Over the years I’ve taken my lumps from friends for loving Starship Troopers. Most who haven’t seen it assume it is a dumb sci-fi action movie. But listen to the directors commentary and the first two things you’re told is that the movie is about “how war makes fascists of us all” and that the Federal Network “media sequences” are based on US World War II anti-Japanese propaganda films. Now that’s dark.
How dark? Well, I’ve always felt that Starship Troopers was to the film medium what 1984 was to books. Yes both are sci-fi, but more importantly they are bleak looks into how technology and power can merge to create a nightmare future (indeed, on a wild tangent, 1984 may be one of the best arguments for why we need an open web).
So if you’ve never thought of Starship Troopers that way (or any way!) I can’t say enough good things about Scott Tobias’ revisit and analysis of the movie 13 years later. It is brilliant.
In fact, stop reading me, go read him.
Not only a far better articulation than anything I’d have written but it also goes places I’d never gone: Tobias’ observation that Starship Troopers is an allegory for September 11th before it happened is brilliant.
As an aside I also love Tobias’ analysis of Starship Troopers faux network television/internet – the Federal Network:
Yet the key to the Federal Network’s power isn’t necessarily the clips themselves—which feature such great cultural advancements as televised executions (after whiplash-swift justice) and barely censored “censored” violence—but the prompt at the end, “Would you like to know more?” That’s what makes it effective as propaganda: the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of choice, the illusion that people have control over their own destinies.
Sometimes that feels exactly like what we get from CNN/MSNBC and especially FOX News… but then willingly or unwillingly, in the first decade of the 21st century war has already made fascists of us all.
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