The President Is Ripping off a Paul Verhoeven Movie (Yes, That One)

It’s 1997, and I am an impressionable 8-year-old who often got to watch things that were too old for me. Couple that with the fact that my dad managed a movie theater at that time, and some things were even easier to see. And one night, for whatever reason, I was allowed at the last minute to go with my brother (who was around 12 at the time) to see Starship Troopers. I was absolutely much too young to see that movie at the time, but I can also understand the mistake, as this is how the film was marketed.

I’ve been laughing at that for about ten straight minutes. I haven’t seen those spots in almost two decades, but anytime I think about Song 2 by Blur or hear it in any other context, I’m transported back to being an absolutely hyped child, so ready to see a bunch of space troopers battle aliens. That’s mostly what the marketing was focused on. This was presented as a ra-ra action film that is about humans battling a race of space bugs who want to take us out!

And, look, as a seven-year-old, that’s exactly what the movie felt like to me. There were big explosions and set pieces. The death during training let me know that this was very serious, and the massacre on Klendathu (another of which we can ill afford) raised the stakes even higher. Seeing Johnny Rico ride a giant bug and then destroy it was thrilling, as was the rescue of Carmen Ibanez and the capture of the brain bug. I saw everything that was on the surface and took it at face value. Because I was seven.

But that’s not what the movie is about. It is a satire of propaganda films and the fascist regimes that pumped them out to sway their citizens. Every time I watch it, I pick up on something new, so I can kind of understand it going over a lot of people’s heads at the time. That said, some of Michael Ironside’s first lines are about the failure of democracy, and he goes on to describe what sounds like a military coup that found us in this mostly white future with beautiful people battling disgusting, inhuman “bugs.” It ain’t very subtle!

The trailers I posted above feel like something that would play in the film, and the fact that it was marketed that way is insane, but not nearly as insane as the President of the United States modeling new Space Force uniforms after the costumes in the movie. Actually, that should be insane, but given who we’re dealing with, it’s more like that moment in The Simpsons when a group of gay Republican men is trying to find a new spokesanimal, a pink elephant balloon flies into the room, and one of them says, “A little on the nose, don’tcha think?”

On one hand, I would absolutely buy that some idiot in the administration simply sees the idea as cool and doesn’t understand the deeper meanings at play in Starship Troopers. I’d also believe that someone like Stephen Miller’s nipples became hard as diamonds and his testicles filled up with blood until engourged as he then secreeted yellow puss from the folicles of his pubic hair (I assume that’s how he experiences arousal) at the thought of dressing up members of the U.S. military as Nazis, even if the branch does little more than model Nazi clothes (apparently).

It’s all just so very stupid, and it always has been. Either you understand history and can realize that what is going on in Starship Troopers is deeply satirical and choose to move forward anyway, or you’ve got the mind of a seven-year-old, saw a bunch of soldiers fighting aliens, and all you could think of was getting your hands on an Ace Levy figure (my only toy modeled after Jake Busey, sadly). It’s all very stupid, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from these evil losers.