Its a hard pill to swallow for the left because it is very explicitly voter suppression against them. Why target youth specifically? What makes the military so enlightened that they don't need to take the test? (rhetorical- its because the military votes republican)
I'm due for a re-watch of this, thanks. Some people were unable to detect the satire. So sad.
It's not that nobody got the satire, it's that Heinlein was deadly serious about it while Verheuven wasn't. The satire in Robocop isn't a whole lot subtler but it also had some stuff that wasn't satire that allowed everyone to attach to it. One of my big beefs with "golden age" science fiction is it's mostly a one-world-government libertarian triumph of the white man. Heinlein was the worst. Starship Troopers was such a McCarthyist screed that Scribner refused to publish it. I've never read it; my family worships Heinlein but that one was just a bridge too goddamn far. It's worth noting, however, that without Starship Troopers there would be no Forever War, a vastly better book with a much greater influence on culture.