Zim (Clancy Brown) who disciplines Levy not with push-ups, solitary confinement, or formally sentenced lashing but by throwing a knife into the soldier's open hand, pinning it to a wall. No opposition is allowed because unlike "Robocop," Verhoeven's earlier satirical sci-fi film, "Starship Troopers" is not a drama but pseudo-propaganda, and it relates disturbing details of real-world tyranny from the past, the present, and, alas, the likely future.Īce Levy (Jake Busey) isn't so agreeable to the military leadership, especially Sgt. They are not people but icons of a violent struggle that is wryly depicted as noble, valiant, and even intimate. Johnny Rico (Casper van Dien) and Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) are model recruits, and they come straight out of Leni Riefenstahl's central casting. These bulletins are propaganda within propaganda because "Starship Troopers" can be viewed as one big propaganda piece vetted by the United Citizen Federation, the film's dystopian one-world government. The numerous propaganda bulletins make this clear, but the propaganda does not stop there. Such literal-mindedness misses that Paul Verhoven's film is satirical meta-propaganda, not a cosmic fascist fantasy. Critics were not best pleased, either, especially Stephen Hunter, who attacked "Troopers" as a film that "presupposes" Nazism.
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