Starship Troopers (film): Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''Join the Mobile Infantry and save the galaxy. Service Guarantees Citizenship! Would you like to know more?''}}
The Paul Verhoeven film is generally considered to be the biggest [[Flipping the Bird|middle finger]] the [[Starship Troopers (novel)|novel]] will ever receive, and that is no accident. It's a satire of militarism, the Cold War, dehumanization of the enemy, war movies, propaganda and military sci-fi in general. It originally started out as an unrelated script called ''Bug Hunt'', before the studio acquired the rights to the novel and rewrote the script to accommodate it. The film was intentionally designed as the polar opposite of the book in terms of message, characterization, and
There was a direct to video sequel or two, with [[Puppeteer Parasite]] in the form of brain-eating Control Bugs and the introduction of [[Powered Armor]] and religious subtext (respectively). They can be viewed on Hulu.
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* [[Artificial Limbs]]: Rasczak's mechanical left hand.
* [[Artistic License: Biology]]: In a Biology class in the beginning of the film, the teacher refers to the Bugs as both "arachnids" and "insects." Moments later, she calls up a holographic image of one. It only has four legs.
* [[Ascended Extra]]: Male!Dizzy was a [[Sacrificial Lamb]] for the first scene of the novel; Carl was killed
* [[Author Tract]]: According to his commentary, almost every scene was supposed to convey some sort of social or political message.
** If you're aware of who director Paul Verhoeven is, you already know [[Anvilicious|he didn't need to point that out]].
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** Happens in the third movie, but most of the time is spent focusing on the survivors, and [[The Cavalry]] preparing their [[Humongous Mecha]] for the rescue mission.
** A fake [[Distress Call]] is sent out in the first movie. While the grunts never saw it coming, it was in fact, an [[Obvious Trap]] to Intelligence, who [[Deliberately Triggering the Trap|tripped it with aforementioned grunts to see if there was a brain bug on the planet.]]
* [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing]]: Played with. The exciting battle scenes seem to undermine Verhoeven's supposed message, but most of the soldiers still die agonizingly horrible deaths. But the trope itself is also a large part of the message, the unsavory elements of the war and its reasons are referenced by people trying to downplay or or distract from those elements. It combines [[War Is Glorious]] with [[Humans Are
** It also doesn't help that the Federation is portrayed, for the most part, in an extremely positive light, and the Bugs are portrayed in an extremely evil light. It should be noted that this is intentional, to demonstrate the propaganda that has infiltrated every aspect of society.
* [[Doomed Hometown]]: Buenos Aires.
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* [[Hand Signals]]: Lieutenant Rascak uses them while approaching the outpost on Planet P.
* [[Hive Caste System]]
* [[Hollywood Tactics]]: The tactics and military conduct in this movie are ''so'' bad that it makes you think they're deliberately trying to lose,<ref>[[Wild Mass Guessing|some theorize that this is indeed the case]]</ref>
** Let's count:
*** Ships parked shoulder-to-shoulder in orbit? Check.
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** When the people on the ship notice the giant asteroid heading toward Earth, rather than firing their rockets immediately to get out of the way, they wait until the last possible second to dodge out of the way of the giant, seemingly unguided asteroid, which clips off a large part of the ship. Despite this, the captain of the ship compliments the pilot as the best damn pilot in the fleet, instead of telling her she's an incompetent screw-up and a showoff that got a bunch of people needlessly killed. She's also never court-martialed, demoted, or even reprimanded for nearly killing hundreds of people and causing millions in damage by recklessly flying out an interstellar spaceship from spacedock in ''her first ever piloting duty'', an action she even has the nerve to laugh off right afterwards.
** Briefly averted in the third film, where Colonel Rico rallies his troops and they make the best of their weapons and terrain (using grenade launchers to force the bugs back while the troopers advanced, with troopers walking along the tops of the trenches to give them covering fire). Indeed, his defense of Roku San proved to be quite effective, until {{spoiler|the perimeter defenses were shut down by [[The Mole]]}}. Later, the military's introduction of mech units proves to be a vast improvement as well.
* [[Humans Are
** This may go so far as being [[Anvilicious]] or a [[Take That]] since the obligatory colony that gets annihilated by the bugs is a ''Mormon'' colony named Port Joe Smith which was apparently set up in bug territory against Colonial authority.
* [[Humongous Mecha]]: In the third movie. FINALLY! And while they used [[Hollywood Tactics]] when using them, they did much, much better than how the grunts did normally in the films.
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* [[New Meat]]: Used quite a bit. A common phrase used to refer to new recruits is "fresh meat for the grinder". Quite funny, in a horrible sort of way. In the sequel a soldier says "Grow up big and strong, we need fresh meat for the grinder" to a newly-born child ''in the arms of its mother''. Upon receiving new arrivals at the end of the first one (early reminiscent of [[World War II]] footage of the Nazis throwing in [[Child Soldiers]] by the end of the war), Rico asks "Who are all these kids?", the reply being "we just got 'reinforced'". Upon this he quips that they ([[Dawson Casting|20-year old soldiers]]) are the "old men" now before proceeding to give them the exact same speech the unit commander he replaced did when he, Ace, and Dizzy joined the unit.
* [[No New Fashions in the Future]]
* [[Nuke'Em]]: the MI seem to have only two
** This troper imagines the fine print on these grenades somewhere along the lines of.
*** "Tactical Nuclear Grenade. Throw very, very, VERY far away..."
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* [[People's Republic of Tyranny]]: The United Citizen Federation, where civil rights are plenty (unless you want to have kids) but political freedoms are virtually nonexistent, executions are televised, and the media is a fully interactive [[Propaganda Machine]].
* [[Physical Fitness Punishment]]: In the first movie, one of several methods of punishment used by the instructors in boot camp. One trooper is sent running around a distance armory (with a Corporal swatting him with a cane to keep pace) as punishment for failing to address his instructor as "Sir".
** [[Played With]] in the second film. A group of troopers are couped up in an abandoned outpost waiting for rescue, and a comely female trooper<ref>
* [[Pin-Pulling Teeth]]: In the first movie, Dizzy pulls out a grenade's pin with her teeth. Which seems entirely unnecessary, as pushing the big red button on top of the grenade is also shown to remove the pin.
* [[Planetville]]
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** The Bugs can take a full magazine of ammo (or more as [[Rule of Drama|drama demands]]) and still fight. In general it took three people all their ammo to kill one bug, which would kill at least two of them in the process. The only person who had an effective weapon only used it ''after'' the bugs had torn him in half. This is (almost) consistent with the book, as warrior bugs have no sense of self preservation and may not even feel pain: if your torrent of bullets fails to hit a vital organ but only chops away at limbs, the bug will keep coming so long as it has a limb left. But in the book, they realized this and aimed for the brain case on the back to disable them quickly. Not so in the movie... even though the psychic specifically recommended it to the troops!
** Subverted in the ending fight of the first movie. After they rescue Carmen, the protagonists are attacked by an army of bugs. The protagonists respond by letting loose with a torrent of bullets that causes a mountain of bug corpses to form in about three seconds flat.
** Played straight in the second film: when the [[Puppeteer Parasite
* [[Puppeteer Parasite]]: The plot of the second film.
* [[Putting on the Reich]]: Taken to extremes. It is impossible to look at a dress or officer's uniform and not think "How very German." Given the film's send up of militarism and the fact that Verhoeven grew up in the Netherlands during World War II, it's not exacting surprising. But note how they are ''never portrayed as anything but good'', even while ''saying and doing horrible things''
** Carl's uniform is the worst offender: the cap and black longcoat haven't been seen on an officer [[Those Wacky Nazis|since 1945.]]
* [[Race Lift]]: Rico was Filipino in the book; now he's [[Bishie Sparkle|sparkling]] white. Similarly, Dizzy and Carmen have Hispanic-sounding last names like Flores and Ibanez, but neither actress is Hispanic. Coupled with the [[Dawson Casting]], this is [[Uncanny Valley|very disconcerting]], and was thus probably done on purpose.
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* [[Running Gag]]: A subtle one. Rico surges through the ranks, but this isn't because he's especially good, it's because the people above him keep dying. ''"Come on, do you wanna live forever?"''
* [[Scars Are Forever]]: With some exceptions, most adults in the movie have lost one or more limbs, become blind due to burn wounds, or gained some other type of permanent scarring due to their military service.
* [[Scary Dogmatic Aliens|Scary Dogmatic]] [[Humans Are
* [[Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale]]: Somehow, the Bugs shoot asteroids across the galaxy using just their ground-based plasma-launching bugs, and in a short enough time-frame to target a specific human city. On the other hand, this is a jumping-off point for [[Epileptic Trees|a theory]] that the asteroid wasn't from the bugs at all, that it was a random force of nature that high command blamed on them as a convenient excuse to declare war (which [[Word of God]] all but confirms).
* [[She's a Man In Japan]]: Dizzy is
* [[Short-Range Long-Range Weapon]]: The MI's weapons are so [[Cool but Inefficient|ridiculously overpowered]] that the recoil makes them practically impossible to aim.
* [[Show Within a Show]]: All three films. The first and third even have commercial breaks.
* [[Shipper on Deck]]: Both Rasczak and Ace are this for Johnny and Dizzy. The latter of which plays a Serenade when they are dancing together.
* [[Single Biome Planet]]: Apparently, they all look like Southern California deserts.
** Rather, they all look like Wyoming's Hell's Half Acre or the Badlands of South Dakota.
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* [[We Will Wear Armor in the Future]]: Rather noticeably by fans, not [[Powered Armour]]. Here the armor is more like modern GI flak armor in terms of bulk and coverage.
* [[What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?]]: Many times. The [[Asskicking Pose|scene]] [[More Dakka|at the end]] of the second film [[No Kill Like Overkill|is notable]].
* [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]]: Inverted. A character prays, in conjunction with obviously [[Doing
** Bonus points for the fact that the suits' retro-rockets as they're [[It's Raining Men|air-dropping to the field]] are seen in the background behind her, ''distinctly'' forming a halo around her head as she prays.
* [[When She Smiles]]: Say what you will about the third film in general, and about [[The Load|Holly]] in general, but the scene when the [[Drop Ship]]'s lights come back on, and her face in turn lights up with a huge smile? ''Gorgeous''.
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[[Category:Starship Troopers]]
[[Category:Film]]
[[Category:Films Based on Novels]]
[[Category:Cult Classic]]
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