Michael Ironside didn't understand why Paul Verhoeven would lead Starship Troopers

"Starship Troopers" wears the trench coat from a wacky war movie. It's got big guns, bigger bugs, and all the bare butts a rowdy movie crowd could want. But beneath the horrific war wounds and obligatory patriotism hide their rigid ideals, pushed to the brink of absurdity. This is the approach that Verhoeven explained to Ironside, who would go on to play squad leader Rasczak (a combination of two characters from the novel, Rico's teacher and his commander) in the film. Ironside adds,

"He basically said to me, 'If we're telling the story and we're going against it, we're fighting against people's prejudice. We're fighting against people's inflexibility. What you have to do, c is telling the story that takes exactly what they take to the extreme so they can see it for what it is. And I smiled and said, 'I'm in.'"< /p>

Verhoeven credits the turmoil between Columbia Pictures and parent conglomerate Sony Pictures Entertainment for such a powder keg of a movie overtaking a major movie studio, but /Film's Devin Meenan notes that "the satirical side of" Starship Troopers "would be dulled if it didn't feel like the blockbusters it ridiculed." Critic Stephen Hunter had such a hard time distinguishing fascist satire from endorsement that his review for The Washington Post was titled "Goose Stepping at the Movies." But, as Chris Evangelista observes 25 years after the film's release in 1997, "Starship Troopers" has established Paul Verhoeven as a skilled satirist.

Dacier was right to take the plunge.