Did Tom Hanks really call ‘Starship Troopers’ “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of sci-fi”?
Whether it’s more grounded stories or playing in a cosmic sandbox with plenty of CGI bells and whistles, looking at the filmography of Tom Hanks, it becomes clear the actor has a deep-seated appreciation of the cosmos in its many forms.
He played Jim Lovell in Ron Howard’s nail-biting biographical drama Apollo 13, will defend Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski’s ambitious epic Cloud Atlas to the death as one of the greatest movies he’s ever been part of, dealt with technological perils in undercooked thriller The Circle, traversed the post-apocalyptic wasteland with a robot and dog for company in Finch, and swung by Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
That’s a diverse range of projects, to say the least, but does the two-time Academy Award winner truly believe Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers to be one of the genre’s finest efforts? There are plenty of people who’d back him to the hilt on that statement, even if the filmmaker’s razor-sharp satire of militarism, fascism and propaganda went over a lot of heads at first.
As the director behind RoboCop and Total Recall, Verhoeven hardly painted science fiction in its broadest strokes, but for whatever reason, it took a long time for Starship Troopers to be reappraised. It’s a withering putdown that passes comment on the marketing and propaganda machines that power many conflicts, the dehumanisation of enemy combatants, and the concept of citizenship.
It was never intended to be viewed as an empty-headed $100million blockbuster bursting at the seams with visual effects and action sequences, but Starship Troopers nonetheless fell flat when its multitude of subversions went misinterpreted. Hanks has never publicly passed comment on whether or not he truly believes the film to be a milestone in sci-fi cinema, but one person told the world that he did.
Edgar Wright tweeted upon his first meeting with Hanks that he’d “heard Starship Troopers was his favourite film”. In response, the star “says it’s the Citizen Kane of sci-fi,” which in turn left the Cornetto Trilogy creator to “proceed to love him even more”. While that may be entirely true, it nonetheless remains the only time Hanks and Verhoeven’s sly dig at society has ever been mentioned in the same breath by any notable industry figures.
When Hanks was asked to name his ten favourite films of all time, 20% of the list was comprised of sci-fi flicks. However, despite taking the time to praise Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rian Johnson’s Looper, Starship Troopers was nowhere to be found. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t deem it to be the intergalactic version of Orson Welles’ game-changing masterpiece, but if he does, then he hasn’t been shouting it from the rooftops. Next time Hanks hits the press trail for one of his projects, then, let’s hope somebody clears it up.
