The truth is out there.
Ever since the release of 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, moviegoing audiences have been obsessed with exploring the extraterrestrial. And, as films like the Alien franchise, Fire In the Sky, E.T., or Men In Black have proven, these movies can range from horrifying to hilarious, depending on the director’s approach.
With Steven Spielberg back in theaters with a new sci-fi film, Disclosure Day, quite a few lists ranking the best alien movies of all time have popped up, highlighting the cream of the crop.
While The Wrap's June 2026 ranking included classics like the ones mentioned above in their Top 20—as well as movies like The Thing, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Arrival on their list—it’s a box office flop from 1997 that makes an unexpected appearance in the #11 spot.
Love for ‘Starship Troopers’
Hitting theaters in November 1997 with a budget of $100-$110 million, director Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was a box office failure. Adapted from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 book of the same name, it clearly wasn’t appreciated upon release and was met with bad reviews, with a total haul of just $121 million.
In the years since, however, the movie has earned its status as a bona fide cult classic, spawning four direct-to-video sequels, comic books, video games, and an animated series.
Starring Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Jake Busey, and Neil Patrick Harris, the movie revolves around a group of recent high school graduates who join the military to fight off an alien invasion.
As The Wrap’s William Bibbiani points out, however, the protagonists are painted as “horrifying fascists whose prejudice against the alien ‘bugs’ stems from shameful propaganda.”
Reviews from 1997
That satire, it seems, failed to land with audiences and critics at the time.
In their review, the Los Angeles Times applauded the special effects, before calling the film “so rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence it’s hard not to be astonished and even mesmerized by what is on the screen.”
Roger Ebert, meanwhile, called the action sequences in the film “curiously joyless” in his review. Saying the movie lacked “exhilaration and sheer entertainment,” he boiled the film down to little more than watching “interchangeable characters firing machine guns at computer-generated Bugs”
TIME also accused the movie of glorifying a “happy fascist world,” concluding that “maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications.”
Speaking with Empire Online in 2020, Verhoeven himself said, “We were accused by the Washington Post of being neo-Nazis! It was tremendously disappointing. They couldn't see that all I have done is ironically create a fascist utopia.”
He also criticized the studio for promoting the movie as “just another bang-bang-bang movie.”
The movie has been reappraised in the 29 years since its release, with some feeling it was simply ahead of its time, or, agreeing with Verhoeven, blaming its lukewarm reception on bad marketing.
Starship Troopers is available to stream now on Netflix.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/wavpDyY
via IFTTT