Starship Troopers

---

Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »

---

"War is hell."
--William Tecumseh Sherman

"The only good bug is a dead bug."
--"Starship Troopers"

Liking "Starship Troopers," Paul Verhoeven's satiric, 1997, sci-fi, war-movie romance is admittedly an acquired taste, but, then again, liking anything by Paul Verhoeven is an acquired taste. Some of the Dutch director's English-language pictures are easy to swallow ("RoboCop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct"), and others are just plain unpalatable ("Showgirls," "Hollow Man").

In any case, "Starship Troopers" was never author Robert Heinlein's best book--"Stranger in a Strange Land" gets that honor--nor is the movie version of "Troopers" in the same league as the best science-fiction films of our day. But it is a good, amusing action-adventure fantasy with enough F/X wizardry to engage most viewers, and its graphics and sound alone easily justify its newest release on high-definition Blu-ray.

In director Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier's hands, "Starship Troopers" is part gung-ho war movie filled with stalwart heroes with impossibly square jaws and gorgeous girls with impossibly perfect teeth; part love story involving hopelessly idealistic young people; and part propaganda spoof, embracing stirring speeches, nationalistic slogans, and patriotic recruiting posters. It's also the first movie I recall using CGI special effects to create enormous armies of antagonists. "Jurassic Park" had solidified the use of computer graphics just four years before this film appeared, and "Independence Day" had proved its effectiveness in duplicating multiple aliens just a year earlier. But "Troopers" was amazing in offering up literally thousands of giant, villainous insects on the screen at once.

Like Stanley Kubrick in "Full Metal Jacket," Verhoeven tells the story of "Starship Troopers" in two parts. First, he gives us a detailed account of the recruitment and training of a group of young men and women into the Federal Armed Service, the strong arm of a future fascist state that has united all of Earth. Then, in the second half, the director allows us to follow their exploits in an outer-space war against gigantic bugs that threaten the Earth. Unlike the Kubrick film, however, which was most interesting in its boot-camp scenes and relatively routine in its actual war sequences, "Starship Troopers" is rather long and slow going in the initial phase, which Verhoeven intends as a sarcastic treatise against totalitarianism, but then gets fairly exciting once the action starts in the second half.

Verhoeven tells the story itself in mock-documentary style, like an old World War II indoctrination film, and to this end he purposely chose lesser-known actors for the major roles. Casper Van Dien stars as Johnny Rico, a fellow who would rather serve his country in the Mobile Infantry than go to Harvard (especially when his girlfriend is also joining up for service); Denise Richards is Carmen Ibanez, Johnny's girlfriend; Dina Meyer is Dizzy Flores, who also has a crush on Johnny; Jake Busey is Pvt. Ace Levy, everybody's friend; Neil Patrick Harris is Col. Carl Jenkins, a psychic who becomes a high-ranking officer by the time he's twenty-four (go figure); Patrick Muldoon is Zander Barcalow, a hotshot spaceship pilot; Clancy Brown is Career Sgt. Zim, a hard-ass drill instructor; and Michael Ironside is Lt. Rasczak, an even harder ass.

The actors, of course, are totally inconsequential. Nothing more is required of them but to stand around and look handsome or beautiful, as the case may be. It is only Ironside, the old veteran of the crowd, who makes much of an impression. When a raving-mad general tells Rasczak to shoot him, with a perfectly straight face Ironside actually starts to carry out the order. It's a grim, sardonic, and to me very funny moment.

The documentary device works amusingly, although it doesn't sustain as much viewer involvement as Verhoeven's previous gimmick did in "Total Recall," where the filmgoer constantly questioned whether the whole affair was for real or just a dream. Nevertheless, the pseudo-documentary approach allows the director to explore plot considerations that would have been awkward to do with more conventional story telling, things like explaining background material on the war, public opinion toward it, and various character motivations. Moreover, the approach is different and fun. Nothing wrong with that.

The war with the bugs is the centerpiece of the movie, as we might expect, and thanks to some lavish computer graphics, it comes off pretty well. The huge insects, some of them gargantuan, fire-breathing beetles, are scary not only because of their immense size and bizarre appearance but because of their sheer numbers. I mean, once the animators create a particular computer-generated design, they can reproduce it any number of times. The movie does this with a vengeance, providing the audience with the sight of thousands of these creatures swarming over the screen at once. Then, in terms of spaceships, futuristic paraphernalia, alien creatures, and the like, the movie gives us nothing we haven't seen before, but it gives us more of it.

Some questions, though: Why did the director choose to reveal the bugs in their entirety so early on in the story? In most good sci-fi and horror movies-- "Jaws," "Them," "Alien," "Mimic"--the monster or monsters are unveiled a little at a time, the better to sustain their mystery and build suspense. But Verhoeven proudly displays his bugs in full view from the very beginning of the picture. Was he purposely trying to demystify them? To have striven for the ordinary so soon, documentary style or not, seems to me to have lessened the monsters' dramatic appeal, their element of surprise. Furthermore, why would the soldiers of such an advanced technological future as the one depicted in this movie still be using bullets, and why do the starships have virtually no defense systems?

---

---