Culture is global and American-led, wisdom would say, but irony is wasted on our trans-Atlantic cousins. ‘They’ could be right: it’s hard to believe 16-24 year-old middle-Americans swarmed suburban mall multiplexes with more on their shredded minds than guts’n’glory when offered Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. And yet, how else to take this expensive, glossy, sick-making celebration of the jackboot? Shift tongue far from cheek (literally, possibly) and we are on very dodgy ground indeed.

It’s the distant future. Democracy has failed and the military have assumed the rule of an Earth at war. With bugs. Green-blooded, multi-limbed herding arachnids from the planet Klendathu. Buenos Aires. Four friends elect to sign-up for service: Dizzy (Dina Meyer) and Johnny (Casper Van Dien) in the infantry; his smart girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards) as a space pilot; and planet-brain Carl (Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris) for the oxymoronic Military Intelligence. Boot camp is tough and Johnny almost quits, until Buenos Aires itself fortuitously falls to a bug asteroid. Separated in training, the friends will meet again when mankind launches its no holds barred assault on the bug homeworld.

If Starship Troopers has an antecedent then it’s surely Verhoeven’s own US debut, RoboCop. The original, satirical, so-violent-it-borders-on-sadistic cybernetic crimebuster, before TV and kiddie cartoons got a look in. This new film was authored by ’Cop’s co-scribe Ed Neumeier, from Robert A. Heinlein’s neo-fascist novel. One wonders what he would have made of it.

And opening in the same year as Spielberg’s much-trumpeted D-Day rehash, Saving Private Ryan, makes Verhoeven’s film all the more bizarre. With so much post-70s Hollywood either a literal (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket) or metaphorical (Southern Comfort) take on Vietnam, it’s strange to find so much of Starship Troopers so carefully designed to shadow WWII: Pearl Harbour (the sneak bug attack); Dunkirk (the ill-feted assault on Klendathu); D-Day itself (the war-turning finale). On a blood-spurting limb for limb count, Private Ryan should watch his back. This is brutal, nasty stuff.

Because Starship Troopers is surely as nakedly fascistic as Heinlein intended. Only - and here’s the rub - we are rooting for the bad guys. Or the slightly less worse guys. But only because they are human, you understand. We make the same mistake as the military and assume a lack of intelligence beyond the aliens’ killer-instinct. Who knows, the film seems to say, if we understood what the bugs were at then maybe we’d switch allegiances. Certainly we cannot but feel queasy when Harris arrives kitted out in his SS greatcoat. It’s a scary world these youngsters are fighting to preserve, all privilege and chiselled jaws: think Beverly Hills 90210 meets Aliens. We’ve moved on to communal showers and an equality of the sexes but, if the tub-thumping interactive news broadcasts that pepper the action (RoboCop again) are anything to go by, then it’s one scarcely worth bloodily dying on foreign soil for.

The case is made, therefore, for Starship Troopers as the most slyly subversive film to emerge from the Hollywood system in the past five years - one that very nearly almost redeems its Dutch director after the near religiously bad Showgirls. It’s packed with rotten acting, wince-inducing lines, heart-stopping patriotism and a single-mindedness even Hitler could admire. And better yet, it’s all intentional. Verhoeven plays it like the anti-Spielberg, like a balls-to-the-wall Red Scare movie on speed. SF, in fact, like Star Trek never happened. If movies really are bad for you, then this grisly, gloriously warped entertainment is very very bad indeed.