Happy 4th! First time viewing of fascist parody 'Starship Troopers'

I finally got around to watching Starship Troopers from start to finish yesterday and I can't think of a better movie to celebrate the Fourth of July with.

I'm not sure why I've never watched it before, I've always heard great things about it and I consider myself a big Paul Verhoven fan.

In a way, Starship Troopers is the culmination of an incredible string of films which are all subversive parodies of American culture and its strain of reactionary politics.

First there was Robocop, a darkly funny sci-fi classic, which recently spawned a mediocre remake.

He followed that up with one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's all-time best -- Total Recall, and concluded with his one-two punch of sexual excess: Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

Showgirls, in particular, has always fascinated me. It is not only one of the best bad movies ever made -- I'm also beginning to believe its director was consciously mocking his own film as he made.

Listen to any interview with Verhoven and you get the sense of an incredibly smart and sophisticated man, with a pronounced socialist streak and a revulsion (mixed with admiration) for the fascistic side of American nature. And he has explicitly said that the ultraviolent, superficially bad Starship Troopers is about that very subject.

Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers

Seeing the film today -- complete with it's horribly dated CGI -- I am so impressed that Verhoven could hoodwink a major studio to bankroll such a ridiculous movie. I suppose execs only saw what it appeared to be -- a byproduct of the bigger is better aesthetic of '90s action movies -- with copious nudity and a high body count.

But the movie is so hilarious and profoundly prescient, that it's hard to believe that people didn't fully 'get it' when came out back in 1997.

The wooden, perfectly coiffed stars square off against an invasion of indistinct bug creatures, all brought to you with commercial breaks from a totalitarian regime called 'the Federation.' It's both wildly entertaining, stupefyingly silly and overblown. In other words -- it's a quintessential American movie. The cast of mostly blonde, blue-eyed 'heroes' grows increasingly heartless as the story evolves and as their 'performances' heighten, so does the gore and the trenchant social commentary.

It could only have been made how it was and when it was. It arrived at time of unparalleled American superiority -- we were in the midst of a historic economic boom and we were at peace. It's hard to imagine a film parodying American military muscle would ever fly in a post-9/11 world.

But safely tucked away as a '90s artifact -- Starship Troopers is pretty irresistible.