Steamy co-ed showers. Gigantic, bizarre space insects. A young Neil Patrick Harris?! These
pause-worthy moments from 'Starship Troopers' are just the start — keep watching to see more.
'Starship Troopers' is considered to be the third of Paul Verhoeven's so-called "Triple
Dutch" trilogy, following up the hit sci-fi satires 'RoboCop' and 'Total Recall.' Those films
similarly mix gleefully provocative imagery and brutality with off-putting, over-the-top screen
programming to drive their themes home, and 'Starship Troopers' is no different.
The fascist propaganda seen on its screens aren't meant to serve so much as commercials
as they are on demand information that bears an uncanny resemblance to
the internet — or at least, the promise the internet held in its 1997 infancy.
It makes some sense, as the nascent World Wide Web held the promise of allowing media
consumers to move from topic to topic with the click of a cursor. If you look hard enough,
you might also detect faint traces of the always-online future to come — the ability to
focus on "Top News" could be seen as predicting eventual social media websites like Twitter.
Of course, the internet aspect of the movie's opening montage pales in comparison to its
fascist overtones. The sequence draws directly from "Triumph of the Will,"
the notorious Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda film, complete with eagle imagery. As Verhoeven,
who grew up under Nazi occupation, told Entertainment Weekly in 1997 -
"When the soldiers look at the camera and say,
'I'm doing my part!' that's from Riefenstahl. We copied it."
Some images from "Starship Troopers" are pause-worthy because of what we know,
others because of what we never will.
Case in point: The biology teacher from the high school attended by 'Starship
Troopers' protagonists Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanez,
and Carl Jenkins definitely has something going on that warrants closer inspection.
She only appears in a single scene, but that scene is impossible to ignore.
Rue McClanahan of "Golden Girls" fame plays the teacher who prowls around her classroom as
Rico and Carmen dissect an Arkellian sand beetle. She extols the virtues of the
alien Arachnids and proclaims the foolishness inherent in any notion of human superiority.
While the scene mostly serves as a crash course in alien biology for the audience, it's impossible to
look away from the teacher, whose burn-like scars around her eyes suggest that she's been blinded.
Between her aesthetic and her ideology, it would be fascinating to learn more about her backstory.
If nothing else, we just want to keep the movie paused on McClanahan long enough to write our
own fan-fiction backstory for her character.
Rico and his fellow Mobile Infantry aspirants are trained by Sergeant Zim,
played with over-the-top intensity by Clancy Brown. His drill sergeant characterization is
undoubtedly familiar to anyone who's seen a war movie before, but Brown, along with Jake Busey,
also delivers one of the film's most memorable images — one that deftly subverts expectations
and drives home just how brutal boot camp can be in a militaristic dystopia.
"Bite down on this son. It helps. I know."
Busey's Mobile Infantry recruit Ace Levy is practicing throwing knives, but is having
some trouble with it. Frustrated, he demands to know why the skill is necessary to learn,
saying that most combat in this particular future is fought using nuclear weaponry, which merely
requires the push of a button. Zim, in response, commands Ace to put his hand against a nearby
wall. Ace clearly has no interest in doing so, but reluctantly follows the order. In most movies,
the pay-off to this set-up would be for Zim to throw a knife and intentionally miss Ace's hand,
or to hit something else with the knife instead. But not in 'Starship Troopers'.
Zim throws the knife directly into Ace's palm, pinning it to the wall,
then calmly walks over and gives a simple, iconic explanation.
"The enemy cannot push a button if you disable his hand!"
It's a classic moment that helps set the entire film's tone.
Upon its late-'90s release, the co-ed shower scene from "Starship Troopers" made a lot of news.
All these years later, the scene is still as potentially abrasive as a dry loofah.
Mobile Infantry recruits, both male and female, all shower together — though as Verhoeven has
pointed out, a similar thing happens in the police locker room in "RoboCop." Perhaps Verhoeven's take
on the future is simply that it's going to result in a lot of lawsuits. The fact that the "RoboCop"
scene seemingly went unnoticed galvanized Verhoeven to go even harder in the "Starship
Troopers" showers, which feature an entire room full of beautiful young actors not wearing any
clothes. But that's not the reason to pause during this scene: What you want to examine are the
faces of the characters, none of whom display any sexual interest whatsoever in those around them.
It turns out that the shower scene means a lot more than audiences initially thought. As the
recruits discuss their lives and ambitions, the fact that they're doing so while naked
in the shower together seems to barely matter to them. As Verhoeven told Empire in 2014 -
"These so-called advanced people are without libido.
It is sublimated because they are fascists."
In stark contrast to the shower scene, the tattoo scene doesn't have any deeper thematic
meaning. But it's no less an iconic image, one that stood out in the original trailer
and features a tattoo design that has since been used in a ton of 'Starship Troopers' merchandise.
It's actually that very tattoo design that makes this moment pause-worthy.
Think about it: Why do four Mobile Infantry soldiers, who have just joined a fighting
force that deals exclusively in ground warfare, have tattoos that say "Death from above?" It's
particularly confusing when you consider that right before they get these tattoos, Rico gets
in a fight with Zander Barcalow, an officer of the Fleet, which DOES hit the enemy from above.
"Forget it Rico - Mobile Infantry and Fleet don't mix."
In fact, the tattoo design is a relic of Robert Heinlein's book, so much so that it doesn't
actually fit in Verhoeven's movie. Verhoeven had nothing but contempt for his source material,
to the extent that his adaptation was specifically designed to satirize it. He changed a ton,
including the fact that in the book, the Mobile Infantry drop onto enemy planets from orbit —
hence the slogan. The tattoos don't actually make sense for the movie — but they look really cool.
One of the many changes made by Verhoeven in his adaptation of "Starship Troopers" was to
combine the character of teacher Jean Dubois with the character of Lieutenant Rasczak,
leader of the Mobile Infantry platoon known as Rasczak's Roughnecks. This choice makes sense;
in the book, Dubois sends Rico a letter revealing that he's a former Mobile Infantry soldier,
so it's simply economical to fuse them together. This also allows the movie to provide a fantastic
narrative moment in which the audience realizes that the teacher has become the soldier.
When Rasczak is still in the classroom, it's clear that he's lost his left hand and most of
his left forearm. No attempt is made to hide this. So when Rico, Ace, and Dizzy join the Roughnecks
and prepare to meet their infamous lieutenant, the close-up on a cybernetic left arm instantly
tells us everything we need to know. It's obvious that the lieutenant is Rasczak before we even see
Michael Ironside's face again, and his seamless transition from respected educator to battle
commander slyly transmits the propagandistic idea that Rico and the Roughnecks are the good guys.
Anything that conveys that much information in a single shot is absolutely worth pausing for.
'Starship Troopers' might be a satire, but that doesn't mean it's
not also a big-budget sci-fi blockbuster. Sometimes, over the course of the movie,
you just want to pause to get a better look at some of the creature designs.
The coolest-looking Arachnid is undoubtedly the tanker bug, which first bursts out of the ground
during a Roughneck mission to Tango Urilla. Massive in size, it sports sinister green eyes
and a built-in flamethrower for incinerating pesky human soldiers. If you pause the movie
as it emerges in the desert sun, you can get a good look at the attention to detail that went
into creating it: it's clearly alien, but also recognizable as an insect. Most people probably
don't love the idea of a gargantuan beetle that spews fire at them, but that's kind of the point.
In the third act of 'Starship Troopers,' we meet another kind of Arachnid — the brain bug,
which resembles nothing so much as a gigantic brain with eyes and pincers. Its capture serves
as the big climax of the movie, representing the first definitive victory for humans over bugs,
along with a potential wealth of new information on how to fight them more effectively.
Not only is this moment pause-worthy because of another incredible alien design,
but also because it marks the re-appearance of Carl,
who has been largely absent from the middle section of the film. He's clearly refined his
latent psychic powers in the years since he, Rico, and Carmen were last together.
"It's afraid… It's afraid!"
This, of course, causes everybody to cheer wildly and signals a clear
triumph of good over evil — since in this case, the good guys are fascists,
and there's nothing a fascist loves more than making somebody else afraid.
Before the humans' triumphant capture of the brain bug, it manages to take out one of the
movie's major characters. Zander Barcalow is first seen as Rico's high school sports rival
and immediately hits on Carmen. While Rico ends up beating him in the big game,
Zander gets the girl, becoming Carmen's pilot
instructor during her Fleet training and ultimately a good deal more than that.
Zander is kind of irritating, and as an audience we're trained to stand behind our protagonist when
he gets himself into a love triangle. However, Zander ultimately proves to be a decent enough
guy — and Rico moves on to sleep with Dizzy, so everything resolves itself pretty easily.
Still, if one of these characters had to get gray matter sucked out of their head
by the brain bug's feeding spike, Zander would probably have been the audience's first choice.
It's difficult to forget this moment after seeing chunks of Zander's brain
move through a semi-transparent tube and into the brain bug as it chows down greedily.The
worst part is when it's all gone, and the brain bug makes a sound like it's sucking on an empty
straw. Zander's white-eyed, hollowed-out head is an image that tends to stick around in the mind.
'Starship Troopers' is particularly interested in the implications of
young people becoming soldiers. The journeys of Rico, Carmen, and Carl happen mostly separately,
but we still see them as kids in high school before we see them as soldiers or
military officers. We can see the changes they endure: by the movie's conclusion,
Carl is a leader in military intelligence, Carmen is a Fleet captain, and Rico is
commanding the Roughnecks — a platoon that suddenly includes several brand-new recruits.
Before his first mission as a lieutenant on Planet P, Rico looks over his newest soldiers,
most of whom appear significantly younger than the protagonists were when they began training.
In the propaganda videos throughout the film, we've seen kids dressing up as soldiers or
smashing ordinary bugs in the street to help the war effort. This moment takes that notion to its
logical extreme, as the depleted Roughnecks are given literal children to refill their ranks.
In the final sequence of the movie,
Rico can be seen repeating Rasczak's words to egg his soldiers on.
"Come on, you apes, you wanna live forever?"
The message is clear: the kids are going to keep going into the meat grinder, punctuated by
the final words that flash across the screen: "They'll keep fighting ... and they'll win!"
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