Film Diary 2024: Starship Troopers and Hollow Man
How many of us use an app for posting selfies to essentially communicate proof of life? Just me?
I had misremembered the release date of Hollow Man as 2002. This matters because, while I watched it, I thought to myself, “Was this film politically neutered post-9/11?” In fact, it was more likely that Verhoeven didn’t see the point in pressing political buttons after his previous film, Starship Troopers, flew over the heads of so much of the American audience. Part of a matching set with Robocop, Starship Troopers and that film bookended Verhoeven’s most active decade in Hollywood, a ten-year span that also included Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Showgirls. Written by Robocop scribe Ed Neumeier, Starship Troopers employed similar tactics to that 1987 hit, from using news broadcasts as both exposition devices and ways to deliver clues to the satirical messages of both films, to an absolute commitment to portraying state-sanctioned violence with as much grotesquerie as possible. An obvious indictment of US inner cities as privatized security states, Robocop’s commentary went unnoticed by the segment of the audience that ironically and uncritically celebrated its techno-futurist gore. By 1997, audiences and critics were even less capable of decoding Verhoeven and Neumeier’s methods — but also, Starship Troopers is more vicious in its indictment of the types of movies that it takes the form of, only to “detourn” them, Situationist-style.
Released in the fall of 1997 — months after the “Special Edition” theatrical releases of the original Star Wars trilogy, featuring digital alterations dictated by George Lucas, including at least one aimed at removing any ambiguity as to a lead character’s heroism — Starship Troopers was the right movie for a culture that was hurtling back into smooth-brained celebration of conspicuous consumption, priming the pump for the post-9/11 evocation of “patriotism” as something that lived at the crux of violence and shopping. (It even suggests that emptying one’s brain before the enemy does to for you might be self-protective: At the movie’s climax, the massive “brain bug” is easily captured not long after he consumes the grey matter of an elite pilot, supposedly one of the finest specimens of intelligence in the film but, as played by Patrick Muldoon, obviously a dumb hunk with nothing of value cerebrum-wise).
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