Starship Troopers (1997)

Would you like to know more? If you've seen Starship Troopers, you'll know exactly why that line lands the way it does. It's delivered with such blank, chirpy conviction that it could be a genuine recruitment slogan, and that, in a nutshell, is what Paul Verhoeven's gloriously deranged sci-fi spectacle is all about.

This is the definition of a cult classic, and I mean that sincerely. On the surface, it looks like someone handed a massive Hollywood budget to a director who'd lost his mind, filled the cast with cheekboned twenty-somethings who act like they've just stepped off a photo shoot, and told them to fight giant alien insects in the name of civilisation. The result is glossy, absurd, and frequently hilarious, and not always intentionally so.

Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer: none of them are delivering what you'd call great performances. The line readings are stiff, the emotions arrive slightly late, and everyone carries themselves with the swagger of someone who has just been told they look fantastic in a uniform. Which, to be fair, they do. There are slow-motion walks. There are explosions that exist purely because someone decided there should be explosions. The whole thing reeks of 90s excess in the most glorious possible way.

And the effects haven't exactly aged like fine wine. The giant bugs are a mix of practical and early CGI, and there are moments where the seams are very much showing. But here's what I keep coming back to: it doesn't matter. Because the film knows exactly what it is, and more importantly, it knows exactly what it's doing.

Beneath all the carnage and cheesiness, Starship Troopers is a razor-sharp satire of fascism, militarism, and state propaganda. Verhoeven wraps it in the aesthetic of a recruitment video on purpose. The news broadcasts, the us-versus-them rhetoric, the cheerful glorification of violence, the way citizenship is literally earned through military service: it's all there, and it's chilling once you clock it. The film is actively mocking the ideology it appears to be celebrating. Most audiences, especially on first viewing, just enjoy the bug-squashing spectacle and go home happy. Which is probably exactly what Verhoeven intended. The joke works on both levels simultaneously.

I've got a lot of time for Verhoeven as a filmmaker. He's never been interested in playing it safe, and you can see the same provocateur energy in Hollow Man (2000), where the genre trappings are doing heavy ideological lifting if you're paying attention. Starship Troopers is probably his most ambitious piece of sleight of hand though, a film that disguises a deeply cynical argument about power and propaganda as a dumb action blockbuster, and pulls it off with a straight face.

Is it great cinema? No, not in any traditional sense. The pacing wobbles, the emotional beats don't land because the characters are deliberately two-dimensional, and there are stretches where the satire goes quiet and it really does just become a film about people shooting bugs. But that's part of the charm, honestly. It's committed to its own absurdity all the way through, and that commitment is what elevates something that could have been a total mess into something genuinely fascinating.

Three stars. Essential viewing if you love films that pretend to be stupid while actually being quite smart. And equally essential if you just want to watch humans fight enormous space insects with flamethrowers for two hours. Either way, it delivers the goods.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1997  | Watched: 2025-12-01

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Rakuten TV · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · YouTube TV
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Paul Verhoeven: Hollow Man (2000)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)