Starship Troopers (1997)
- During the filming of Starship Troopers, Casper Van Dien improvised one of the most famous lines in the movie.
- The incredible score for Starship Troopers was composed in just a few weeks after the original composer dropped out.
- Before Casper Van Dien was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
Starship Troopers is a 1997 American military science fiction action film directed by Paul Verhoeven, loosely based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel. The film follows Johnny Rico, played by Casper Van Dien, a Buenos Aires teenager who enlists in the Mobile Infantry β the ground forces of the United Federation β to fight the Arachnids, an insectoid alien species nicknamed Bugs that has attacked Earth by hurling asteroids at Buenos Aires.
Paul Verhoeven deliberately designed the film as a savage satire of fascism and militarism β the Federation's society, with its limited citizenship earned through military service, its propaganda newsreels recruiting children, and its beautiful, ethnically diverse soldiers enthusiastically marching toward meaningless death, was modeled on Nazi Germany's aesthetics and ideology. Many American audiences and critics missed the satire entirely, taking the film at face value as a straightforward (and poorly acted) action movie, though international and subsequent audiences embraced its subversive genius. Starship Troopers earned $121 million worldwide on a $105 million budget and has been extensively reappraised as one of the most intelligent science fiction satires of the 1990s.
