Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Starship Troopers
1997 · Paul Verhoeven · Starship Troopers on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the Federal Network bulletins and what they interrupt. (cutting)
The broadcasts cut into the story every few scenes, complete with recruitment spots and a chipper invitation to know more. Not one of them moves the plot along.
Payoff: A second film runs beside the war movie. It shows you the machine that sells the war you are busy enjoying. In the reading: the Figure (reflection-image). The reading calls this a reflection-image: action transposed into spectacle and discourse, so the picture poses a problem instead of advancing one.
Notice how clean and bright the civilian scenes look. (light)
Jost Vacano lights Buenos Aires like advertising: high-key, saturated, every face handsome and evenly lit. The combat coverage then breaks into dust, long lenses, and pandemonium.
Payoff: The two looks are the argument. One world is photographed the way it wants to be seen and the other shows the bill.
Look at the uniforms, especially the coats and caps. (setting)
Allan Cameron's design quotes 1930s totalitarian dress directly. Carl turns up in a black leather greatcoat and peaked cap, and nobody in the scene reacts at all.
Payoff: The film never comments on it. You are left holding the recognition, which is where the bright surface turns and asks to be read. In the reading: demark. The reading calls this a demark: an anomaly that breaks your habits and makes you interpret rather than simply follow.
Watch how flat and cheerful the young actors play everything. (performance)
Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, and the rest are directed toward daytime-soap brightness, sincere and unshaded. Michael Ironside supplies the one weathered adult voice in the film.
Payoff: The blankness is a choice. These are beautiful instruments of a system rather than people with interior lives.
Listen to how rousing Poledouris makes the marches sound. (sound)
The brass swells exactly where a war film's music is supposed to swell, right on cue. It keeps swelling over images that have turned into a meat grinder.
Payoff: The score is working on you on purpose. Notice when you get excited, and then notice what you are excited about.
Once you have seen it
Watch the rallies: rows, low angles, synchronized bodies. (staging)
Verhoeven quotes Riefenstahl's rally footage directly, with heroic framing and mass ornament. Individual recruits vanish into one cheering shape that the camera admires.
Payoff: Fascist beauty is delivered as a thrill before it is offered as a judgment, and that order is the whole method. In the reading: dividual. The reading calls this a dividual: a crowd rendered as one feeling unit rather than a collection of separate people.
Watch the cut from a soldier's body to the bulletin. (cutting)
A slaughter reaches the public as a victory. The announcer calls it progress while the footage says something else, and the film leaves the gap standing.
Payoff: The broadcast and the image tell different stories deliberately. The film does its thinking in the space between them.
Track what the film shows about who started this war. (structure)
The news says the Bugs threw the asteroid. The evidence stays thin, and the enemy never gets a face, a language, or a chance to answer. Every appearance is a swarm.
Payoff: The enemy functions as a screen. A society organized around war needs something that cannot say anything back.
Carry this in: Watch what the broadcasts are selling. The war movie inside them is sincere, and the frame around it is not.