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.
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.