> The enemy in Starship Troopers is clearly, obviously, unconditionally hostile. The nuance necessary to paint anything like satire across the story is wiped out by the fact that "the bugs" are super-stupid-crazy bad.

> As the United Citizen Federation expanded its territory across the Galaxy, it came into contact with the Arachnid Species covering an area of it. The Federation initially considered the Arachnids to be a less advanced civilization, however, to avoid conflict, the region of space the Arachnids had colonized was Quarantined to prevent any humans settling within it. Despite this unofficial colonies were created, on Arachnid planets often ending in the Arachnid attacks of these poorly defended colonies leading to massacres such as at Port Joe Smith. In response to these intrusions into Arachnid colonies, the Arachnids launched an Meteor Attack on Buenos Aires. This led to the Bug War, and the Second Bug War.

Perhaps the bug response was an overreaction, but the human's response, a full-scale war with intent of complete xenocide, was orders of magnitude more so.

Perhaps this point was made a little too subtly, perhaps it was just subtle enough. Personally I didn't find the movie very subtle satire at all, but if the movie was a satire subtle enough to fool as many as it did, to me that just makes it better satire to me.