Sigh… I know, I know… 
Re Starship Troopers as a satire: Yes, absolutely, it is a sophisticated satire of war propaganda movies. To anyone who disagrees, I’m sorry, but it’s not an obvious satire, like Network or Wrong is Right or similar movies that tell you they’re satires. Starship Troopers is sophisticated specifically because its satirical elements are buried under the veneer of pretending to be a “real” movie.
Consider: Verhoeven is European. He was born prior to WWII, and he and his family fled German expansion. He certainly had exposure to Nazi propaganda films, in which the most heinous acts were justified with martial music, impressive spectacle, and crowd-pleasing reassurances. But then, as the deeply cynical man he is, he probably found that Western propaganda was no better, even if (from our perspective) it was propaganda supporting the “correct” position.
Now: Look at the film he made of Starship Troopers. In my original review, referenced by sdimbert, I referred to a “flickering satirical subtext.” I have since rethought this position, as part of a wholesale re-evaluation of Verhoeven’s whole canon, inspired by the release of his new film Hollow Man, and have upgraded my opinion of Starship Troopers significantly. Yes, he absolutely subverted and undercut Heinlein’s philosophy, because he doesn’t buy it for a minute. It amuses him greatly to take one viewpoint, tweak it slightly, and use it to make the opposite point. (More on this in a minute.)
Again, look at the film: It has all the trappings of a conventional adventure. It has attractive actors playing all the heroes, beautiful people who, unfortunately, can’t really act. (Look back to Betty Grable: amazing legs, no discernible talent.) The character who is supposedly the most powerful is played by Doogie Howser, for cryin’ out loud. And Doogie’s little cadre of “good guys” are dressed, unquestionably, in Nazi-inspired hats and topcoats.
The entire film is structured exactly the same as a WWII propaganda piece, as is made clear by several small details. The one I find most amusing occurs after Johnny Rico washes out of boot camp; as he’s headed for the exit, his bag slung over his shoulder, all the other soldiers run past him the opposite direction, and one calls back over his shoulder, “We’re going to war!” Could there be a more obvious 1942 Jimmy Cagney moment?
Now look at what’s really going on. The bugs are way the hell over on the other side of the galaxy. The war started because humans tried to colonize one of their worlds. The bugs refused to let them stay, and destroyed the colony. The humans get mad and fight back for their “right” to expand to the planet where the bugs already live. Who’s the invader here?
Look at it this way: We, as the human audience, are being asked to identify with fictional human heroes in their war against alien bugs. All the trappings are there for a successful movie: attractive people, snazzy special effects, a little sex, and the “bad guy” bugs are, without question, huge, scary, and nonhuman. Any halfway decent hack director could have made this into a rousing, flag-waving adventure, one that panders to our basest impulses and seduces us into yet another self-centered bit of aggrandization.
But Verhoeven deliberately undercuts this at every turn. The lead actors are all terrible, making it difficult to identify with them. If you examine the situation rationally, the human characters are clearly in the wrong. Tactically, the humans’ approach makes no sense either; without power armor, nuclear grenades, or any other truly useful weapons, the human infantry simply becomes cannon fodder in a pointless war of attrition. (Trench warfare, anyone?)
The bottom line: To “read” Starship Troopers, you have to make a leap of imagination. Pretend you’re a German nationalist in 1942, going to the cinema in Berlin, watching a movie in which your leaders attempt to justify the war as right and good. If Starship Troopers makes you uncomfortable or doesn’t seem to “work correctly,” don’t feel bad – it’s supposed to be like that.
Verhoeven absolutely makes movies about movies, and about audience expectations and desires; this is clear if you truly look at his other work. Showgirls is just the most notorious example, and is, for me, the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned movie of the last twenty years. If you really look at it, it’s clearly a big “fuck you” to the classic American dream of “A Star is Born,” to the ultimate fantasy of being “discovered” and elevated to fame and fortune. It’s clunky and awkward on purpose, and casting a no-talent clueless bimbo like Elizabeth Berkeley in the lead is just the final bit of decoration that makes Verhoeven’s thematic intent clear. The whole movie is basically a Stage Door-style fantasy, with story structure, dialogue, and acting styles imported wholesale from 1935, but by transplanting the whole thing into a world of sleaze and filth, Verhoeven is flipping a big fat bird to our most-cherished dreams. Hollow Man doesn’t work in quite the same way, and has a fairly different underlying message, but it employs similar meta-cinematic devices.
Still, because Verhoeven’s themes are so subversive, his movies don’t “work” for the conventional viewer; they seem “off,” somehow. It’s perfectly all right if you don’t enjoy Starship Troopers or Showgirls or any of his other movies, because they’re not designed to be enjoyed in the generally understood sense; and in fact, if you do “enjoy” Starship Troopers on a superficial level, then you got suckered by the masquerade. What isn’t all right is to assert that the satirical intent isn’t there, because it most certainly is, if you look for it.
