In 1997 director Paul Verhoeven adapted the story Starship Troopers from Robert Heinlein's
novel. The mega-budget film was a total flop and panned by the critics. If you want to
learn more about this crazy, misunderstood satire, here's the ending of Starship Troopers
explained.
The story is set in the distant future when Earth is ruled by a fanatical government that
requires military service as a condition for full citizenship. Despite that, life seems
relatively prosperous, apart from a series of ongoing battles with giant alien insects
known as "the bugs."
Our heroes are four recent high school graduates who enlist in the military for various reasons.
Carmen played by Denise Richards dreams of becoming a pilot. Carl, a young-looking Neil
Patrick Harris, is an academic prodigy with latent psychic abilities who ends up in military
intelligence.
Casper Van Dien plays Johnny Rico, an aimless jock in search of his identity. He impulsively
enlists in an effort to impress Carmen, his girlfriend, but ends up in the most dangerous
branch of the military — the infantry. Then Dizzy, played by Dina Meyer, joins the same
unit as Johnny, hiding an unrequited crush on him.
Then the bugs launch a direct attack on Earth, destroying our heroes' hometown of Buenos
Aires.
"Buenos Aires has been wiped off the Earth"
Humanity responds by launching a direct invasion on the bug homeworld of Klendathu, but this
operation ends up being a complete disaster. 100,000 soldiers die in the first hour alone,
including most of Rico's unit.
Rico and Dizzy are some of the only survivors and get transferred to an elite group of soldiers
known as the Roughnecks, led by the stoic Lieutenant Rasczak played by Michael Ironside.
Soon after, Rico, Dizzy, and the Roughnecks are on their way to answer a distress call
on a world only known as Planet P. It's here that the film's final chapter begins.
Our heroes arrive on Planet P and discover that the soldiers who sent them the distress
signal have all been killed. They find only a lone survivor, a general who explains his
forces have discovered an unknown group of bugs, called Brain Bugs, that have the ability
to absorb knowledge by feasting on the minds of humans.
The bugs then attack the base and many Roughnecks are killed, including Lieutenant Rasczak and
Dizzy.
"Johnny, I'm dying. I’m dying."
However, Rico and several others are saved by a passing ship, piloted by Carmen. Rico
is given command of the Roughnecks and his old buddy Carl tasks him with another operation:
"We're going back to P to capture that brain."
However, Carmen's ship is suddenly hit by an explosive plasma projectile. She crash-lands
on Planet P and is captured by the bugs. She's then brought before the elusive Brain Bug
who's hungry for the young pilot's tasty gray matter. But Rico and a couple other Roughnecks
arrive at the last minute and save her.
Johnny and Carmen retreat to the surface, and moments later, they find that the Brain
Bug has been captured. Carl arrives on the scene and uses his psychic powers to sense
its emotions. He declares:
"It's afraid. It’s afraid!"
The surrounding soldiers cheer, and the film ends with a military recruitment video, encouraging
the audience to join the fight against the bugs.
After humanity's victory on Planet P, it's probably safe to assume that Johnny, Carmen,
and Carl are all locked into a lifetime in the military. After the destruction of Buenos
Aires, we doubt they'll ever return to the lives they had before. They can't go home
again, both in a literal and metaphorical sense.
The final recruitment ad gives us a chance to check in on our heroes one last time. Rico
has been given permanent command of the Roughnecks. Carmen has achieved her dream of becoming
a starship captain, and Carl was present at the first-ever capture of a Brain Bug, so
we can only imagine the promotions that await him in the future.
But are Rico and Carmen going to get back together? The film ends with their relationship
status uncertain. They each had romantic adventures while apart, Carmen with her crewmate Zander
and Rico with Dizzy. But now, both of their would-be paramours are deceased.
But there was an alternate ending that settled things far more definitively. In this scrapped
version of the finale, Rico and Carmen celebrate their victory on Planet P with a kiss, reaffirming
their romantic relationship.
When Carmen's ship crash lands on Planet P, she radios Johnny, telling him there are bugs
closing in all around her. Rico hesitates for a moment before ordering the Roughnecks
to ignore her distress call and continue onward. He knows that the bugs don't take prisoners.
A few minutes later Rico stops in his tracks and says:
"She's still alive.”
“I don't know how I know, but I know."
It turns out that Rico's hunch is correct. Carmen is indeed alive, as the prisoner of
the Brain Bug, and Rico manages to rescue her.
But how did Rico do this? We know that psychic powers exist in the world of Starship Troopers,
but Rico definitively doesn't have them. The film does actually offer a potential explanation
to Rico's lucky hunch in its closing moments, but it's easy to miss.
When Rico finally reunites with Carl at the end of the film, a new possibility occurs
to him. He says to Carl,
"It was you, wasn't it? You told me how to find Carmen."
All Carl says in return is,
"Well, that's classified."
It seems that Carl's psychic powers, much like his military rank, had risen to heights
he never would've thought possible.
On a basic level, Starship Troopers isn't a difficult movie to understand. There's not
much ambiguity in the ending, nor are there any last-minute plot twists. But on a deeper
thematic level, it's a surprisingly tough film to pin down and easy to misinterpret.
In one sense, it's just a movie about soldiers killing bugs without really telling the audience
how to feel about it. Because of this, when the film was first released, it was panned
for being violent, joyless, and empty. We totally get how this happened.
There's no big speech at the end where our main character says, "I was wrong, war is
bad!" The humans and bugs don't discover that "they aren't so different, after all" and
decide to make peace. Honestly, no one really learns anything in the end.
That's not to say that the film doesn't have a point that it's trying to make. It actually
has several, but these characters and this world are so far gone that there's no saving
them. They can't learn the lesson, but we can. Starship Troopers is a cautionary tale,
trying to steer us away from the horrible future this film depicts.
One of the topics that Starship Troopers seems interested in exploring is the idea of self-delusion.
All throughout the film, single-minded obsession and willful ignorance lead to the characters
either dying or ruining their lives. The humans believe that the bugs are weak, and that victory
on Klendathu is assured, but then the bugs slaughter them mercilessly and they're forced
to retreat. Humans think that the bugs are unintelligent but at the end of the film,
they discover the intelligent Brain Bugs. Time and again, the humans end up being completely
wrong.
But this theme isn't just explored on a cosmic scale, it's also reflected in the lives of
our heros. Rico's all-consuming love for Carmen makes him enlist in the infantry, which forces
him to endure life-threatening horrors. Dizzy's obsession with Rico leads her to request a
transfer to his unit, which ultimately leads to her death. Starship Troopers shows us that
many of the horrible things that happen to us are things that we do to ourselves out
of pride.
One of the central themes of Starship Troopers is a critique of fascism. Fascism is a somewhat
loose concept, describing a range of different political movements united by how they gain
and maintain control. In his 1995 essay, philosopher Umberto Eco lists 14 qualities of fascism.
These qualities include a rejection of arts and the humanities, a need to exist in a state
of perpetual warfare, propaganda, and a tendency to characterize their enemies as both quote
"horrible threat that will destroy us all" and "no match for our superior military might."
Eco states that,
"Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable
of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."
You may notice that many of the tenets of fascism seemingly contradict one another,
and you'd be correct. At the end of the day, Starship Troopers shows that Fascism is anti-intellectual,
as exemplified by pretty much every character in the film, and is a system that definitely
deserves ridicule.
Perhaps a major reason why critics initially labeled Starship Troopers as feeling brainless
and soulless is because of how often our heroes have to face horrifically grim tragedies with
no warning and with seemingly no deeper meaning.
Buenos Aires is destroyed by a meteor, killing Rico's parents. During a training exercise,
a perfectly nice farm boy gets accidentally shot in the head. And the woman who accidentally
shoots him, a kind person with dreams of becoming a politician, has her entire career destroyed
in an instant. Is the film just doing this for cheap shock value? What are we supposed
to make of all this senseless suffering?
There's an argument to be made that Starship Troopers is a work of existential nihilism.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that we live in a world without a god, where
everything comes into existence empty of meaning. Basically, stuff just happens, and it doesn't
mean anything.
The idea that war, and by extension life, is meaningless is a common theme in war movies.
Happiness or a sense of purpose only occurs in glimmers, such as executing the perfect
play to win the high school football game, dancing with your squadmates as a soldier
plays the violin, or spending the night with your sweetheart before a big battle. When
everything seems meaningless, hold onto your friends and enjoy what time you have with
them because that's all you have in the end.
The book and the film versions of Starship Troopers share many of the same character
names and plot beats but they're wildly different in terms of their priorities and deeper messages.
The book spends most of its time inside of Johnny Rico's head as he muses about life
while at boot camp. But the movie is more of an ensemble piece and focuses on the war
itself. Also, the soldiers in the novel have powered armor exoskeletons, but trying to
replicate all of these imaginary setpieces onscreen may have been a bit advanced for
a film to handle back in 1997.
In fact, Verhoeven wasn't a fan of the book at all.
In an interview with Empire, he said, quote, "It is really quite a bad book."
He then went on to say about his cinematic adaptation,
"All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the
way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'"
If you can't get enough Starship Troopers, then we have some good news and some bad news.
The good news is that the end of this film isn't the end of the story, as there are numerous
direct-to-video sequels. The bad news, they're not that great.
The first two sequels are direct-to-video live-action films. Starship Troopers 2: Heroes
of the Federation is pretty much universally disliked. It doesn't feature any returning
characters, and it doesn't have any of the satiric self-awareness of the original film.
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder, however, is more of a return to form. Not only because
Casper Van Dien returns to reprise his role as Johnny Rico but because the filmmakers
once again achieve a satiric tone more in line with the first installment. It's a bit
of a step down in quality from the first movie in pretty much all respects, but it's still
totally worth a watch for diehard fans.
After the third movie, the franchise switched over to the world of animation. Starship Troopers:
Invasion wasn't especially loved by critics, and it was compared unfavorably to a bad video
game cutscene. And finally, Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars received some lukewarm praise
for being a campy fun time, but it still paled in comparison to the original film. On the
plus side, not only does Casper Van Dien return to voice Rico in Traitor of Mars, but this
time, Dina Meyer also returns to provide the voice for Dizzy.
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