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Ross Douthat pauses from cleverly cataloging foreign-policy notions and stoops to banter a bit about vulgar science fiction movies:

Troopers, on the other hand, is an entirely ironic exercise, an attempt at a critique of fascist militarism that deliberately undercut its storyline (humans battle interstellar bugs) at every turn without providing enough actually-clever social commentary to justify this kind of self-sabotage. You can tell that Verhoeven thought he was being terribly clever, and lots of people agree: I've had any number of conversations in which I mention that I think Starship Troopers is dumb, and somebody complains that I just don't understand the subtext, which is that fascism is bad. "Get it? Get it?

[snip]

Yep, I get it. And it's still dumb - and much, much dumber than a straightforwardly silly humans-fight-aliens movie.

Fortunately, I will never argue that ST is subversive-smart or some such twisty nonsense; the reason I appreciate it is that, no matter what Verhoeven thought he was doing, the movie turned out to be a straight-up, dumb-as-rocks, fun-and-gun action flick that goes about the business of being ridiculous and shamelessly entertaining with gleeful aplomb. It's like an after school special with gore, nudity, and badass space marines. It's not clever at all, but it's got enough brute, jock simple-mindedness (not to mention gratuitous bug mayhem) that it doesn't have to be.