10 Sci-Fi Movies That Broke All The Rules
8. Humans Were The Bad Guys All Along - Starship Troopers
Science fiction has a storied history of treating humanity as either the intrepid, well-meaning explorers of the galaxy or the victims fending off an invading extraterrestrial force.
Take Star Trek, which generally took an optimistic, earnest bent to space travel, with humanity trying to explore and connect with as many far-flung alien races as possible.
On the flip side, there are literally dozens of big-budget alien invasion movies like Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Edge of Tomorrow, and so on, where the aliens are depicted as grotesque "others" who represent a major existential threat to humanity.
But Paul Verhoeven's deliciously entertaining sci-fi satire Starship Troopers opts for a far more fascistic - and, let's be honest, realistic - inverse of these tropes, where humanity is depicted as a tyrannical space-faring force which pounds foreign races into submission by any means necessary.
Though Robert A. Heinlein's original novel was a genuinely earnest piece of right-wing military propaganda, Verhoeven threw all that out to emphasise the brutality of the real-life military industrial complex, particularly as it pertains to American foreign policy.
The film is rife with hilariously tongue-in-cheek propaganda commercials for the fascist, colonialist United Citizen Federation, and as visibly repulsive as the Bugs may seem, ultimately they're beaten into a pitiable state of fear by film's end, as is proudly cheered by the UCF soldiers.
While the film does appear to depict the Bugs launching an asteroid towards Earth, killing millions, it doesn't take much of a below-the-surface reading to suggest that this may well have been a false flag operation concocted by the UCF to justify a strike against the Bugs.
Either way, Starship Troopers wasn't the first alien invasion movie to make humans look bad - The Day the Earth Stood Still did it decades earlier - but it was certainly the most blatant, even layered behind a gossamer-thin veneer of social satire as it was.