On what Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (1997) reveals when you watch it correctly.

Starship Troopers was released in 1997 to mixed reviews and indifferent box office. Critics who read the film as a straight science fiction action film found it excessive and stupid. The film is neither.

Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, made a film about fascism in the visual language of fascist propaganda. The advertisements, the newsreels, the military uniforms, the propaganda sequences — all of it is directly modeled on Leni Riefenstahl and the visual vocabulary of Nazi Germany, filtered through the lens of an American science fiction action film.

The joke, which the film trusts audiences to get without explaining, is that the aesthetic is now familiar as 'cool.' The same visual language that made Triumph of the Will seductive has been repurposed for a space opera, and audiences in 1997 watched it without noticing what they were watching.

This is the film's argument: fascism is not ugly. It is spectacular. It recruits through beauty and belonging and the pleasure of collective violence. The film makes you feel these pleasures and then leaves you alone with what you felt.