Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
I don't think I could claim it was a great movie. The fact that so many people missed the point and the movie was unenjoyable if you did is proof that it's not a great movie. I think the ending where a narrator suddenly appears was supposed to be the final reveal for anyone who hadn't caught on yet that the whole movie was just propaganda from the future, but even that was ambiguous since it's just as easy to interpret it as an homage to the WWII era films it had been mimicking.
My big problem with the movie wasn't that it was somewhere between mediocre and awful if you 'missed the point'. It's that, as a work of satire, it wasn't very good. There are great satires out there - ones that, in the process of making a point about the world, actually tell a good story at the same time. Depending on your definition of satire it could include movies like The Truman Show, Te'alat Blaumilch, Team America (albeit heavy-handed)... hell, The Princess Bride and Shrek are damned good satire compared to Starship Troopers (I even liked Iron Sky more than this film, even though that was a deeply flawed film itself). If Terry Pratchett wrote a screenplay that satirized Starship Troopers, it would have blown away this relatively weak effort by Verhoeven et al.

I still love Starship Troopers (the novel) not because I think Heinlein was making some subtle point about militarization or because I ignore it. I love the novel because it's fun, it was transformative to military SF, and because his exposition is thought-provoking. It was also clearly written as a bit of a reflection on his time in the USN in the 30s, and if you read his over-fondness for the military in this context it makes a whole lot more sense. Heinlein always wrote provocatively about extrapolations of future social structures - his pseudo-anarchic future in Moon is a Harsh Mistress is hardly one I'd embrace, nor his dystopian I Will Fear No Evil or the decidedly problematic Stranger in a Strange Land. He dallies with pedophilia and incest in a number of his books.

It's probably possible to somehow assemble of coherent worldview of Heinlein that encompasses all of the values that are highlighted in his novels, but it'd be damned hard. I think that his choice of social structures to explore certainly reveal something about him - in this case, his fondness for his time in the military - but then he explicitly exaggerates them to examine a society that is at once familiar to us and intensely alien. The cognitive dissonance that arises from it is what makes us think, and it's one of the best parts of reading speculative fiction. I don't think Heinlein was writing a satire in any way - I think he genuinely wanted to explore the ideas put forth in his novel - but I also don't think he intended it as a paean to militarism.

Verhoeven is certainly welcome to reinterpret the novel any way he wishes - that is the prerogative of an artist, after all, and I think a warning about creeping militarization as a stepping stone to fascism is certainly a worthy artistic subject. But if he's going to do it, he should actually do it well. As it is, the movie is just painful to watch - it's a terrible movie in its own right, and the far from subtle message is just force-fed to the viewer.