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Starship troopers warhaven9/14/2023 ![]() ![]() Sample humor: At one point, a bomb destroys a giant bug, and the three of them yell “Oh no, Raid!” Later, Denise Richards smiles, and someone says, in a robotic voice, “Smile-o-tron 3000 engaged.” It goes on like this. Nelson and his RiffTrax co-stars Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett heckle the film with about as much insight and wit as they misperceive the film to have. On October 4th, RiffTrax-a series of downloadable comedy commentary tracks from the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000-released an episode in which they mocked Starship Troopers, a movie their website describes as “dumb and loud” and a “goofy mess.” Mike J. ![]() Club’s film section, lauded Troopers a few years earlier as “the most subversive major studio film in recent memory,” observing that it “seems absurd now to write it off as some silly piece of escapism, as its detractors complained.” The tagline for RiffTrax is “Your favorite movies-made funny!” What they don’t seem to understand is that Starship Troopers already is funny-and smart.īut the original misperceptions still persist. Club’s ‘90s poll, too, appearing in the top 50, where it was praised as a “gonzo satire destined, even designed, to be misunderstood.” Scott Tobias, former editor of the A.V. Coming in at number 20 on Slant Magazine’s list of the 100 best films of the 1990s last year (a poll in which, full disclosure, I was among the voting critics), the site’s Phil Coldiron described it as “one of the greatest of all anti-imperialist films,” a parody of Hollywood form whose superficial “badness” is central to its critique. But you can feel the conversation beginning to shift it rightfully has come to be appreciated by some as an unsung masterpiece. Over the nearly two decades since the film’s debut, the critical reputation of Starship Troopers hasn’t especially improved. Even the conclusion makes a point of deflating any residual sense of heroism and valor: We see our protagonists, having narrowly escaped death during a near-suicidal mission, marching back to battle in a glorified recruitment video-suggesting that in war the only reward for a battle well fought is the prospect of further battle. Heinlein’s notoriously militaristic novel with archetypes on loan from teen soaps and young-adult fiction, undermining the self-serious saber-rattling of the source text. The screenplay, by the Robocop writer Edward Neumeier, furnished the old-fashioned science-fiction framework of Robert A. The resulting film critiques the military-industrial complex, the jingoism of American foreign policy, and a culture that privileges reactionary violence over sensitivity and reason. ![]()
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