BY ANDREW MOODY

“The only good bug is a dead bug!”

In its own time, (the late 1990s) Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was initially a critical and commercial failure. Twenty five years later, and thanks to the film’s deeply loyal, obsessive fan base (primarily sustained on the internet) Starship Troopers has now been widely judged as one of the most misunderstood movies in Hollywood history.

After its release, most American critics hated the movie. Legendary critic Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun wrote that the film was “one-dimensional…pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.”

Jeff Vice, in the Deseret News, called it “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.”

In The New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle… raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.”

Anybody cogent in the 1990s will remember the enormous, decade long debate on screen violence that bookended the culture with the 1999 Columbine high school massacre, and began with the notorious Belgian serial killer mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), released the same year as Bret Easton Ellis’s sadistic, grimly transgressive novel American Psycho, as well as Quentin Tarantino’s ultraviolent debut Reservoir Dogs (banned for a time in the UK.) Also released in the 90s was Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) adapted from an original Tarantino screenplay, which became Columbine mastermind Eric Harris’s favourite film, endlessly referenced in his notorious diaries. Also released to great critical and cult acclaim were The Matrix (1999), along with Fight Club (1999), both of them indicative of the morally ambiguous, CGI approach to the new cinema of the 90s. It cannot be underestimated too how hard-core, first person video games like iD Software’s 1993 DOOM added to the controversy. It was the favourite game of both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Combined with the hip, ironic approach of Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, which saw great success with the ingenious, meta fictional Scream (1996) as well as the much lauded Pulp Fiction (1994), the 90s, more so than in any other period in American cinema, were a time of gleeful, subversive experiment. A time when minimal budgeted, strikingly original films could bring enormous commercial profit. At the same time, Hollywood was ablaze with several enormous budgeted projects like James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and George Lucas’s planned Star Wars prequels. The big story in Tinseltown was the relatively new digital technology that was on the verge of taking over the way movies would be made. Reality was harder to define. Like everything in the nineties, paranoia was never far away from the surface. Just because you’re paranoid, Kurt Cobain warned, don’t mean they’re not after you…

Paul Verhoeven had been a major filmmaker since at least the late eighties, with hugely entertaining, tongue in cheek mega movies like Robocop (1987) Total Recall (1990), and the classic erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), which put him in a pivotal position in the debate about screen violence. He was so well respected that he managed to rustle up a cool 100 million for the Starship Troopers budget, a mere two years after his mega-flop Showgirls (1995) which saw him become the first person to show up to the Golden Raspberries to accept his Worst Picture and Worst Director awards.

His next movie was to be an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s jingoistic science fiction novel Starship Troopers (1959). Heinlein is nowadays most known for writing Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) notoriously followed by Charles Manson with his mind control technique used on his drugged up, middle class family of brainwashed murderers. Having now watched Starship Troopers enough times to recognise the craftsmanship, and unique intelligence of Verhoeven, it seems needless to provide too much of a synopsis. Satire? Self indulgence? Both? Neither? Post 9/11 the American perspective in Hollywood changed forever. If nothing else, twenty five year later, Starship Troopers is still good fun, and a very strange puzzle to consider. In Verhoeven’s case, he seems to have proved the old adage:

Hollywood is not a place for intellectuals…