Why is starship troopers in buenos aires

If one really looks beneath the surface and understands what Verhoven was saying with this film, he makes it very clear who the real monsters are.

When reflecting on this film, Verhoven remembers it with heartbreak. At the time, and even today, people often view this film as fun schlock. That Verhoven made a satire of fascist propaganda films and that some people un-ironically embraced its warped views is, to me, the most disturbing thing of all.

Make no mistakes. The utopia this film promises, like all other promises that fascism makes, is a lie. Like this article? Check out these other similarly themed pieces by some of our top contributors! Like Like. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Dreamlike fascism is a dream that fascism proposes to you. In reality, the dream is a nightmare.

Paul Verhoven For the natives of Klendathu, nothing could be truer. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Link In Bio Podcast. Follow Following. While these prosthetics are dystopian futuristic cool meaning you could totally open cans of tuna by crushing them in your steely fingers , they still replace a living limb, which is not cool.

The thing is, though, that the officer who shakes the cadets' hands comes out from behind the desk and doesn't have a leg to stand on. No that's not a joke-- the guy has no legs. It turns out the actor playing him actually had both legs amputated in real life, so the authenticity is out of the park with this one. As sad as it is, casting must have been a cinch.

Who ever thought that Neil Patrick Harris would ever look so at home in an uniform? Its been stated before, but the uniforms that the humans wear in Starship Troopers look a lot like Nazi uniforms. Well, they're actually meant to, according to director Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven grew up in the Nazi occupied Netherlands, right down the street from a German V2 rocket base, which was a prime target for allied soldiers to turn into a smoking crater every chance they got.

For obvious reasons, Verhoeven hated the Nazis and war, and it reflects in his directing choices. Even though the allies-- much like the humans in Starship Troopers -- were the good guys, it doesn't mean that innocents-- like Verhoeven and his family-- didn't suffer during their bombing. The point behind dressing up the heroes like Nazis is meant emphasize the fact that the uniform doesn't make a difference-- in war, we're all monsters.

The original book, as well as the unrelated screen play that was mashed with the novel, was about humans fighting bugs and the horrors of war. There were several fascist elements in the book, so director Paul Verhoeven took what he knew about fascism and the Nazis which was a lot , and used it to make Starship Troopers a serious cinematic study on the subject.

An example of this is the propaganda displayed in the movie, which is overly dramatized. Most of the soldiers and civilians on Earth obtain their news about the war from this propaganda, much like the brainwashed state of Germany, which was blinded as Hitler and his cronies became more and more powerful in WWII. The movie also speaks volumes about the futility of war, as well as the massively important aspect of context and the perspective from both sides during an armed conflict.

The bugs are only doing what's best for them-- ripping off peoples' legs and eating them alive-- while the humans are doing what's best for the-- eradicating a species that they don't understand. No one wins. Its already been established that Starship Troopers wasn't actually the source material in the beginning-- a completely unrelated screen play was selected and jammed packed with elements and plot points from Heinlein's book, much to the agitation of the screenplay's writer and director Paul Verhoeven.

So, Verhoeven had an idea-- he was going to take those last minute elements from the book and mock them. The producers wanted to take a pro-Fascist book and sprinkle it all over his movie-- no problem, especially for a guy who gets off on pointing out that Nazis, and Fascism in general, are the worst.

Thus, Starship Troopers was born as the glaringly poignant look at Fascism that it remains today. Robert A. Heinlein is considered the "Dean of science-fiction" in the field, as his controversial novels and stories still largely effect the genre today. Starship Troopers may be his most well known book. This may be partly to due with its Fascist undertones, which might seem a bit odd since the book was written by a military man from the US. Well, there's a reason for that-- after Heinlein retired from the military and began writing about people blasting bugs with assault rifles, he made an astute observation about the civilians that he had spent his life valiantly serving: they were a bunch of lazy slobs.

Heinlein makes mandatory military service part of his human society in the novel, amidst other norms that run right along with the Fascist ideas implemented by the Axis of Evil in WWII. In the book, Rico is from Buenos Aries, meaning that he is Argentinean. However, in the movie he looks like he is of European decent. While many fans wondered if this was due to a casting mistake or due to time restraints, it was actually because of neither reason.

Verhoeven decided to cast the blond haired, blue eyed Casper Van Dien to reflect the mass exodus of war criminals and Nazis to Argentina after the Reich came crashing down at the end of WWII.

This was actually a very creative way to get Paul Verhoeven's deeper meaning or obsession , with broadcasting the atrocities of the Nazis and fascism to the masses. The whole reason that the humans decide to storm the bug's planet and start splattering their neon colored insides all over the place is because the bugs flattened most of Buenos Aries with a comet. However, one has to wonder: how were they able to do this? In the film, Captain Hair Johnny Rico wants to "join the military to travel.

As though interstellar backpacking isn't a thing? As though in the future, kids don't still go off to Europe with a rucksack and some friends after graduation to find themselves? Furthermore, Rico's parents are well off and they hate that he's enlisting.

I'm sure if he just wanted to travel, they'd give him a wad of cash and the keys to the space convertible to see the rest of the universe. Especially because the alternative is gruesome death by bugs. Carmen and Diz are the competent heroines of the film, who dutifully serve their planet, and who both share feelings for Rico.

However, Carmen is in flight school for all of what seems like a few minutes and she's already flying a giant ship? How does that work? Clearly, these women are capable because Diz is like Hermoine in space.

She's the most well-versed in all military tactics, performs the best in training and on missions, and somehow wastes her time pining after someone who will never love her and got someone killed during basic. We just don't know where and when they learnt everything. Apparently, in the space military of the future, promotion works a little differently than in the real one.

Rico can be responsible for the death of a man under his command during a routine training exercise, and yet still get promoted over Diz. And when he gets demoted, and Jake Busey takes over, Diz still doesn't get promoted despite being the most capable leader. Rico effectively gets promoted 3 times and made an officer with no additional training in what basically amounts to a day and a half.

What exactly qualifies Rico for this sort of recognition? He's just in the right place at the right time and everyone keeps dying around him. In the book which was written in the '40s there was mobile armor. As crazy as it sounds that something like that could be conceived of for the military far in advance of it actually having any, it seemed a logical defense mechanism against the bugs.

So where was it in the film? The military is part of a futuristic society with loads of advanced technology. This armor is said to have inspired the Space Marines of the Warhammer 40k universe and would have not only saved lives in the movie, but it would also have looked damn cool.