles” and despite all the dissent and in-fighting it’s provoked, remains hugely influential on that strand of written SF that trades in visions of future wars.

If they weren’t bashing the film for its perceived politics, critics were often sniffily dismissing it as trash, as though that in itself was a bad thing. Yes, it is trashy and unashamedly so. Verhoeven and Neumeier’s tongues are rarely far from their cheeks as they bombard us with over-the-top violence, have fun with exploitation conventions using a far greater budget than any exploitation filmmaker could even dream of and gleefully rip apart the cliches of war, action and even western films. The over-run outpost on Planet “P” will be instantly familiar from any number of B westerns about besieged forts and in 2018, Fabrice Mathieu, a veteran creator of video “mashups” created Far Alamo, splicing footage from films like The Alamo (1960), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) into bug attack scenes from Starship Troopers and its sequels, pitting John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef among others against the arachnid hordes (see below). For all its high-tech trappings, Starship Troopers is a curiously old-fashioned film. On the DVD commentary, Verhoeven said that “I’ve heard this film nicknamed All Quiet on the Final Frontier” and it’s certainly an apt comparison.

Verhoeven doesn’t take any of the madness at all seriously and that’s where the film really finds its form. The cast are terribly earnest – and often just terrible – but their po-facedness is crucial, echoing the deadly seriousness of the more gung-ho brand of war films of the past. Veterans Clancy Brown and Michael Ironside seem to be in the joke but it’s hard to tell if the younger cast members are quite as clued up on the film’s more satirical elements (Meyer gives the best performance from the younger crowd). Casper Van Dien looks good but lacks charisma as Johnny and his casting again set the cat among the proverbial pigeons – in the book, Johnny had been Juan “Johnny” Rico, a Filipino, and the film was inevitably accused of whitewashing. It was a deliberate move of course, Van Dien’s square-jawed, action man looks echoing something of the Aryan ideal and, curiously, few critics seemed bothered that he and his conspicuously white, All-American family hail from Buenos Aires in Argentina.

In fairness to the cast, the characters are mere cyphers but, in a sense, they need to be given how easily they fall for the propaganda and become brainwashed by the populism, nationalism and xenophobia peddled by the media into doing suicidally stupid things in the name of the glory of the federation. They’re useful idiots (pity the poor “brain bug” trying to find sustenance sucking out the brains of these simpletons), cattle fodder for the war machine (theirs is a society that has only become good for one thing – acts of violence against an enemy that none of them truly understand) and it probably pays not to get too attached to them emotionally. Ranged against them are the faceless hordes of the arachnids, a satisfyingly vicious species who will happily tear troopers’ limb from limb, fart giant starship smashing fireballs or spew red hot lava-like substances at all and sundry. For all the human’s technology and bombast, the bugs often have the upper hand – the initial human attack on Klendathu (“we thought we were smarter than the bugs” is a rare moment of self-awareness) is a military disaster of epic proportions.

Starship Troopers‘ mix of satire, gore, state of the art effects (most of which still impress today), cringey high school romance, propaganda spoofs and sheer barminess is a heady one ripe for misunderstanding. If taken at face value, then it is just a noisy, brash space opera with lashings of guts and entrails. In 1997, it was sold poorly by an advertising team that seemed to misunderstand it almost as badly as the critics – not a single piece of the advertising material suggested that the film was a satire, or indeed anything other than a straightforward war film and audiences perhaps couldn’t help but be disappointed.

Over the years though, the film has been re-evaluated, its satire more widely appreciated and though the initial box office was considered disappointing it’s become a firm cult favourite, leading to two live-action sequels, Phil Tippett’s made-for-TV Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004), which features none of the original surviving characters, and Neumeier’s direct-to-video Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008) which saw the return of Van Dien as Johnny Rico, now a colonel. A further pair of animated spin-offs followed, Starship Troopers: Invasion (2012) and Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017), and there was even a 49-episode animated television show, Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles (1999). 2011 brought news that producer Neal Moritz was planning a new adaptation of the book which, to Verhoeven’s dismay, was planning to stick closer to the far more morally dubious novel. It has yet to materialise.