The film Roger Ebert trashed as “the most violent kiddie movie ever made” went completely over his head
Film criticism as it exists today is a direct result of what Roger Ebert did to revolutionise the form.
His writing for the Chicago Sun-Times was intelligent, thoughtful, and surprisingly conversational, as he found a way of assessing film in a way that worked for both average readers and obsessive cinephiles and was also a great advocate for under-the-radar films, helping generate buzz for titles that wouldn’t have received nearly as much attention otherwise.
While his reviews tended to skew more positively than many of his peers within the criticism space, few things were more entertaining than one of his rants about how much he hated a film. Given his vast knowledge of film history and inherent brilliance as a writer, Ebert could put together a rational, well-argued review about why a film didn’t work that was also peppered with his snarky sense of humour.
While he had many negative reviews that became quite popular, his anger was sometimes misplaced, as he once wrote a nasty, two-star review for Starship Troopers, even though he had praised director Paul Verhoeven’s work on Robocop and Total Recall. To Ebert, Starship Troopers represented everything he hated about special effects and mindless spectacle, writing, “What’s lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment. Unlike the Star Wars movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, Starship Troopers doesn’t resonate. It’s one-dimensional.”
Even though the critic would often defend filmmakers who included explicit content within their work, he took issue with the excessive violence in Starship Troopers, noting that it was “the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters and values are pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.”
Ebert’s sentiments were shared by many of his contemporaries, but Starship Troopers is a film that was decades ahead of its time. Verhoeven took the original source material from author Robert A Heinlein, which had been highly jingoistic and pro-military, and satirised it by turning his film adaptation into an extended work of propaganda.
The director had purposefully begun the film as a straightforward space opera adventure, only to slowly transform it into a shocking nightmare about the brutalities of war, and while some dismissed Starship Troopers, including Ebert, because they failed to pick up on its satirical intentions, it has emerged as a cult classic.
The characters were intended to reflect the bland, faceless minions that fascism necessitated, as they are stripped of their personality in order to become mindless drones that can wage a “forever war” against an enemy that is just trying to defend its home. Verhoeven even goes on to make direct allusions to Nazi propaganda films, including placing Neil Patrick Harris in a fascist uniform and straight-up invoking Triumph of the Will.
On the other hand, Ebert would occasionally admit to being wrong, too, where he famously only gave three stars to The Godfather: Part II when it was first released, but then went back and awarded it a full four stars, even incluing it on his ‘Great Movies’ list, so maybe, if he had revisited Starship Troopers, he might have seen it differently.
