10 Awesome Movies Audiences Weren't Ready For

5. Starship Troopers

Paul Verhoeven's deliciously entertaining 1997 war satire Starship Troopers largely fell upon deaf ears during its initial release, tanking at the box office with a "C+" CinemaScore and receiving similarly polarised responses from critics.

The big problem with Starship Troopers is that, somehow, most viewers seemed to gloss over the satirical aspects and engage with the film as an earnest piece of fascist, right-wing military propaganda (as per the novel which the movie borrows its name from).

This is despite the movie clearly mocking the oorah themes of Robert A. Heinlein's novel, depicting the human soldiers as uncommonly attractive yet vapid, while the alien insurgents are literally bugs, paralleling U.S. military policy of making foreign forces seem as inhuman and "other" as possible.

Better still, Starship Troopers is literally packed with wink-wink propaganda videos, which to contemporary audiences might even seem too on-the-nose for their own good.

But the important consideration here is that, had Starship Troopers been released in the wake of 9/11 and especially the Iraq War, it likely would've been praised to the moon and back as a bold indictment of American imperialism.

The movie has certainly lived on as a cult fave, but if audiences had been given the necessary real-life lesson in geo-politics by the time it hit cinemas, its general reception could've turned out totally different.