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Casper Van Dien is loving the Starship Troopers renaissance but still finds it mind-boggling some take it at face value (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 3 months ago (8 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 59 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The movie point blank says

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!