Thread by @karaokecomputer

Short film crit thread on how Starship Troopers brilliantly depicts an empire in fascist decline 🧵

It’s clear throughout the film that earth and its interplanetary colonies live under a global fascist order ruled by the Citizen Federation whose explicit aim is to colonize and control the entire galaxy. It’s also implied by a reporter that humans encroached on Bugs first.

There’s even reference to Camp Joe Smith, an “extremist Mormon colony” that attempted to colonize a planet in what the Federation calls “The Arachnid Quarantine Zone”, where setting up colonies is considered unadvisable - but is not prevented by the Federation. Sound familiar?

The film makes clear through propaganda newsreel that Klendathu orbits twin stars with a large asteroid belt. The asteroid that hits Buenos Aires is said to have been shot over by “Bug Plasma” - but we never see the Bugs actually firing it, so it’s not clear they’re responsible!

This sets the stage for a humiliating preemptive invasion followed by another invasion of humans into Bug territory. Not once do the Bugs actually invade Earth or its solar system, but Verhoeven brilliantly depicts everyone in the Federation viewing their actions as DEFENSIVE.

This is humanity gone mad under fascism and settler colonialism. Executions aired live on all stations, pundits screaming at each other in the wake of major defeat resulting from their attack on the Bugs, wall-to-wall unhinged war propaganda, and a galactic crisis of legitimacy.

The Federation’s ground offensive churned through so many able bodied adults that what begins the film as a joke: a literal child claiming to be joining the front, becomes a stark reality by the second invasion. They’re losing a war of aggression that they started and losing bad!

This is a society gone collectively insane under fascism, minds dulled by bread, circuses and quack science.

In the “psychic” test scene Carl says no one’s yet learned how to psychically influence humans yet – which cleverly cuts to a scene of screaming fans at a football game.

The end is a hilariously dark depiction of a declining empire desperately searching for victory in a mountain of defeat. The final “psychic” moment where Carl declares “it’s afraid!” to the rapturous cries of joy from the crowd of fascist stormtroopers is a telling projection.

Hot Take: what makes Starship Troopers a masterpiece is its SUBTLETY. Between stunning action set pieces & great bits like Jake Busey on a neon fiddle are the dark truths the newsreel voice talks AROUND - a reality shoved to the periphery of a Nazi [Israeli?] propaganda narrative

The film drops us into the world AFTER fascism has won. The teacher tells it like this: “the failure of democracy by the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos”, until “The Veterans took control and imposed the stability that’s lasted for generations since”.

Many aspects of the world presented in the film is played for humor or shock value; but in total it reveals how fascism normalizes cruel hierarchical control over every aspect of the lives of its subjects whilst offering in trade the illusion of agency and mastery over the Other.

This thread has introduced me to some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet

@TopMarx420 This is quite thematically central to the film. The colonizers feel terrified and inferior by an enemy they don’t understand that’s capable of thinking and acting beyond their comprehension, so they mask insecurity with a supernatural sense of superiority (like Zionism & Nazism)