What didn't dawn on everyone at the time of Starship Troopers's abbreviated theatrical run was that it was a comedy � a vicious, all-barrels-firing piece of social satire and by far the funniest Hollywood film of 1997. (In retrospective interviews, Verhoeven agrees that audiences 'didn't get it.') Word got out, ticket-buyers steered clear, and the film quickly vanished.
Audiences went gingerly during its opening weekend, expecting to have their baser instincts blandly excited, and were dumbfounded. That's definitely how it was marketed by a rather clueless studio (Sony/Columbia/Tri-Star), and that's how critics understood it � both Roger Ebert and the New York Times' Janet Maslin dismissed it as gory, stolid trash. Heinlein novel first published in 1959, and featuring enough gadzooks digital imagery to fill a mainframe, Troopers had all the earmarks of a typically boorish, straight-faced trip to action-movie hell, all boom, boom, splat and aargghh. Whatever else it is, which is plenty, Paul Verhoeven's eye-popping 1997 epic Starship Troopers has to be the most misunderstood and underappreciated sci-fi blockbuster of all time.
