Is the Nazi Metaphor in Starship Troopers Really That Hard to Grasp?

For those unfamiliar with the nuances of the increasingly niche Gen X and millennial pop culture, Starship Troopers was a 1997 film adaptation (and some might argue, an utter betrayal) of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 science fiction novel of the same name. Directed by Dutch provocateur and cynic Paul Verhoeven, the movie features pin-up ready television shows and rising Hollywood teen talent like Casper Van Dien (One Life to Live), Denise Richards (Melrose Place), and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.) as bright, attractive, fresh-faced young Americans spouting patriotic platitudes with the usual heavy hand of a 1990s prime-time soap opera. Or a 1930s propaganda film.

That was by design.

“We really tried to get away from the novel, because we felt the novel was fascist and militaristic,” Verhoeven was quoted as saying by IndieWire in 2016. “Our philosophy was really different (from Heinlein’s book), we wanted to make a double story, a really wonderful adventure story about these boys and girls fighting, but we also wanted to show that these people really, in their hearts, unknowingly, are on the road to fascism.”

The effect is realized in the film with thousands of good-looking people dying while being shipped off in starships to the far reaches of space to battle an alien race of “bugs” that are blamed for a meteorite impact on planet Earth. (The evidence is deliberately vague and suspiciously thin.) There, the children are fed into what they happily call “the grinder” of war while posing with ’90s-flavored riffs on Leni Riefenstahl iconography. And in case this has somehow escaped anyone’s notice, Harris’s intelligence officer wears the body-hugging, Nazi-infused garb of a tight black uniform and his long, leather trench coat, so impeccably, cleanly midnight black.

According to actor Michael Ironside, even while making the film, Verhoeven apparently mused that it might be “too subtle for the American consciousness.” Paul, it would appear you weren’t whistling “The Deutchlandlied.”

While Starship Troopers’ lampooning of hyper-nationalism and jingoistic valor plays out ironically, it would appear that many generations of viewers who grew up with it (or were already 50 years old in 1997) apparently missed the metaphor entirely; This, despite the fact that the film’s “good guys” attire bears a striking resemblance to the Third Reich, or at least to the villains in Star Wars who were modeled on the same Triumph of the Will iconography. (Just wait until the President finds out where the word “stormtrooper” comes from!)