Starship Troopers (1997) - Quotes

Taglines: This Fall, TriStar Pictures takes you to the front lines of the next frontier.

Taglines: They came to our planet, they destroyed our cities. But on November 7, they'll learn, they messed with the wrong species.

Taglines: In every age there is a cause worth fighting for, but in the future the greatest threat to our survival will not be man at all. Now the youth of tomorrow must travel across the stars to face an enemy more devastating than any ever imagined.

Taglines: You can't step on these ones

Taglines: Forget the insecticide, bring on the nukes!

Taglines: Mankind just became an endangered species

Taglines: The only good bug is a dead bug

Taglines: When you battle 6 trillion enemies that will eat you alive, there are only two rules... EVERYONE FIGHTS. NO ONE QUITS.

Taglines: The paratroopers of the future are here... and their enemies aren't HUMAN

Taglines: Prepare for Battle

Taglines: Genocide doesn't compare to this.

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022): [[w:Action film|action movie] It’s in Starship Troopers that Verhoeven does his job too well, essentially throwing a desperate warning at the audience that says, “The right ] director can even make fascism look just this cool, guys.”

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022): Even 20 years later, very few films’ endings have ever made me so completely question everything preceding them. It didn’t dawn on me the third or even the fifth time I saw this film that the ending is showing us that this has been, as I said before, a propaganda film from the opening shots. Are we seeing a movie that’s actually a dramatization of Johnny’s rise, starring some pampered actor and some disingenuous representation of the bugs? Is this the To Hell and Back of the Starship Troopers universe, with Johnny Rico playing himself, just as Audie Murphy did? I wasn’t old enough to “get” Starship Troopers when I first saw it. I found the violence shocking and off-putting as a teen. It wasn’t until later that the realization of why it’s such an ugly movie caught up with me. As a child, Verhoeven lived next to a Nazi military base in the Netherlands that became a target of allied bombings. The violence in his science fiction films is always brutal, but it’s the sickening sense of the characters being enveloped in a callous world over which they have no control that draws a line under the bullets and blood.

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022): All fascism is about Us vs. Them at base. The most insidious regimes encourage this enmity not just toward other states, but toward other citizens. It’s in the film’s second reel, when the young cadets all head off to boot camp, that we get a few more details about who is the Us and who is the Them. Some of Johnny’s fellow recruits want to do things like have children or start businesses—but the government regulates all those things and only citizens are allowed, or at least fast-tracked to permission. If you aren’t out there sacrificing your limbs for the military’s dumb wars, you don’t deserve any of society’s other benefits. One of the cadets gives a little shrug—perhaps the same one you did when they imposed the indoor smoking ban in your state. That’s just the way it is now.

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022): But try this: Watch Starship Troopers through the lens of somebody in the world in which it’s set. Imagine you’re watching this as a denizen of this legitimately scary society. As Republican candidates for president in 2016 went on about possibly repealing birthright citizenship—a legal precedent established centuries ago that stands unquestioned in nearly every country in the New World—this a movie from 20 years ago paints a perfect picture of what a society without it would look like. The film’s newsreels and secondary characters repeat that “Service Guarantees Citizenship,” meaning that if you voluntarily enlist in the military, you are granted citizenship. Nowhere in this sunny propaganda film of an action movie is there any mention of what not being a citizen means. This is a world where the fascists have already won. All society is geared around and idealizes the military. In the film’s opening scenes, when Johnny and friends are finishing high school, we’re given glimpses into what this is doing to society. Their teachers are disfigured and unhinged war veterans. Michael Ironside plays an amputee who fills his students’ heads with war propaganda, flatly telling them that violence is the solution to political disputes, and maybe you should ask Hiroshima how being a peacenik works out, huh?

“20 Years Ago, Starship Troopers Showed Us What Happens When Fascism Wins” (November 7, 2022): Starship Troopers has the most rock-dumb and dirt-simple plot of any science fiction feature in recent memory: Humanity is at war with gigantic creepy-crawlies from outer space, and a crew of determined youngsters must do battle with them.

Newsreel Announcer: We have the ships. We have the weapons. We need soldiers. Soldiers like Lieutenant Stack Lumbreiser.

Lt. Stack Lumbreiser: [aboard a warship] We're over the target area now, Captain.

Newsreel Announcer: And Captain Carmen Ibanez.

Capt. Carmen Ibanez: This is the Captain speaking. All personnel prepare to drop.

Newsreel Announcer: Soldiers like Private Ace Levy and Lieutenant John Rico.

Lt. John Rico: [to soldiers as they prepare to board dropships] Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?!

Newsreel Announcer: We need you all. Service guarantees citizenship.

Lt Jean Rasczak: [taps him on the shoulder. Rico stands up] Rico, you once asked me for advice. You want some now?

Cpl. John Rico: Yes, sir!

Soldier: [to Rasczak; Rasczak nods in acknowledgement and the soldier leaves] Lieutenant, HQ's on the com.

Rasczak: Never pass up a good thing!

Ace Levy: Sir, I don't understand. Who needs a knife in a nuke fight, anyway? All you gotta do is press a button. Sir.

Career Sergeant Zim: [Ace hesitates; Zim throws a knife and hits Ace's hand, pinning it to the wall] Put your hand on that wall, trooper. PUT YOUR HAND ON THAT WALL! The enemy cannot push a button... if you disable his hand. Medic!

Dizzy Flores: Uh, my mother always said violence never solves anything.

Jean Rasczak: [to Carmen] Really? I wonder what the city fathers of Hiroshima would say about that. You.

Carmen Ibanez: [[Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|Hiroshima was destroyed] They probably wouldn't say anything. ].

Rasczak: Correct. Naked force has resolved more issues throughout world history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence never solves anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always pay.

Jean Rasczak: [to a student] Let's sum up. This year, we explored the failure of democracy. How the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts. But have I taught you anything of value this year? Hm? You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It's a reward. What the Federation gives you for doing federal service.

Rasczak: No. No. Something given has no value. But when you vote, you are exercising political authority. You're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.

Dizzy Flores: [placating Rico after he fights Xander Barcalow over Carmen] Mobile Infantry and Fleet don't mix.

Sky Marshall Diennes: [addressing the UCF Federal Council as it agrees to declare war against the Bugs] We must meet this threat with our valor, our blood, indeed with our very lives to ensure that human civilization, not insect, dominates this galaxy now and always!

Carl Jenkins: [to Rico and Carmen after the Brain Bug is finally captured; they see the now-Private Zim being carried by the soldiers] We've got one of their Brains now. Pretty soon we'll know how they think. One day it will all be over. And everyone will forget that this was the moment. This was when it turned. It wasn't the mighty fleet, it wasn't some fancy new weapon. It was a drill instructor named Zim, who captured a Brain.

Lieutenant Jean Rasczak: Hold here! Hold what you got!

Lieutenant Jean Rasczak: [opens pod and pulls out a beer keg; everybody cheers. opens another pod with sports gear and music equipment; throws football] Listen up! I expect the best and I give the best. Here's the beer. Here's the entertainment. Have fun. That's an order.

Lieutenant Jean Rasczak: [to Rico at a party] Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom.

Johnny Rico: [eulogizing Dizzy Flores] Somebody asked me if I knew the difference between a citizen and a civilian. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility. Dizzy was my friend. She was a soldier. But more than that, she was a citizen of the Federation.

Johnny Rico: [addressing a reporter] Let me tell you something: I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say "Kill em all!