You’ve probably been seeing a lot of space marines on your timeline recently. That’ll be in no small part thanks to the surprising, and slightly overwhelming, success of Helldivers 2, which has certainly adorned my timeline with numerous clips of human on bug-stroke-automaton action. It’s a classic case of word-of-mouth, and funny and cool clips propelling it higher than any kind of ad campaign possibly could. Ironically, it’s also all over the internet right around the same time that there’s discourse (deep sigh) about Starship Troopers. Ironically still, Starship Troopers just so happens to be the perfect film to watch if you’re loving Helldivers 2.
If you know the premise of Helldivers, then you pretty much already know the premise of Starship Troopers, but I’ll run it down for you anyway. Set in the 23rd century, the Paul Verhoeven directed film follows teenager Johnny Rico and his friends signing up to join the military. This specifically involves going off to fight alien bugs that supposedly want to wipe out the human race, described as both intelligent enough to purposely launch asteroids at Earth from lightyears away, but stupid enough to only live off the instinct to kill and nothing else – the contradictory nature of those two things being very much on purpose, of course.
You see, while the protagonist of the film is the strong-chinned Johnny, he is not what one might call a good guy. He initially signs up to join the military simply because his girlfriend does, he has no real purpose in life, he’s just there because that’s what his hormones told him to do. A short way into the film his family is culled by the bugs (supposedly), and lo-and-behold, there’s his motivation! He hates bugs now and wants to wipe every last one of them out.
About Author
