Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven's film of Robert Heinlein's book) is another nice use of science-fiction.  The tone is lighter than Moon, District 9 or Rise of TPOTApes, but it's only light with ironic distance from quite heavy material. In Heinlein's book, the heaviness of a war with an existential threat is treated without irony, as requiring courage.  In Verhoeven's film, the visual feel is Beverly Hills 90210 meets The Empire from Star Wars, and the ironic distance allows you to see the following:

• globalisation means we are all Americans now.  Jonny Rico, Carmen Ibanez and all are from Rio de Janeiro Buenos Aires, but there is no trace of latin culture to be seen.
• the militarism of Heinlein's book, which draws on his WWII experience and is reasonable given a significant threat, is shown in its fullness - on the one hand, discipline, training, power and career advancement at a young age; on the other a narrowed conception of the possibilities of life and an inability to do anything other than fight.
• 'Violence is the supreme authority, from which all other authority derives.' A perfect, ironic summation of the problem of this culture (and ours). Relating this to Foucault's Knowledge-Power we might say that yes it is, but the technology of such power is becoming overspecialised and will miss opportunities to finesse, or to find new efficiencies.
• The neat fit of 90210-world and the Empire - the same winner-takes-all competitiveness, the same casual commitment of your all in relationships, the same unreflective self-enlargement, the same expense of the destruction of the weak.

What I think is so clever about Verhoeven's film is that it doesn't really do a disservice to Heinlein's book - the reality of the book is there, and its goods are present; but Verhoeven gives us lines to follow that take us outside the frame and show the weakness behind the strength, the narrowness of outlook and the foreshortening of life.