Starship Troopers was released in 1997 as Paul Verhoeven’s follow-up to his run of provocative Hollywood hits that included RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Basic Instinct (1992). A big-budget science fiction action film on the surface, it is in reality a biting satire of fascism, nationalism and military propaganda, presenting a future society that looks suspiciously like the Third Reich in space. Featuring a cast led by Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards and Neil Patrick Harris, it remains one of the most audacious and misunderstood studio films of its era.

We’re telling the behind-the-scenes story of Verhoeven’s gloriously demented classic with 45 facts about Starship Troopers. You can also listen to our full episode on the film on Spotify, on YouTube, or on our website.

1. The film began life as something else entirely

The road to Starship Troopers started not with Robert A. Heinlein’s classic book of the same name but with a separate project altogether. Following the success of RoboCop (1987), producer Jon Davison was keen to reunite key members of that film’s creative team, including writer Edward Neumeier. Neumeier had been working alone on a story treatment called Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, which he brought to Davison at TriStar Pictures in December 1991. Davison noticed similarities between the treatment and Heinlein’s 1959 science fiction novel Starship Troopers, a book that had received a sharply divided reception on publication for its promotion of military power and its criticism of liberal social programmes.

Davison assumed the film rights to the novel would already be taken, so Neumeier pressed on with his treatment, completing it by late 1992. When TriStar executive Chris Lee rejected it, the pair discovered the Starship Troopers rights were actually available. They pitched an adaptation of the novel using elements from Outpost 7, won support from TriStar head of production Mike Medavoy, who had backed their work on RoboCop, and the book rights were purchased. Neumeier began reshaping his treatment to more closely fit Heinlein’s story.

2. A huge Hollywood director was approached

There were rumours at the time that TriStar went to James Cameron before Paul Verhoeven, but Cameron was already deep into production on Titanic (1997) and unavailable. When Verhoeven came aboard, he threw himself into preparation with characteristic intensity. Before a single frame was shot, he completed over 4,000 storyboards. His energy on set was equally full-throttle. Writer Ed Neumeier said that he would leave meetings with Verhoeven feeling exhausted, and actor Clancy Brown recalled that during the battle scenes, the director would personally act out the role of a bug for the cast, jumping up and down with a bullhorn, screaming that he was going to kill them. There is behind-the-scenes footage of Verhoeven doing exactly that during the cave sequence near the end of the film, standing behind the camera, holding a broom above his head and yelling at the cast.

3. Verhoeven couldn’t get through the source material

Once he was confirmed as director, Verhoeven sat down to read Heinlein’s novel. He didn’t get far. He put it down after the first two chapters, calling it “a very right wing book,” and asked Neumeier to summarise the rest of the story for him. This is significant because the satirical, anti-fascist commentary that runs through every frame of the finished film is almost entirely absent from Heinlein’s novel, which plays its military world completely straight and presents its characters as heroes.

Verhoeven’s intention was to take the world Heinlein had built and show what it would actually look like in practice. As he put it, he wanted to demonstrate how horrible that kind of society would be in reality. The film is less an adaptation of the book than an argument with it, which could, as it happens, be described as a fairly accurate summary of Verhoeven’s entire career.

4. The cast looked like Nazis (apparently)

Verhoeven has said he didn’t set out to cast actors who were good-looking but inexperienced (which is mostly how it worked out). Rather, he was deliberately going for a visual aesthetic drawn from Nazi propaganda films. Blonde hair, blue eyes, chiselled features. The cast, led by Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico, fit that template precisely. Van Dien did bring something practical to the role beyond his looks: his grandfather had been a marine during the Second World War, and he knew how to handle a weapon, which impressed Verhoeven during his audition.

5. Several bigger names were considered for the lead role

Before Casper Van Dien was cast as Johnny Rico, a number of better-known actors were in the frame for the part. James Marsden, Keanu Reeves and Jason Priestley were all apparently considered. Mark Wahlberg reportedly turned the role down. Van Dien, at that point, was mostly known for recurring roles in television series. In the end, the relative inexperience of the cast worked in Verhoeven’s favour, lending the film the clean, scrubbed quality of a propaganda film rather than the weight of established movie stardom.

6. Another actor became Van Dien’s mentor

Veteran character actor Michael Ironside plays lecturer-turned-military man, Lieutenant Rasczak. Van Dien has spoken warmly about Ironside’s guidance during production, saying that Ironside served as a mentor to him on the film as well as in it, offering advice on how to deliver lines and how to conduct himself with the crew. Van Dien also took it upon himself to look after the extras during the large battle sequences. He would go round each person to check they had water. Given that some sequences involved up to 1,400 extras, working his way through the crowd may have taken a couple of hours.

7. A rising star was first choice for Carmen

Verhoeven’s original pick to play Carmen Ibanez, the ambitious pilot who is Johnny Rico’s girlfriend, was Neve Campbell. Campbell, however, was already committed to filming Scream 2 (1997) and was unavailable. The role went to Denise Richards, whose career up to that point had consisted largely of modelling and smaller television roles. Verhoeven was careful in how he directed his inexperienced cast, keeping dialogue punchy and avoiding the kind of extended monologues that might have exposed some limitations.

8. Richards refused a nude scene

During filming, Verhoeven approached Richards with an idea for a new scene. It would be a love scene, and it would require her to appear naked. Richards refused, pointing out that the scene wasn’t in the script she signed up for and that she felt it served no narrative purpose. She was firm, and the scene wasn’t shot. She did, for what it’s worth, say she enjoyed working with Verhoeven despite his methods, describing him as “a crazy person, but in a good way.” Anyone who has read about the production of Basic Instinct or Showgirls will recognise the pattern.

9. One stunt was more elaborate than it looked

Early in the film, during a Jumpball (a futuristic, fictional sport created for the film) match at school, Rico scores a touchdown with an impressive acrobatic flip over two defenders. The move was performed not by Van Dien but by stuntman Joey Box, who launched himself from a ladder and was captured and cut at exactly the right moment in the edit. The ladder was then removed digitally in post-production. The physics of the sport, with players leaping improbably high, are deliberately exaggerated, setting up the film’s underlying theme of young people being conditioned from an early age with a kill-or-be-killed mentality.

10. The school was a real medical building

All of the school sequences in the first act were filmed at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Centre in California. The building’s architecture lends the scenes a convincingly futuristic quality. The shot where students gather to see their maths results opens with a striking Metropolis (1927)-style tilt down from the top of the tower to Carmen and Rico standing in the foreground, moving seamlessly from a digital background to the physical set.

11. Carmen’s vomit was very fruity

In biology class, Rico dissects a large bug and presents its organs to Carmen, who promptly throws up. The practical bug is an impressive physical creation rather than a digital one. The vomit, for its part, was mashed banana. Also, the teacher in the scene is played by Rue McClanahan, best known for playing the endlessly romantic Blanche Devereaux in the long-running American sitcom The Golden Girls (1985–1992).

12. A key character was created by combining two from the novel

In Heinlein’s novel, Jean Dubois is Rico’s history teacher and Rasczak is the commander of the Roughnecks division. For the film, Neumeier merged them into a single character, Jean Rasczak, played by Michael Ironside. It’s a smart piece of consolidation, giving Ironside’s teacher and commander a connected arc across the film. Verhoeven considered casting Michael Douglas in the role after their collaboration on Basic Instinct (1992), though ultimately decided against it.

13. Two cast members got married

Supporting characters Djana’D and Breckinridge, played by Tami-Adrian George and Eric Bruskotter respectively, are relatively minor presences in the film. Off screen, however, their story was rather more significant. George and Bruskotter met during production on Starship Troopers and went on to get married and have children together.

14. The whipping scene required hidden sandbags

In one of the film’s more uncomfortable scenes, Rico is publicly flogged at boot camp by Corporal Bronski, played by Teo Smoot, after a training exercise goes tragically wrong. Smoot was taught how to use a bullwhip by legendary stuntman Vic Armstrong, who had himself learned the skill during production on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). During filming, Smoot kept instinctively stepping forward and getting too close to Van Dien with each crack of the whip. Verhoeven repeatedly told him to stop, but it made no difference. In the end, they placed sandbags on Smoot’s feet to physically prevent him from moving. That’s why for most of the shot he is framed from the waist up.

15. Verhoeven  got naked for the shower scene (even though he wasn’t in it)

The co-ed shower scene, in which male and female soldiers share a communal wash without any apparent self-consciousness, was understandably a source of anxiety for the cast. Verhoeven’s solution was direct. When actress Dina Meyer (Dizzy Flores) challenged him to do it himself if it was no big deal, he obliged and stripped off. Director of Photography Jost Vacano, who Verhoeven said had been “born in a nudist camp,” followed suit without hesitation. Verhoeven said the gesture helped put the cast at ease, though Van Dien reportedly reacted with a horrified “Oh God! Whyyyy?”

Verhoeven was characteristically unapologetic about the scene and later said: “Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets.” He had previously included a co-ed shower scene in RoboCop, noting that nobody had particularly noticed it there, and said he made sure they’d notice it this time.

16. A Vietnam veteran ran a boot camp for the cast

To bring authenticity to the boot camp and military sequences, Verhoeven hired Dale Dye as military advisor. Dye was a Vietnam War veteran who had previously served as consultant on Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Casualties of War (1989). He put the cast through a week-long training programme covering weapons handling and unit behaviour. Dye also has a small cameo in the finished film: he’s the officer who asks “What’s it thinking, Colonel?” when Carl reads the mind of the Brain Bug in the final act. His next consulting credit after Starship Troopers was Saving Private Ryan (1998).

17. Verhoeven gave a very specific pitch to Michael Ironside

When Ironside first read the script, he went straight to Verhoeven with a blunt question: why was he making a right-wing fascist movie? Verhoeven’s answer was equally direct. He said that if he simply stated that a fascist way of organising society doesn’t work, no one would listen. So instead he would create a perfect fascist world, one where everyone is beautiful and everything is shiny, and show that all it’s actually good for is killing bugs.

The film’s anti-fascist subtext also nearly didn’t get made at all. Verhoeven has said that Sony, which owned TriStar at the time, was cycling through studio heads at a rapid rate. Five different chairmen came and went during production of Starship Troopers. By the time anyone in the executive suite paid close attention to what Verhoeven was actually doing, he already had an assembly cut. Casper Van Dien, reflecting on this since, suggested that a film with this particular message probably wouldn’t get greenlit today.

18. The film used more ammunition than any other

Weapons Coordinator Rock Galotti oversaw the discharge of over 300,000 blank rounds during the production of Starship Troopers, making it the highest consumption of ammunition in film. Given that modern productions tend to rely heavily on CGI muzzle flashes and digital effects rather than live blanks, that record is likely to stand indefinitely. Seventeen gallons of fake blood were also used across the shoot.

19. A big TV star joined the cast

Carl Jenkins, Rico’s psychic childhood friend who rises through the military intelligence ranks, is played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unlike Van Dien and Richards, Harris came to the film with an established profile, having starred as the teenage medical prodigy in the hit American television series Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989–1993). Harris is on screen less than the two leads, but his work as the increasingly detached and sinister Carl is among the most effective in the film. He later went on to star in the long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014) and appeared in films including Gone Girl (2014) and The Matrix Resurrections (2021).

20. Carl’s ferret caused chaos

Carl’s companion throughout the film is a ferret called Cyrano. Both Harris and Van Dien referred to the animal as the “ferret from hell” during production due to its tendency to do as it pleased during takes. Working with the creature apparently tested the patience of everyone involved. In the original scripts, Cyrano was written as either a frog or a turtle, which raises the question of how a turtle would have navigated some of the more demanding scenes, such as when Cyrano rapidly runs up a staircase.

21. Van Dien punched his co-star in the face (accidentally)

Midway through the film, Rico runs into Carmen on the Ticonderoga Space Station and gets into a physical confrontation with her new partner, pilot Zander Barcalow, played by Patrick Muldoon. The fight scene required 40 takes, and during one of them Van Dien caught Muldoon with an accidental punch that split his lip. The space station sets themselves are solid work, named after Fort Ticonderoga, a fortification that played a significant role in the American Revolutionary War.

22. The airstrike sequence set an explosive record

Before the infantry can land on the bugs’ home planet of Klendathu, the fleet performs a massive airstrike to clear the way. Most of those explosions were real, with CGI added afterwards. Special effects supervisor John Richardson, who had previously worked on six James Bond films and would later work on seven Harry Potter films, oversaw the sequence. To achieve the shot, tonnes of explosives were laid out over a mile of terrain and detonated in sequence, rolling towards the camera. At the time of filming, it was the longest rolling explosion ever captured on film. Richardson had also served as effects supervisor on James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), likely a major reason he was hired by Verhoeven.

23. Verhoeven drew on real war footage to stage the Klendathu landing

For the sequence in which Federation troops are dropped onto the planet by landing craft, Verhoeven studied archival footage of Allied forces landing on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion of 6 June 1944. The visual reference is evident in the shot where the craft doors drop forward like ramps, mirroring the famous landing craft of D-Day. The logistics of the sequence were formidable: Verhoeven was working with 1,300 extras at 8,000 feet altitude, all wearing armour weighing 32 pounds each.

24. Verhoeven’s wife gave out music lessons

During a scene around a campfire, the character Ace Levy, portrayed by Jake Busey, plays the violin. The piece is called “Dixie,” written in 1859 by Daniel Emmett, the founder of the Virginia Minstrels, the first blackface minstrel troupe in America. It became the unofficial national anthem of the Confederate States during the American Civil War. Its inclusion in the film, played cheerfully by a Federation soldier around a campfire, is almost certainly deliberate on Verhoeven’s part. As for Busey, he learned to play the violin specifically for the role. His teacher was Martine Verhoeven, the director’s wife.

25. The film and its source novel are dramatically different

While Starship Troopers is technically an adaptation of Heinlein’s novel, the two works share relatively little beyond character names and the broad concept of a war against alien insects. In the book, Rico is Filipino rather than of Argentine descent, Carmen is not his girlfriend, and Dizzy is a man rather than a woman. Carl is killed early in the novel when the bugs attack a research station, and Ace is a composite of two separate characters from the book.

In Heinlein’s version, the Arachnids are not the mindless swarm of the film. They possess atomic weapons, guns, and their own military infrastructure. There is also a second alien species in the novel called the Skinnies, tall, green-skinned beings who have allied with the Arachnids and are also at war with humanity. The iconic powered armour worn by Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry, which allows them to leap hundreds of feet and carries laser weaponry, was left out of the film due to budget constraints. Producer Jon Davison confirmed this directly. Since the film began life as the separate Bug Hunt at Outpost 7 script, the narrative is largely Neumeier’s own work, with Heinlein’s world and names retrofitted around it.

26. The dialogue was deliberately innocent

Verhoeven has said that the intentionally bland, squeaky-clean quality of some of the film’s dialogue was a deliberate creative choice. Lines like Carmen’s earnest “Let’s make a vow, no matter what, we’ll always be friends” were written to evoke the guileless sincerity of a 1950s American television drama. Verhoeven acknowledged that this approach was polarising, saying: “To me it’s artistic, but to other people it was weird.” Which, as summary statements of his career go, is fairly accurate.

27. There were other Nazi influences

Verhoeven drew openly on Nazi fashion, iconography and propaganda when designing the visual language of the Federation. The film’s opening recruitment advertisement is a direct imitation of Triumph of the Will (1935), the celebrated and deeply sinister propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who had been commissioned by Adolf Hitler to document the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. The opening shot of Starship Troopers is a deliberate echo of a specific shot from that film.

When the studio saw the finished film, one executive reportedly pointed at the Federation flag (designed by production designer Allan Cameron) and said: “Their flag, it’s a Nazi flag!” Verhoeven’s response was that it was different colours. The Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo, the Nazi Order Police, used a green, white and yellow flag. The Federation’s is green, white and blue. So, not enormously different. Verhoeven has said he received verbal attacks from critics in interviews, particularly in countries with a historical experience of fascism such as Italy and Germany. When Verhoeven gave interviews in European countries he was verbally attacked by critics who believed he was celebrating authoritarianism. One asked him if this was meant to be the new Star Wars. Verhoeven replied: “Yes, but they’re all fascists.”

28. The film is packed with military references

Several of the names and details in Starship Troopers are drawn from real military history. The boot camp is called Arthur Currie Camp, named after a Canadian First World War officer who rose from the lowest rank to become Commander of the Canadian Corps, a first in Canadian military history. His nickname was “Guts and Gaiters.”

The ship Carmen is assigned to is called the Rodger Young, named after a Second World War American soldier who asked to be voluntarily demoted so he could remain in active combat. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after sacrificing his life to save his platoon, a death that mirrors the way Private Watkins (Seth Gilliam) dies in the climax of the film. The line “Do you want to live forever?” was not written for the script, it was reportedly said by Sergeant Dan Daly to his troops before the Battle of Belleau Wood during the First World War. And the space academy where Carmen trains is called Tereshkova Base, named after Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet cosmonaut who in 1963 became the first woman in space and remains the youngest woman ever to fly in Earth’s orbit.

29. The film’s opening sequence is based on propaganda

To create the Federal Network news broadcasts and recruitment advertisements that open the film and punctuate it throughout, Verhoeven studied Triumph of the Will (1935) closely. The very first shot of Starship Troopers, with Federation soldiers smiling cheerfully at the camera and declaring they’re doing their part, is a direct recreation of the tone and visual grammar of Riefenstahl’s film. Verhoeven has said he has spoken to people who called Starship Troopers “All Quiet on the Final Frontier,” a reference to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Lewis Milestone’s landmark anti-war film based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name.

30. The in-film ads contain two censored clips

The second and third Federal Network advertisements seen during the film include two sections of footage that appear to have been censored. Verhoeven has explained on the film’s commentary track that these are in-universe gags. The clip showing a cow being killed was censored because the Federation received complaints from animal rights protestors. The clip of the Brain Bug experiment was classified by the Federation itself. Verhoeven treats the two as entirely real pieces of information, apparently seeing no reason to distinguish between the film’s fictional world and his obligations as a narrator. The prisoner shown awaiting execution in one of the broadcasts is played by Ed Neumeier, the film’s writer.

31. The composer was a Verhoeven regular

The score for Starship Troopers was composed by Basil Poledouris, marking his third collaboration with Verhoeven after Flesh and Blood (1985) and RoboCop, and his 45th film as a composer overall. Poledouris’s daughter, Zoë, who is herself a composer, has said her father took significant inspiration for the film from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and told her he wanted to write “a sci-fi ballet of madness and carnage.” He was given six months by Verhoeven to complete the score, brought in a percussion specialist to assist, and the finished work was performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony under his own direction.

Zoë Poledouris also appears in the film. At the graduation party sequence early on, a band performs on stage playing “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town,” a song by English rock musician David Bowie, recorded in 1995 for his album Outside. The singer is Zoë Poledouris.

32. The son of a President turns up

Another minor-but-interesting apppearance copmes just prior to the troops’ drop onto Klkendathu. They’re addressed by an officer telling them “Remember your training and you will make it back alive!” The actor is Steven Ford, son of former United States President Gerald Ford, playing the commander of Willy’s Wildcats during the Battle of Klendathu.

33. Real disaster footage was used for the bugs’ attack

The shots of Buenos Aires in the aftermath of the bug meteor strike, the footage that the recruits watch on screen at boot camp, were not created for the film. The footage of the devastated city was sourced from real news material shot during the Oakland Firestorm in California in October 1991, a disaster that killed 25 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Cut into the film’s context, it sits seamlessly alongside the rest of the production.

34. Many effects studios worked on the film, and it still wasn’t enough

Seven separate visual effects companies contributed to Starship Troopers: Tippett Studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Industrial Light and Magic, Boss Film Studios, Visual Concepts Engineering, Amalgamated Dynamics and Mass Illusion. That number wasn’t the original plan. Producer Jon Davison had hired Phil Tippett, whose stop-motion work on RoboCop and creature effects on Jurassic Park (1993) had made him the obvious choice to create the bugs. But Sony, which owned TriStar, insisted Davison use their in-house effects company, Sony Pictures Imageworks, for the space sequences and starships.

Sony Pictures Imageworks struggled significantly. Deliveries were late, and much of the work fell short of the required standard, forcing large portions of it to be farmed out to ILM and the other studios. The film’s release date was pushed back from its original summer slot to November 1997, largely as a result of the effects delays.

35. The bugs had their own hierarchy

All of the Arachnid designs were created by Craig Hayes at Tippett Studio. To save time, Hayes revised some unused creature designs that had been developed for Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), which the studio was working on simultaneously. He structured the bug hierarchy along military lines: warrior bugs as infantry, tanker bugs as tanks, hopper bugs as the air force, and plasma bugs as heavy artillery.

36. Each bug took months to render

The scale of the digital rendering required was staggering. Shots featuring hundreds of warrior bugs simultaneously could take 32 hours to render per frame. A five-second shot therefore required approximately five months of rendering time. To achieve realistic movement, the team agreed that a warrior bug would weigh around 1,700 pounds, roughly equivalent to a polar bear, and spent months studying insect biology and behaviour before creating animatics to map out how the creatures would move on screen.

37. Verhoeven crashed the ships together himself

When ILM and Boss Film Studios were brought in to handle the model spaceships, the build process took 14 months in total. Two of the ships were 18 feet long. In the sequence where plasma bugs attack the fleet and two vessels collide, Verhoeven’s solution to staging the crash was straightforward: he simply rammed the model ships into each other. In the scenes on the bridge of the Rodger Young where explosions throw the crew off their feet, the interior set was mounted on a gimbal and physically rocked back and forth to give the actors a sense of motion.

In total, Starship Troopers contained 200 visual effects shots, the highest number in any film at that time. For context, a modern Marvel production typically contains around 1,600 effects shots, and Avengers: Endgame (2019) had nearly 3,000. The film’s effects team was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. They lost to Titanic.

38. Dina Meyer was knocked unconscious

During the climactic sequence in the bug tunnels, Rasczak meets his end when a warrior bug comes up through the floor and tears off his legs. In the original staging of the scene, Diz was supposed to be present at his side. However, during filming of that moment, Dina Meyer fell and was knocked unconscious. That’s why she is absent from the shot: it wasn’t a scripting decision but a practical consequence of an on-set accident.

39. She also argued with Verhoeven about how she should die

When it came to filming Diz’s own death, in which she is stabbed through the back by a warrior bug, Meyer had a specific note for Verhoeven. She argued that her character wouldn’t scream, because having been stabbed through the lungs, she would have no air. Verhoeven’s response was concise: “Just scream.” Meyer has said she had initially been asked to read for Carmen but, after reading the script, knew immediately that she was Dizzy. As it turned out, Verhoeven agreed.

40. The planet scenes were filmed in  extreme conditions

All of the Klendathu and outpost planet sequences, including the brutal Whisky Outpost battle, were filmed in the Badlands at Hell’s Half Acre in Wyoming. Torrential rain and a windstorm caused equipment damage and forced the crew to evacuate the location for two weeks. When production resumed, daytime temperatures reached as high as 46°C. The Whisky Outpost set itself took six weeks to build and was modelled on the desert fortress aesthetics of Beau Geste (1939), a French Foreign Legion adventure film, and Zulu (1964), Cy Endfield’s British war epic set during the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.

41. The tunnel explosion had the cast running for their lives

In the final act, when Rico, Carmen and Ace escape from the bug lair and a bomb detonates behind them, the explosion was entirely real. Richards, Van Dien and Jake Busey sprinted through the tunnel as charges were set off behind them. Verhoeven told the cast beforehand that it was dangerous, which is why it was scheduled as the very last thing they shot. If something went wrong, at least everything else was already in the can. They had one take. It worked.

42. Carl’s final scene was originally more explicit

Near the end of the film, Rico asks Carl whether he psychically guided him to find Carmen. Carl’s response is to say, “That’s classified.” In the original version of the scene, Carl explicitly confirmed that he had been responsible, but told Rico that his ability to now read human minds, not just those of animals, was the classified part. This connects back to an early scene in which Carl demonstrates his limited telepathy and says, with a knowing look, that he can’t do humans yet. The ambiguity of the final cut leaves that thread slightly open-ended.

43. Another romantic relationship was cut from the movie

During the portion of the film where Carmen believes Rico has been killed, a number of scenes were shot in which she begins a relationship with Zander. When these scenes were shown to test audiences, the reaction to Carmen’s character was strongly negative so Verhoeven and the producers made the decision to remove all of those scenes from the final cut. For the film’s satirical argument to function, the audience needs to maintain some sympathy for the characters, even as the world they inhabit is being dismantled around them.

44. The film lost money, partly due to scheduling

With a production budget of $105 million, Starship Troopers took $121 million at the global box office. When marketing costs are factored in, the film ended up in the red. Producer Jon Davison has attributed part of this to the release date change: the film had originally been scheduled for a summer 1997 release, but was pushed back to November. The delay was partly caused by the effects problems discussed earlier and partly because the studio didn’t want it competing directly with Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One (1997). Casper Van Dien was reportedly told by industry analysts that if the film had been rated PG-13 rather than R, it would have made twice as much money. It’s difficult to imagine a sanitised Starship Troopers still being discussed with this much enthusiasm 30 years later, however.

The critical reception compounded the box office disappointment. Verhoeven has said the studio marketed the film as a straightforward action blockbuster, and many critics took it at face value. Today, the film holds a 72% critics’ rating and a 70% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of 7.3 out of 10 on IMDb.

45. Van Dien’s daughters were mortified by one scene

Starship Troopers has followed Casper Van Dien around since it opened. He has said that not a week has passed since the film’s release without someone shouting “Johnny Rico!” at him in the street. The shower scene, specifically, came home to roost in a rather specific way. He recounted that when he went to pick up his daughters from school one day, a group of 10-year-old boys were waiting for him and immediately started cheering. His daughters, who hadn’t seen the film because they were too young, got into the car and told their father: “Those boys said they’ve seen you naked. You’ve ruined my life.”

And that’s the end of our list: 45 facts about Starship Troopers (1997), one of the most brazenly subversive blockbusters Hollywood has ever accidentally funded. If this has got you in the mood to hear us go deep on the film, you can catch our full episode on Spotify, on YouTube or on our website. Please do share the article on your social media channels too.