The “really funny” cult classic sci-fi movie the Coen brothers loved: “It was pretty bold”
In 1997, a $100million sci-fi action blockbuster sputtered at the box office and angered critics with its politics, only to later be hailed as a satirical cult classic by legions of fans, including the Coen brothers.
Indeed, when this ultra-violent, profane, and boob-filled extravaganza first hit screens, it seemed like most people simply didn’t get it. To the majority of critics, it was badly acted, filled to the brim with special effects at the expense of characterisation, and stomach-churningly gruesome to boot. Most worryingly of all, though, many prominent voices accused the film of endorsing fascism through its depiction of the United Citizen Federation, a military regime that ruled the future after democracy nearly brought society to its knees generations earlier.
In truth, the movie’s source material didn’t help this perception. After all, when Starship Troopers was a 1959 novel by Robert A Heinlein, the author’s work was seen as conservative and libertarian at best, militarist and fascistic at worst. The problem with applying the same logic to Paul Verhoeven’s movie adaptation, though, which cast a host of generically beautiful Aryan actors as patriotic soldiers all-too-willing to defend their military overlords against vicious alien bugs, was that the RoboCop director wasn’t endorsing fascism. Instead, he was satirising it, and the whole thing just flew over most people’s heads.
When the movie was met with such a fierce backlash, including The Washington Post declaring it a glorification of Naziism, Verhoeven was dumbfounded. “We were accused of being neo-Nazis!” he exclaimed with barely restrained disbelief. “They couldn’t see that all I have done is ironically create a fascist utopia.”
It all gets even more ridiculous when you remember that Verhoeven grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, which gave him a deep-rooted loathing of fascism and any ideology that glorifies war. He didn’t even finish the book, mind you – found it utterly vile – and instead set out to completely flip it on its head with the film.
In the years following the film’s release, the perception of the movie did shift, but it didn’t happen particularly quickly. A 2013 retrospective by The Atlantic acknowledged that some critics had come around to the film, but it wasn’t as if it had executed a complete 180 in prevailing opinion.
By the time the 2010s rolled around, big chunks of society had shifted so drastically that people became far more willing to criticise America’s flaws rather than blindly wave the flag. Suddenly, the satire in something like Starship Troopers felt glaringly obvious, and those discovering the film years later were left scratching their heads, wondering how critics and audiences at the time had completely missed Verhoeven’s point.
Interestingly, a number of famous faces have declared Starship Troopers a misunderstood classic over the years. For example, in 2022, filmmakers like Ari Aster (Hereditary), David Lowery (The Green Knight), Eli Roth (Cabin Fever), and Margaret Brown (Descendant) declared it one of the best movies of the ’90s, while star Casper Van Dien claimed Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino have separately told him of their love for the film. In fact, he said that Tarantino “talked to me for five hours about why Starship Troopers is one of the best movies ever made.”
However, long before any of this reevaluation, the Coens were some of the first prominent voices to throw their support behind Starship Troopers, even at the height of its vilification by the media. In 1998, they spoke to Total Film magazine in support of their similarly misunderstood future classic, The Big Lebowski, and Ethan revealed that he disagreed with most critics about Verhoeven’s splatter-filled send-up of totalitarianism. “I liked Starship Troopers,” he mused. “Really funny.”
Now, this mightn’t seem like too revelatory a statement, until you remember that precious few critics at the time even realised the movie was trying to make them laugh. Regardless, Ethan also felt Verhoeven was brave in his casting of such a large-budgeted film, saying, “It was pretty bold that he went in on a $100 million movie with no stars.”
Good ol’ Coens. They always know the score.
