Paul Verhoeven's lolcow status aside, Starship Troopers is an incredibly political movie (it's a huge satire of fascism, warmongering, and the futility and horrors of war) but it's done in such a way that it works. For me, at least. If you removed that political satire from it, it would become an objectively worse movie for it.
Maybe I’ve just been drinking the
Sargon Kool-aid, but is "fascism" really an accurate description of the world in the Starshipt Troopers book/movie? Granted, I've still not read the book, but it seems the movie merely adopted a fascist
Aesthetic™ for its propaganda videos and such, which is absent from the original book, and most viewers came to this conclusion based on that alone and something else about "WAR BAD".
The way I understand it is that while they may live a two-tiered system, it doesn't mean they treat the second class ("civilians") as subhuman. There's actually a lot of emphasis on
muh freedoms, and in the parts of the book Sargon quotes, it says personal freedom greatly exceeds that of the present day – including for civilians. Military service and "citizenship" is just an optional thing that one can do to enter the ruling class, which the movie glosses over.
The writer of the movie famously hated the original book, and deliberately made its world look fascistic, which feels
very late-2010s woke Hollywood. That being said though, the movie was also kinda dope in spite of it. But let's not pretend that Hollywood lefties have only been shoving their politics into places they don't belong for the last 5 years or so.
I'd argue there is still a difference, that difference being that when they did it back in 1997, we actually got a movie that was entertaining, regardless of whether you take its political message to heart. But in the last few years, entertainers have decided that they're no longer going to sweeten the pill for us, and that their left-wing politics (which they pretend are morals, which they pretend are wholesome) can be the entire selling point of a creative work.
Although having just typed that out, I've realised that we probably agree.