• “I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don’t.”

    • Paul Verhoeven, director of Starship Troopers

    The movie makes it clear that:

    1. The bugs were responding to human colonization
    2. Humans fired the first shots
    3. The government is lying to everyone claiming the bugs are mindless. They overjoyed shouts of the soldiers when they learn the opposite is true - is only because they learn that the bugs are terrified.
    4. The endless over the top propaganda is supposed to be a pretty fuckin heavy clue that it’s a fascist state.
    • Most of your points aren’t true at all.

      1. The movie point blank states towards the beginning that the Bugs were flinging out their pods/eggs/whatever into space looking to land on worlds to colonize

      2. The movie gives all appearances and inferences that the Bugs attacked first. Not the humans. This makes further sense by point 1, and how far away the bugs home world actually is.

      3. The only announcement made of a bug being afraid wasn’t all bugs. It was only the large “thinking” bug at the end of the movie, after it had its mouth cut off and it was strapped down and being experimented on in the lab. There was no inferences at all of any other bugs being made. So no, the government wasn’t depicted in the movie as lying about knowing of any bug intelligence. I didn’t know of any intelligent bugs, and by the end of the movie it was only known that the one type of rare smart bug captured was the only intelligent one, and that it was able to possibly psychically control the other dumb bugs.

    • 4 in particular I think is more open to interpretation based on ones existing biases than people seem to think. Being over the top doesn’t necessarily have to be mockery and authorial intent is peanuts to a random personwatching a movie.

      The other points IIRC are individual moments rather than recurring themes. It’s not surprising to me that significant numbers of people overlook them.