10 Movies You Didn't Realise You Were Following The Villain

3. Starship Troopers

It may seem impossible to believe nowadays, but when sci-fi war film Starship Troopers was released back in 1997, the overwhelming majority of critics and audiences completely missed that it was a satire of fascism, particularly the American imperialist kind.

If the movie was marketed as an earnest bug hunt where the clean-cut, good-looking young American soldiers ventured off to slaughter the grotesque alien "others," the film itself not-so-subtly suggested that the ambitious humans were really the true villains after all.

Given Starship Troopers' abundance of tongue-in-cheek faux-propaganda intended to satirise the military-industrial complex, it's easy to side with the Bugs, who are having their turf encroached upon by an aggressively expanding human race.

Furthermore, if you consider the possibility that the Bugs' supposed asteroid strike on Earth was nothing more than a false-flag operation created by the humans to stir up hatred of the Bugs, then the humans become a whole other level of insidious.

As easy as it is to turn your brain off and just enjoy the gory mayhem, for anyone with even the faintest ear for subtext, it's clear that the humans are a decidedly more nefarious outfit than their extraterrestrial "enemies" throughout the film.