The most charming element of Robocop, a previous collaboration by director Verhoeven and writer Neumeier, was the satirical use of television, especially news and ads. They do the same thing here, but here it doesn't work.
First, in Robocop the TV satire was always in the background, usually literally, as the camera passes by a television and pauses for a moment; the TV satire was never a part of the main dramatic stream. This allowed us to separate the two: we are not expected to give the background satire the same importance as the foreground drama. In SSTroopers, the satire is an integral part of the dramatic structure: it carries its share of the story, it is visually indistinguishable from the rest of the film, and it has, in the main, the same narrative voice. We cannot separate the two, and are left uncertain about the attitude we are to take to the story itself.
Second, the Robocop satire was witty. The
SSTroopers satire is heavy-handed; Neumeier and Verhoeven
have traded their rapier for a sledgehammer. This lack
of subtlety and style merely increases our confusion
about the overall flavor of the piece — or perhaps,
because the satire is so broad it has no edge, and therefore
no satiric effect, and therefore serves only to
strengthen the overall humorlessness of the story.
I get the feeling that Verhoeven and Neumeier wanted to do the movie with tongues firmly in cheeks, as they had done Robocop. But somewhere along the way, they started taking it seriously. At that point, the satire lost its underpinnings, and therefore its reason for being. Rather than disposing of satire that no longer had a point, they expanded it and used it to bolster the dead-serious mock-heroic machismo of the main story line, the very element that the satire ought to have deflated.
In interviews, Verhoeven has said that the war in SSTroopers is deliberately based on World War 2 (that choice was really made by Heinlein; Verhoeven implies that he considered using Vietnam as a model for the war, but then it would not have been Starship Troopers, but The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman). Verhoeven uses the "Last Good War" both to eliminate any moral qualms we might have had and to emphasize the inhuman evil of the enemy.
So why in God's name does he make the good guys into Nazis?
The Third Reich was used for similar symbolic reasons in Star Wars, but Lucas had the good sense (and good taste) to make the bad guys Nazis (both Lucas and Verhoeven also borrow set-pieces from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will). And the Third Reich symbolism is far more blatant in SSTroopers: the uniforms are almost unaltered Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe; the eagle and the distorted cross are everywhere; the Gestapo even wears ankle-length black leather coats. Whatever good Verhoeven hoped to derive from using WW2 as a symbol is, I think, completely obliterated by the morally ambiguous (if not repellent) use of Nazi symbolism.
This contradictory use of WW2 derives, most likely, from a facile misreading (or deliberate distortion; you decide) of Heinlein's political philosophy. Starship Troopers, like most of his novels of the fifties and early sixties, gave Heinlein a setting in which to expound and examine his vision of an ordered and free society. The political philosophy that comes across in these novels is a sort of patriotic fascist libertarianism (or libertarian fascism, depending on whether the emphasis is on order or freedom; Heinlein's emphasis is usually on freedom, as in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Farnham's Freehold). Whether Verhoeven and Neumeier misunderstood Heinlein or deliberately simplified his philosophy, all that comes through in the movie is the fascism. And to depict this future fascist state, Verhoeven and Neumeier used the symbols most readily at hand, those of the Third Reich, unaware or unconcerned that this completely undercuts their other use of WW2.
It also undercuts the automatic sympathy of the audience for the brave defenders of humankind: suddenly we have to ask ourselves, is this society worth defending, not merely because it is human, but because it is good? Would we fight for Hitler against an alien invasion, even knowing that this would make Hitler stronger? This is the sort of moral question the film tries to avoid. It is also a question that many people, when the "alien" invasion was communism, answered in the affirmative; but many people said no — and there is no room in the movie for people who say no. There is also no patriotism in the movie, just an unthinking jingoism that ultimately cloys. Nor, come to think of it, is there love, or even affection. There is mindless desire and prep school bonding, akin to love as jingoism is to patriotism.
This lack of passion is personified in our leading couple, Johnny Square-jaw and Carmen Pert-nose, about as cute a Barbie-and-Ken as you'd want to see outside of Malibu. His emotional range is from dumfounded surprise to grim determination; hers is from coquette to scamp. In neither case is there much of a difference. Both are so empty and plastic that it is something of a relief that they never have sex. The only sex in the movie (gratuitous and intrusive as it is) is between Johnny Square-jaw and Diz, who has had a crush on him since high school.
Diz is the closest thing this movie has to a true character, with three dimensions, actual thoughts, and contradictions. She is treated poorly. Johnny zooms through the ranks on the strength of acts of unthinking bravado; when asked how he did such a thing, he says he was captain of the football team. But Diz was the quarterback of the football team; when Johnny does something brave and heroic, it was Diz who drew up the play. But does Diz get any credit for displaying real leadership and tactical skill? Of course not. It is Johnny who becomes squad leader, corporal, sergeant. And what happens to Diz after her movie-long pursuit of Johnny is finally successful? She dies. Of course. And with one of the most embarrassing and insulting dying speeches in recent Hollywood history: it's okay to die because "I got to have you." Had me reaching for the airsick bag.
The other characters are pretty cardboard; you've seen them in a hundred war movies. The most striking, and most anachronistic, is Ace, the gangling farmboy with straw behind his ears and a fiddle in his hands, played in an Aw Shucks manner by Jake Busey, looking eerily like a scarecrow version of his father. The most chilling is Carl, the kid with ESP who joins Intelligence, played by Neil Patrick Harris. Doogie Howser, S.S. Colonel Doogie Howser, 19 years old and making command decisions, single-handedly crafting the defense of Earth and showering largesse on his old high school pals.
Then there are the bugs. Can somebody please tell
me why they have skewers? The pincers I can see,
and the brightly colored winged forms that
occasionally appear. But skewers? And what about those
giant napalm-spitting beetles? Are they supposed to be
the same species? I wonder how a species evolves
the ability to fart at escape velocity. And after
Colonel Doogie demonstrates the proper way to kill the
things, why does no soldier actually try it? And after the
first encounter, when it takes 50,000 rounds of
ammunition to kill a single big, why didn't they get bigger guns?
Why did they have lasers in training, but not on
the battlefield? I find it hard to believe that the
mobile infantry of the future will use 1970s armament.
When they planted a fort on a hostile planet, with
millions and millions of bugs with metal-crushing
pincers around, why did they put the support structures
on the outside? And why did I keep hearing
war-whoops in this Fort Apache, Outer Space scene? When
you're flying a gigantic spaceship in a packed formation of
a few thousand gigantic spaceships, what exactly
is meant by "evasive action"? Does anybody really
think that in a couple hundred years Buenos Aires will
be indistinguishable from Pacific Palisades? Are there
no Asians any more? Or are they just too smart to join
the Army? Can anyone seriously make a case for
arena football as the sport of the future? In the macho
stag-fight between Johnny and Skander, a trained
killing machine against a flyboy, why wasn't Skander
incapacitated in the first five seconds? What are they
teaching those boys, anyway? What was the point of
knife training in basic when the only person to use a knife
in the movie wasn't trained? What exactly was the
point of the brain sucking, anyway?
Questions! Questions! I want answers!
This is, I believe, the first Hollywood movie made from a Heinlein book since 1951's Destination Moon, on which Heinlein himself worked (though there was an early 80s Canadian production of The Puppetmasters). All I can say is I'm glad Heinlein's dead. He, at least, was spared the agony. There have been rumors for years that Stranger in a Strange Land was coming to the big screen; now the thought makes me cringe.
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