One of the WEIRDEST big-budget, futuristic, sci-fi action movies ever. A lot of people hate this one. Many admirers of the classic 1959 Robert A. Heinlein novel (a book that director Paul Verhoeven says he never finished reading) consider it an embarrassment. General audiences and critics in 1997 didn’t care for it either, and today this $100 million flick survives as a controversial cult film.
It’s structured just like a classic war movie.
In the beginning, it’s an adolescent romance.
Then the characters enlist and we go to boot camp, as the romance strains and then falls apart.
THEN about an hour in, the film morphs into a guns-a’-blazin’ action flick with body parts flying all over the screen.
Oh, and it’s also a parody of World War II propaganda films throughout.
Humans and an alien race of giant insects are at war and the film never quite tells us WHY. In fact, both sides know remarkably little about each other. They (literally) occupy different galaxies. We get some flimsy background information in the beginning—a sequence that barely lasts a minute—about how The Bugs are somehow directing meteors to hit Earth, but that’s as deep it gets. The characters never DEBATE the war or even DISCUSS it at all in non-jingoistic terms. They have a foreign enemy, they want ’em dead—every last Bug—and that’s that, Bucko. The subject here is fascists and how war turns everyone into one.
Human society here is a strange combination of utopian and warlike. A civics teacher instructs his class about the practical importance of violence. Military service is voluntary, but it’s the only way that one can earn the rights of a “citizen”, as opposed to a mere “civilian” who can’t vote. Meanwhile, humanity seems totally at peace with each other, right down to the complete absence of sex discrimination. The only thing anyone hates are The Bugs.
The strangest thing about this movie is what little affection Verhoeven shows for his protaganists. Sure, Denise Richards has a smile on her that can melt a man, but when not outfitting our human heroes in uniforms modeled after Nazi Kommandant slickers, Verhoeven gives us some of the most bloodless paper dolls to ever flit across a screen. The main character is Johnny Rico, played by Caspar Van Dien, a handsome, chiseled, and almost supernaturally BORING blank slate of an actor. I have socks that have more charisma than him.
And I think that’s the POINT. We’re not SUPPOSED to care about these people. They’re young and beautiful pawns, the perfect propaganda poster faces for humanity to show off for their cause, but pawns are there to be manipulated by the other side, too. That other side is where Verhoeven sits.