STARSHIP TROOPERS (78)

Directed by: Paul Verhoeven

Starring: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards

The Pitch: In the 24th century, teenage soldiers fight oversized bugs.

Theo Sez: Stunning, inexplicably overlooked monster movie that also happens to be among the year's most fascinating and (sorry, Skander) subversive satires. It's hard to think of another movie (Leni Riefenstahl excepted) that uses Fascist imagery so blatantly - Nazi-style greatcoats and uniforms, soldiers standing in serried ranks bellowing in unison, recruitment ads in the style of the Hitlerjunge - and it doesn't even bother to camouflage its bloodlust with the soft-hearted trappings (parental bonding, filial reconciliation) of THE LOST WORLD or INDEPENDENCE DAY : this is an unabashedly militaristic future, where only soldiers have the right to vote and the Army makes a man of our callow hero - it's a clarion-call for violence, and it doesn't have a sentimental bone in its body. Yet - unlike the Robert Heinlein book on which it's (loosely) based - it's not (only?) a celebration of Fascist values : our heroes look almost reprehensibly Aryan (airbrushed teens, all teeth and cheekbones), at least till you realise they also look like the clean-cut kids on glossy TV shows like "Beverly Hills 90210" - and until it clicks that perhaps the "master race" isn't all that different from our capitalist glorification of the rich, the smooth and the shiny (it sounds simple, but if Gregg Araki was doing it every hipster on the planet would be salivating). Similarly, though the film's worldview seems politically incorrect to the point of barbarity, it's in fact based on the most ubiquitous shibboleths of 90s public life : men and women are entirely equal, racism is unheard-of, nobody smokes or does drugs, and, above all, uniformity (both cultural and, implicitly, political) has been imposed throughout the globe - in the film's slyest gag, these archetypally Californian teens are supposedly from Buenos Aires! It's just exhilarating to think of arch-joker Verhoeven enjoying his rich, multivalenced (if nihilistic) joke : on the right-wing redneck crowd who take the gung-ho aggression at face value, not realising the military discipline is played so straight it's a hair's-breadth away from hilarity ("You kill anything that has more than two legs! You get me?" barks the sergeant ; "We-get- you-sir!" yell the recruits) ; on the weedy liberal types who find the whole thing objectionable, not getting the true message - that all attempts to substitute homogeneity for individual freedom are equally despicable, however "good" the cause ; and perhaps on the hapless studio that bankrolled the whole thing to the tune of $120 million, never realising what they were in for. And the ultimate joke? All the above is just subtext, mere icing on the cake : the film is primarily a monster movie, and an outrageously exciting one, full of mind-boggling visual trickery and kinetic battle scenes - it's everything THE LOST WORLD should've been and more, the adventure movie as irreverent, in-your-face comic-book. Terrific stuff.