It was uncomfortably hot today, well into the high 90s and sweltering, and I spent most of it indoors. I felt especially bad for our dog when I had to take him outside for a walk. He hasn’t been feeling too well lately, continuing to throw up on occasion, and for the past day or two walking with a bit of a limp. We don’t know if it’s the heat, his weight, arthritis, something in one of his front paws, or some combination of those things. But my mother’s taking him to the vet on Monday, so hopefully he’ll feel better soon.
I spent most of this evening watching Starship Troopers, which I haven’t seen since it was in theaters in 1997. I didn’t much like the movie back then, but Scott Tobias’ recent in-depth review made me want to reconsider it:
Though Starship Troopers is a generalized critique of war, Verhoeven’s preoccupation with World War II dominates the look of the film, which is loaded with Nazi allusions and compositions on loan from Leni Riefenstahl, whose propaganda films lionized order and physical beauty. Only here, the fascists are our heroes in the Federation, the governing body that’s working to ensure that humans, not bugs, control the galaxy. And for some critics and viewers, that’s where the confusion sets in: Was Starship Troopers an endorsement of fascism? Or at the very least, a thoughtless, juvenile celebration of young people sacrificing themselves for the good of mankind? Audiences are naturally inclined to root for the gung-ho hero in space adventures like these, and certainly the bugs, whose motives are somewhere between inscrutable and nonexistent, seem like ghastly adversaries, worthy of extermination. What’s more, the Heinlein novel is considered a stirring defense of militarism and the necessity of war and civic duty, so an adaptation would surely honor those themes, right?
And you know, Tobias is probably right: the film is better than I remember it. But that doesn’t mean I liked it.
The film is an uncomfortable straddle between satire and summer blockbuster, an indictment of fascism that’s nevertheless couched in all of fascism’s trappings and the spectacle of a CGI-driven action movie. It’s hard not to see director Paul Verhoven’s intentions — they’re laid pretty bare in all of the ways that Tobias makes clear — but it’s also hard not to be a little exhausted by them by the movie’s end. I can admire and respect the subversive streak that casts our heroes as fascist warmongers, that simultaneously asks us to root their victory and question ourselves in the process. But it’s hard to enjoy a movie, much less a pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat sci-fi action movie, where you have to hate the characters a little, and hate yourself a little for liking them.
I may listen to Verhoven’s commentary track, but right now, I liked Tobias’ essay a lot more than the movie.
Ack! That is hot! I do hope that the dog feels better soon, too.
I had wanted to like Starship Troopers better as a film, but it was hard to compare it to the novel. I think that Heinlein’s writing on civic duty – and I do think the book was more about than than it was about military glory – was somehow lost in the film adaptation.
The question is this, I think: had the movie been made around the time that Obama was coming to power, would the film makers have taken a different approach? Or post 9/11? Three years after Rwanda, I think the film did the best it could to try to tackle – however indirectly – the idea of civic engagement, but I’m not sure that Heinlein’s ideals could ever be adequately translated for film.
I’ll admit, I never did finish more than half of Heinlein’s novel, although I do remember it as being more than a little jingoistic. Certainly not to the extent that Verhoven satirized in his movie adaptation, but it’s not hard to see how, taken to its logical extreme, that sort of thinking could easily translate into ugly fascism.
I still have a copy of it somewhere, so I should maybe revisit Heinlein’s book.
Revisiting the movie, I’m more inclined to think that Tobias is right about its merits, and certainly about Verhoven’s intentions, which seemed a lot murkier in 1997 when I first saw it. It’s hard not to see it with different eyes in a post-9/11 world. As Tobias writes:
And yet I didn’t really find myself enjoying the movie. On a surface level, it’s full of attractive but vapid, not particularly talented actors. (There are some real exceptions, of course, but Van Dien and Richards aren’t anybody’s idea of great thespians.) And beneath the surface, where that’s the intent — where we’re supposed to view these people as vapid defenders of might-makes-right — it’s just hard to care about them.
I respect the film a lot more, and agree with Tobias that it’s incredibly subversive and pointed for a studio blockbuster. But there may be too many competing elements, too much dichotomy between fascist satire and summer action, for it to really work.
It was a vapid movie, to be sure – I had to agree with Tobias’ notes on Neil Patrick Harris being the only one who seemed to get ‘it’ as he was walking around in his rubber raincoat.
I suspect the movie would have worked its subversive message better (that’s an awkward sentence!) had it not chosen to rewrite some of the characters. The elimination of the mechanized suits that the Mobile Infantry wore was a definite mistake, I think. Sergeant Zim – who trains Rico back in his boot camp days – ends up with a field commission, and he is not nearly as brutal as the movie would have made him out to be (though the knife incident does happen). Rico himself leaves the company well before that to attend Officer Candidate School, which opens up a whole section of philosophical debate that the movie couldn’t have hoped to touch:
Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far), the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics – you name it – is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what Man is – no what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.
The universe will let us know – later – whether or not Man has any ‘right’ to expand through it.
In the meantime the M.I. will be in there, on the bounce and swinging, on the side of our own race.
It seems to me that the book was more about the awakening of a civic consciousness in a young man, and less about the war. The movie ought to have tried to capture that, but couldn’t have done it and still pulled in the young audience they were hoping for.
So I just finished re-reading Starship Troopers. The knife incident does not happen. There is a good discussion between Zim and the recruits as to why they learn to use ’em, but he doesn’t pin the guy’s hand to the wall. Nor does Zim demote himself to fight – he fights as Platoon Sargeant under Rico’s command (Rico’s first command, actually, while he is still training to be an officer).
It’s troubling that Zim had to be remade into a brute – who brutalizes – for the sake of the movie. From the book’s account, he’s not.