this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Are the bugs really initiating the attacks? Because with the distance between Klendathu & Earth it seems pretty obvious the movie is trying to imply the bugs aren't the ones sending meteors at the humans.
When I rewatched the movie with a friend recently he was surprised that the movie ended with what felt like an anticlimactic resolution - because the war keeps going forever (or so it seems). I really like the interpretation that Starship Troopers (the movie itself) is an in-universe propaganda film used to recruit soldiers to feel important and make a difference in the war effort.
The point is the war must continue for ever, this is made very clear in the book - that's what happens when you deify soldiers, when you make a society obsessed with valour there needs to be a war for the generals to earn stripes - when your society's entire social contract and cohesion is based on war your leaders will always find a war that just HAS to be fought...
The movie point blank says the bugs attacked first and that it's a colonization species that just hurls meteor filled bugs randomly into space in order to try and find new planets to colonize.
Also, when the "main" character in the movie (Rico) is in basic training and about to quit the military, a bug meteor impacts the earth, taking out an entire city, and killing his parents, so the bugs were most definitely attacking humanity, and earth directly.
The movie also ends on a high note, making it seem like they learned some very important information by capturing one of the until then unknown bugs that was able to think and direct all the mindless bugs. So while the war will go on, it leaves the viewer to think that humanity was making progress towards a victory. The movie also marked the first time that humanity actually went to the bug home planet and "took the war to them".
The in-universe propaganda TV show point blank says these things. The film is pretty vague on the origins of the bug conflict - we know that the "Mormon extremists" tried to colonize a bug world and got killed for the trouble, and we know that Zegema Beach in the outer rings also gets nuked like Buenos Aires did, but not much else besides these two totally contextless events. In fact the very first propaganda film we see is about how great the Earth's planetary defenses are - so why was the asteroid allowed to impact at all? This and the fact that Klendathu is so far away that launching meteors towards Earth doesn't make sense is why many people who analyze the film conclude that the destruction of Buenos Aeries was a false flag, or at least was allowed to happen, by the fascist government in order to spur the people to support the war.
Also, the cinematography speaks for itself. Look at this shot from the battle of Klendathu sequence, where the mobile infantry are literally swarming over the arachnid home planet like ants. The movie wants you to question who the "bugs" really are, because any time humans and arachnids are on screen together, the humans are swarming around the much bigger aliens, only barely managing to bring them down (except in the very brief shot of the aircraft bombing the valley).
And the ending of the film - Dougie Howser walks out in a Nazi SS uniform and uses his psychic powers to tell everyone that the brain bug is afraid. You can tell it's afraid just by looking at the fucking thing, the way it's recoiling from him - it looks like it's about to cry! Johnny Rico's whole character arc in the film is being a kid who wants to do some good and who has some humanity in him getting that humanity ground out of him by the military machine until he's shouting the exact same catch phrase that the older generation shouted at him. An older generation that is without exception portrayed as broken by their lives in the military meat grinder.
Last thing I promise: and really, the film isn't about the conflict with the bugs. Listen to the director's commentary with Verhoven and the script writer, and they barely talk about the bugs at all. The movie is really about the ways in which a fascist society perpetuates itself and destroys the people in it. Whether the bugs started the war or not is irrelevant - the war is necessary for that society to exist. It's a society that brainwashes you as a kid, and then incentivizes you to maintain your brainwashing as an adult. It's a society of broken people breaking their children. It's a society where a hundred hot young adults can stand around in the shower together and everybody is so horny for the political ideology that they forget to be horny for each other!
Nice write-up
Seconding the other poster. Excellent write up; you distilled every rebuttal point I would have made to OP perfectly.
Klendathu is shown to be on the opposite side of the Milky Way. It is physically impossible for the bugs to hurl meteors at these distances while accounting for drift, every piece of matter in between and also the time difference. "Oh yeah, let's launch this meteor so it can destroy a city called Buenos Aires, that hasn't been founded yet by a species that hasn't evolved yet."
They didn't learn anything at the end, they all remained the same characters, still happy to be gears in a military machine. Oh, and NPR mutilated the brain bug's face vagina.
The music made you feel this way, but that's to manipulate you to do so.
This one always bugged me (no pun intended) when I first saw the movie as a kid. We (humans in the movie) can barely do precision missile-strikes on another planet across the galaxy, and the bugs are way less technologically inferior. How do they even move/manage a meteor?
Buenos Aires is an inside job?
The bug meteors aren't launched ballistically, they are launched in some kind of superluminal method that isn't explained and doesn't need to be, it did bypass earths defenses however. You can see that happens because the transport ship Denise Richards is piloting literally sees it happen. In the movie the idea of Buenos Aires being a false-flag isn't supported by the text, nor the subtext.
The movie actually doesn't care if the asteroid was sent by the bugs, was a false flag or just really unfortunate circumstances because it doesn't matter. What matters is how the government reacts and the government instantly presents it as an attack.
It's like with WW1 the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is presented as the reason the war started, but really countries were just looking for an excuse to start a war. Buenos Aires didn't really matter because Earth was just looking for an excuse to start a war.
I think you meant to say "bugs filled meteors"?