The moment when you discover what Starship Troopers is really about is one of the great eureka moments in the life of any young movie dork. I’ve got vivid memories of sneaking into and staggering out of a suburban multiplex in 1997 and sputtering, “What the fuck was that?” To my young self, it was basically Saved by the Bell plus giant alien bugs cutting people in half. And since I liked the spectacle of giant-monster-related carnage, I wasn’t even mad. I was just confounded. Like: Why were all the human characters so stupid? Could it be possible that a movie so big and expensive could also be so blindingly, knowingly dumb? And how is someone going to make a grand-scale blockbuster with Doogie Howser, MD as the most famous person in the cast. (Neil Patrick Harris was still unequivocally Doogie at that point; he would remain Doogie until the first Harold and Kumar flick. Look, 1997 was a long time ago.) And when a friend’s mom told me, years later, that the movie was really about fascism and militarism, I absolutely thought that person was full of shit (sorry Ms Spurlin). But that’s exactly what it is. Starship Troopers may be the greatest joke ever played on the American movie going public.