Can I Kick It? Starship Troopers

Hip Hop beats vs Cult Classics! Can I Kick It? screens cult classics and contemporary martial arts/action favorites while DJ 2-Tone Jones live scores the film, scene-by-scene, with a blend of genres such as hip hop, soul, and funk.

Tonight, humans in a fascist, militaristic future wage war with giant alien bugs. In 1959, Robert Heinlein envisioned a future in which humanity is engaged in interstellar conflict with a species of bug-like aliens. His novel, Starship Troopers, went on to win the Hugo Award and was later adapted to film by Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier.

When the satirical cult classic, Starship Troopers came out 25 years ago today, it bombed at the box office. Thank goodness that, a quarter-century later, society has come around and hailed Starship Troopers as a sci-fi classic, widely recognizing the film for what it is: a brilliant piece of satire that’s so overtly anti-fascist and militaristic that it’s truly a wonder that people missed the point when it first came out.

Set on the future earth, Johnny rico is a young student dating a girl named Carmen. When Carmen decides to join the military in order to become a class citizen (citizenship is only achieved through serving your country), Johnny follows and joins as well. He soon realizes that he joined for the wrong reasons but just as he is about to quit, an asteroid that originated from the orbit of planet “klendathu” hits Buenos Aires (his home town) and kills his family. Johnny and his fellow troopers set out to destroy the planet’s inhabitants: a type of deadly and very large scaled space bugs. Through a seemingly ordinary action flick, director paul verhoeven creates a subtle anti-war theme, that shows us a fascist and military world far more frightening than WW2’s Germany, Italy or Russia, the kind of world that is actually functioning.