To tie it into the main theme: Verhoeven’s message in Black Book seems to be that “war makes monsters even of the good guys.” Starship Troopers has the same message, albeit without as much subtlety.

But then you get to the crap trifecta of Showgirls-Troopers-Hollow Man where everything falls apart. Sure, I’ll let you make the argument that he’s playing an elaborate joke on everyone with those movies, DARING you to like them. But he did so well playing that joke, he essentially worked his way out of Hollywood. Is it any coincidence that his three worst movies had the three worst screenplays? I think not. But no one told him he had to make them. And whether by bad luck or design… by making movie after movie that were slammed by critics, no one liked and didn’t make enough at the box office? That’s right — no one wanted to hire him.

re: Troopers — if you make a movie that’s offensively stupid, why on earth would anyone but the most imbecilic teenagers give a damn about seeing humans blowing up bugs? Again, it all goes back to story — if you don’t got one, NO amount of visual effects or pyrotechnics are going to save you. You might as well watch ILM’s demo reel over and over again and get the same enjoyment out of it. Without investment in the story, there’s nothing to get you to care about what’s going on. Even if you think it’s all working on some ultra-meta level where he’s trying to show how inept a film can be. So yes, while there were lots of explosions to look at in Troopers… why would anyone think that was remotely entertaining? There’s no “cheering for the humans” involved.

Here’s the problem with the “Verhoeven as crap auteur” theory: it proves the old adage “Fool me once…” Having made that aggressively stupid movie, I had absolutely no interest in seeing Hollow Man. I like sci-fi/horror movies — that was my kind of project — but I was so annoyed by Troopers that I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt when it came to the tons of negative reviews for the movie. And when I caught some of it on cable, I considered myself lucky. That movie’s terrible (and it’s interesting — and understandable — that no one has rushed to defend it). So Verhoeven, by “winning” the battle — to prove he could make terrible genre pictures — lost the war.

It’s funny that for weeks, no one’s brought up his German movie Black Book either (after the six-year, post-Hollow Man drought) — I assume because most readers haven’t seen it. But guess what? It’s actually a fantastic film. Involving story? Check. Well-acted? Check. Well-shot and directed? Check! So there he was with great elements to work with, and guess what? It made for a great movie. There was no intent to purposefully make a crappy film — while it definitely plays with the genre, it also works on its own terms.

So people are giving Verhoeven FAR too much credit. Besides those three movies, his films generally have compelling ideas at their core, and work on multiple levels. You can’t make the same argument about the crap sandwich in the middle of his career.

So shitty in fact that there is no way to interpret their shittiness as anything other than intentional. This serves the double function of hiding his lack of talent (and I don’t mean to demean him here; every director can’t be Kubrick) while at the same time distilling his films down to pure ideas: a critique of fascism, a critique of feminism, a critique of police violence, a critique of the sex industry.

What makes Verhoeven so great is that he doesn’t let his audience off the hook. As someone above pointed out, we, by enjoying his films, become part of that crititque if not the very essence of it. In Starship Troopers, despite the bad acting and writing, despite the over-the-top satire, despite the bad lighting and pedestrian camera work, we are cheering for the fascist bastards to kill the bugs no matter what. We love watching Robocop take out that huge-ass gun and blow peoples balls off. We are caught up despite ourselves, and depsite what we know to be “good” filmmaking practice. This thought alone has many implications that question the nature of the filmmaking craft, the nature of performance, the role of the audience, you could go on and on. I mean, the dude is a genius. Just not a great director.

In becoming a master of shitty films, Verhoeven’s managed to make a name for himself. If not admired for the quality or intelligence of his craft, he has, through limited ability and, ironically, a lot of brains, made himself universally discussed and difficult to dismiss, like directors such as Russ Meyer, John Waters and David Cronenberg. The amazing thing is that critics, even those that have seen all of his films, don’t always seem to get it. Seeing how many times he has done the exact same thing in the past, you’d think they’d come to expect it by now. They certainly seem to let the directors above off the hook now and then. I wonder if maybe critics, like any group of intelligentsia, hate to be lumped with the common man, and when they watch a Verhoeven film they are implicated along with everyone else by its thesis, and they resent it.

It reminds me of the lengths that Normad Spinrad went to when he wanted to illustrate the implicit fascism in sci-fi and fantasy; he wrote The Iron Dream, a novel written by Adolf Hitler, where the Second World War was turned into much the same Us vs. Them tale that the film version of Starship Troopers was. That’s the most clever reading of fascism in Sci Fi you can get; Starship Troopers isn’t that good, but it plays by many of the same rules.

I haven’t watched Starship Troopers lately, but this has inspired me to watch it again.

Especially when you consider that the director didn’t even READ the book, and the majority of people working on the film at the start didn’t even know it -was- a book first.

“According to the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven never finished reading the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both “bored and depressed” is not a statement that I take to mean that he was trying to recreate the mood and theme of a great classic novel.

If I had to characterize the point of the novel, it was, if taken seriously, that loyalty to the state is a very important quality, and that people should be willing to give over what they’d prefer when the group as a whole has need of you to do something else. Whereas the primary message I got from the movie was “Check out the special effects, also, guns are cool, also NPH is hilarious.”

The only way you could, in my mind, say anything good about STarship Troopers (movie) inside the context of Starship Troopes (novel) is to suggest that he was making a deliberate satire -of the novel- except that, you know, he didn’t actually read the whole book.

But as Genevieve suggests about the quality of the acting, that too would have given the game away. Fascism isn’t a Bad Thing based on its won/loss record.

Robocop and Kubrick’s satirical work was satire about our society. Starship Troopers is a satire about our “art”/the stories we tell ourselves about our society. ST is mocking action movies and showing them to be inherently fascistic (anticipating Inglorious Basterds by a decade). This may be a reason the critics missed it, just as so many of them missed Basterds. A lot of the mass-media crits still don’t do “meta” very well, not to mention being generally pig ignorant about politics.

It is important that the performances in ST are bad, the drama insipid, and that it looks like crap except for the SFX because that’s what’s terrible about action movies. Gen’s last graph is on point: it’s impossible to like this movie (on a surface reading) BUT WE STILL DO. (Although I disagree with Perich that this is intrinsic to human nature and fall more on the side of it being a result of endless cultural conditioning, especially pronounced in the US.)

Couple random things:

An extended comparison of Verhoeven to Tarantino needs to be done, punch-bowl pissers extraordinaire that they are.

By way of expanding the Perich thesis to a general critical blindness to fascism, it would also be interesting to note the critical response to 300. IIRC everyone panned it, but not for its fascism. 300 is the most unironically fascist movie since Triumph of the Will. It’s practically a greatest hits of the key themes and tropes of fascist art.

Can anyone explain why ALL of the fascist allegory was taken out of the new “V” and what that means for the world?

If anyone hasn’t read Michael Moorcock’s essay “Starship Stormtroopers” definitely check it out. It’s fantastic.