Agree, but if we're looking at movies with "leftists talking points" SST literally only has fascist talking points, ironic as they may be. The whole film is meant to be interpreted as a leftist critique of fascism, but its individual parts do not contain any leftist rhetoric. Verhoeven almost puts the onus on the viewer to talk like a leftist in their heads, but the characters on screen all talk like fascists from start to finish. You only see slight doubt of the fascist rhetoric on the edges of their universe, like the reporter who briefly wonders if perhaps it's humans who attacked the bugs and not the other way around, before being told to STFU and support the troops by Johnny Rico.
So this is a film that is leftist as the sum total of its parts, but its individual parts are all ironically fascist that require the viewer to pick up on the irony to understand the broader, unspoken leftist message.
Not saying it's a problem, just saying it's a problem if you're specifically looking for movies "with leftist talking points" and you watch Starship Troopers, because there are no leftists talking points, only ironic fascist talking points.
It's not wholly an issue with Starship Troopers, but mostly how the audience that saw Starship Troopers was conditioned by decades of Hollywood war movies to expect to see heroes on screen and expect to root for them because literally every Hollywood war movie is about cheering on the soldiers on screen. Again, I think Starship Troopers is a great film, but the vast majority of people who went to see it could have used some kind of primer to interrupt those Hollywood-set expectations that led so many to miss the point.
This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing.
David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
An absolutely valid critique of Starship Troopers; while it does a superb job of ripping apart fascist/militaristic ideology, it ultimately offers no positive alternative or solution.
I think Dr. Strangelove is a movie that made its satire more obvious to its intended audience. By making Dr. Strangelove a literal Nazi who still salutes Hitler like a fascist zombie, yet still the most sought after political consultant to determine the future of the human race, it heightens the material to such a ridiculous degree that there is no other interpretation for the audience to have other than to laugh. Nobody leaves Dr. Strangelove mistakenly thinking it's a celebration of the military or validating of Cold War politics.
I think SST is an amazing film, don't get me wrong, I actually rewatched it about 2 weeks ago just for fun, but I think it needed even just 1 more line in the film winking at the audience. Neil Patrick Harris literally wearing an SS outfit at the end was supposed to be that, I think, but because it comes so late in the film, I think most people were seduced by the increasingly fascist imagery throughout the film and didn't realize it. Almost like the frog in a slowly boiling pot. If you had a quick flash of that boiling water in the beginning, maybe, it would clue the audience in more that they were watching space Nazis. Like maybe it you saw Neil Patrick Harris leave the others and go with a guy dressed like an SS officer near the beginning, then show up as that SS officer in the end. I'm just spitballing, but I think the film would benefit from a more blatant nod somewhere closer to the beginning.
I agree American education plays a part, but I think the blame mostly rests with Hollywood and its conditioning of audiences expectations when watching war movies. I can't think of a Hollywood war film where the soldiers portrayed on screen were not meant to be the good guys, even when you see them commit some war crime in a movie, they are always shown feeling bad for what they did after the fact, so it's still assumed they are otherwise heroic people put in tragic circumstances. No Hollywood movie has ever depicted the troops as victims seduced by fascism until Starship Troopers.
When you walk into a movie like SST and literally every single war movie you've ever seen leading up to it has unquestionably showed the soldiers as ideal heroes, it's natural to take that as assumed in SST. So that's why I think there should have been something very early on to bump people off of those preconceived biases so they'd recognize they aren't in for a fun campy space adventure, but a dark and miserable story about space Nazis running head first towards collapse of human civilization.
Even the "anti-war" movies people always point to in American cinema, like Apocalypse Now, I'd argue still glorify war and still portray soldiers positively, less like superheroes and more like normal men just trying to survive, they're still sympathetic to the audience as an earnest person.
The number one scene people think of when they think of that film is the helicopter attack scene, where they massacre an entire village to le epic classical music. They're committing war crimes and I'm guessing we're supposed to be horrified, but the characters we are close to are all having the time of their lives, the music is encouraging the viewer to see the massacre as glorious, and the result of all of that is people recreating that scene for fun in video games and other media. I'm 100% sure some real life Apache helicopter pilot has played that music while dumping hellfire missiles on a civilian village in Afghanistan. Just like Starship Troopers, the message intended by that scene and the message received were completely different for the majority of the audience, at least I hope and assume FFC wasn't intentionally glorifying war crimes.
So I'd argue that even the attempts of portraying soldiers as less-than-heroes have been failures in Hollywood, until Starship Troopers, and even then most people didn't get it, especially not at the time it was released.
As I was rewatching Starship Troopers 2 weeks ago, I was texting a friend and he mentioned he loved the movie, but thought the first half was boring. I started talking about the fascism in it and he was like, "Fascism? What do you mean?" He genuinely had no idea and didn't notice the details that seem obvious to people who come into the movie already knowing it's a satire of fascism.
And yet almost no Americans understood that and took the movie seriously on its face, even today.
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Agree, but if we're looking at movies with "leftists talking points" SST literally only has fascist talking points, ironic as they may be. The whole film is meant to be interpreted as a leftist critique of fascism, but its individual parts do not contain any leftist rhetoric. Verhoeven almost puts the onus on the viewer to talk like a leftist in their heads, but the characters on screen all talk like fascists from start to finish. You only see slight doubt of the fascist rhetoric on the edges of their universe, like the reporter who briefly wonders if perhaps it's humans who attacked the bugs and not the other way around, before being told to STFU and support the troops by Johnny Rico.
So this is a film that is leftist as the sum total of its parts, but its individual parts are all ironically fascist that require the viewer to pick up on the irony to understand the broader, unspoken leftist message.
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Not saying it's a problem, just saying it's a problem if you're specifically looking for movies "with leftist talking points" and you watch Starship Troopers, because there are no leftists talking points, only ironic fascist talking points.
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It's not wholly an issue with Starship Troopers, but mostly how the audience that saw Starship Troopers was conditioned by decades of Hollywood war movies to expect to see heroes on screen and expect to root for them because literally every Hollywood war movie is about cheering on the soldiers on screen. Again, I think Starship Troopers is a great film, but the vast majority of people who went to see it could have used some kind of primer to interrupt those Hollywood-set expectations that led so many to miss the point.
An absolutely valid critique of Starship Troopers; while it does a superb job of ripping apart fascist/militaristic ideology, it ultimately offers no positive alternative or solution.
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I think Dr. Strangelove is a movie that made its satire more obvious to its intended audience. By making Dr. Strangelove a literal Nazi who still salutes Hitler like a fascist zombie, yet still the most sought after political consultant to determine the future of the human race, it heightens the material to such a ridiculous degree that there is no other interpretation for the audience to have other than to laugh. Nobody leaves Dr. Strangelove mistakenly thinking it's a celebration of the military or validating of Cold War politics.
I think SST is an amazing film, don't get me wrong, I actually rewatched it about 2 weeks ago just for fun, but I think it needed even just 1 more line in the film winking at the audience. Neil Patrick Harris literally wearing an SS outfit at the end was supposed to be that, I think, but because it comes so late in the film, I think most people were seduced by the increasingly fascist imagery throughout the film and didn't realize it. Almost like the frog in a slowly boiling pot. If you had a quick flash of that boiling water in the beginning, maybe, it would clue the audience in more that they were watching space Nazis. Like maybe it you saw Neil Patrick Harris leave the others and go with a guy dressed like an SS officer near the beginning, then show up as that SS officer in the end. I'm just spitballing, but I think the film would benefit from a more blatant nod somewhere closer to the beginning.
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I agree American education plays a part, but I think the blame mostly rests with Hollywood and its conditioning of audiences expectations when watching war movies. I can't think of a Hollywood war film where the soldiers portrayed on screen were not meant to be the good guys, even when you see them commit some war crime in a movie, they are always shown feeling bad for what they did after the fact, so it's still assumed they are otherwise heroic people put in tragic circumstances. No Hollywood movie has ever depicted the troops as victims seduced by fascism until Starship Troopers.
When you walk into a movie like SST and literally every single war movie you've ever seen leading up to it has unquestionably showed the soldiers as ideal heroes, it's natural to take that as assumed in SST. So that's why I think there should have been something very early on to bump people off of those preconceived biases so they'd recognize they aren't in for a fun campy space adventure, but a dark and miserable story about space Nazis running head first towards collapse of human civilization.
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Even the "anti-war" movies people always point to in American cinema, like Apocalypse Now, I'd argue still glorify war and still portray soldiers positively, less like superheroes and more like normal men just trying to survive, they're still sympathetic to the audience as an earnest person.
The number one scene people think of when they think of that film is the helicopter attack scene, where they massacre an entire village to le epic classical music. They're committing war crimes and I'm guessing we're supposed to be horrified, but the characters we are close to are all having the time of their lives, the music is encouraging the viewer to see the massacre as glorious, and the result of all of that is people recreating that scene for fun in video games and other media. I'm 100% sure some real life Apache helicopter pilot has played that music while dumping hellfire missiles on a civilian village in Afghanistan. Just like Starship Troopers, the message intended by that scene and the message received were completely different for the majority of the audience, at least I hope and assume FFC wasn't intentionally glorifying war crimes.
So I'd argue that even the attempts of portraying soldiers as less-than-heroes have been failures in Hollywood, until Starship Troopers, and even then most people didn't get it, especially not at the time it was released.
I agree with you, they literally have NPH walk in wearing a Nazi uniform 2/3 into the movie.
Can someone give an example of this? I hear this repeated breathlessly, but as far as I can tell it's just a recently accepted dogma.
Roger Ebert review from when it came out
Also found this short write up about critics missing the point
As I was rewatching Starship Troopers 2 weeks ago, I was texting a friend and he mentioned he loved the movie, but thought the first half was boring. I started talking about the fascism in it and he was like, "Fascism? What do you mean?" He genuinely had no idea and didn't notice the details that seem obvious to people who come into the movie already knowing it's a satire of fascism.