Starship Troopers.

There's a genuinely gripping moment about 2/3 of the way through Starship Troopers. An evacuation plane (piloted by the only pilot crazy enough to attempt this rescue mission, Carmen Ibanez, the ex-love interest of Johnny Rico, who will soon become Lieutenant of the group that is the target of this particular rescue) has landed in the midst of a significant strategical offensive initiated by the alien bugs. The bugs have a brain, and the brain has manipulated the Starship fleet by transmitting false orders over their communication systems: the bug brain orchestrated an ambush. The roughnecks caught in this trap are retreating into the plane. Lieutenant Rasczak has already perished (death from a bug), and Dizzy Flores has just won retribution for his death by tossing a grenade into the mouth of his monstrous murderer (kind of - Rico shot Rasczak before the bug could finish him, so technically Rico is Rasckzak's murderer). She is one of the last on their way to the plane. Rico, her new lover, the lover she has dreamed of having for years and years, a lifelong yearning that has only recently flourished, shouts for her to come aboard. As she turns and runs toward the plane a bug appears behind her, and the bug devastatingly inflicts mortal wounds upon her body. Rico's retributory slaying of the bug allows Flores to make it on board the plane with her injuries. As the plane begins to leave the co-pilot, Zander Barcalow, the former competing love interest between Rico and Ibanez, signals for the final two turret roughnecks to board. They run towards the plane but are incinerated by giant bug leaders of the approaching horde.

The plane takes off. Barcalow tells Ibanez that Rico is aboard the plane. Ibanez has no knowledge of Rico's love affair with Flores: it is in that moment that she learns Rico is still alive, as she was falsely informed of his death on the battlefield at an earlier point. In the back Rico holds the dying Flores in his arms, but it is not a sad moment, because Flores, with her dying breath, assures Rico that all this was worth it, because she was finally able to be with him, the one she always loved. Flores dies in Rico's arms.

The truly powerful moment comes then: Rico, assuming leadership of the squadron, rushes to the cockpit of the plane. He orders an all-out nuclear assault on the bug planet. He doesn't acknowledge Barcalow or Ibanez, he simply issues the command for planetary annihilation. Though his request will be denied, and through all that has happened before and will after, the true drama in this scene, for me, is the red-eyed Rico, who has been transformed by war in ways he never imagined, in ways the audience never imagined. His story we enter at its beginning, back in his high-school days, when he was still in love with Ibanez, and Flores was annoying and meddling along the peripheral.

It's those red eyes that are genuinely gripping. I can accept this moment because I can accept what surrounds and houses it. I'm not fucking around when I say that amid all the sci-fi lunacy and ancillary drama of the film, all the other badass shit going on, it's a truly powerful and meaningful message on warfare, and a sadly fatal moment for the human spirit.