I'd say Starship Troopers is on par with most war movie shlock. The bugs make for interesting setpieces, the love square between Johnny/Diz/Carmen/the other guy is fun to watch play out, there are a lot of memorable and funny moments. Yeah Johnny's character arc of "becomes a fascist" sucks but it's not like the average movie hero's arc of "becomes a cop" is much better. Verhoeven was targeting Hollywood war movie slop and he fukken nailed it to the wall with a throwing knife - they're almost all really shallow and childish, they just play at being adult oriented by having a lot of gore.