Something I don't get. ST1 was to me always super-campy B-list action/horror schlock that you basically only watched to see bugs chomping people and people shooting bugs. Now though there are 'hindsight' reviews proclaiming Verhoeven to be a satirical genius disguising social commentary as, well, super-campy B-list action/horror schlock. And thus decrying the rest of the series as such, compared to the"brilliant satire" of the first.
What the foxtrot? Am I missing something, or are these reviewers kind of grasping at straws with rose-tinted 20/20 goggles on?
A little of column A, a little of column B. If you've ever read the original Heinlein novel, you'll quickly note that it's completely different in tone from the films. Verhoeven tried to read the book, but found its pro-military stance and the "service for citizenship" to be far too reminiscent of World War II Germany. (He grew up in The Hague, the seat of the German occupation of the Netherlands, during the war.) He was firmly into doing subtle satires of America by this point - both Robocop and Showgirls were meant to be digs at American hypocrisy - and in a very real way Starship Troopers completed a virtual trilogy. Those of us who remember just how
weird things got during the 1993 war with Iraq should be able to see his points, even if we disagree with them.
Of course, Heinlein never meant his novel to be social commentary. He wrote it in response to cutbacks in military research, and the book is purely meant to show off the potential that technology could offer, with every infantryman in a nuke-wielding, armored battlesuit. Starship Troopers is widely considered the origin of the mecha genre, and to this day various militaries around the world have continued to try to reproduce his vision of powered armor. The rest of the novel - the social backgound - was meant to be the barest sketch of a world, one very different from his next major novel: the hippie classic Stranger in a Strange Land.
The use of fifty-year old novels and twenty-year old movies as social commentary on today strikes me as bemusing. It's roughly the equivalent of claiming that the Simpsons predicted basically everything that's happened over that show's multiple-decade run. But hey, it's easy to take an old science fiction movie and point to whatever the authors guessed correctly. Got to produce the content, after all.
