STARSHIP TROOPERS
Yes, I want to know more!

  Starship Troopers is either a slyly intelligent dumb movie or just a dumb movie in which I'm seeing more than I probably should.  My affection for this movie is much like that which I hold for The Lost World: the plot is ludicrous beyond belief, and the characters are all idiots, but the combination of incredible FX and some truly vicious carnage wins me over and puts a goofy smile on my face every time.

Loosely (very loosely) based on the Robert A. Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers follows four recent high school grads in futuristic Buenos Aires who decide that mere civilianhood ain't enough for them, they wanna be citizens!  And in this future world, to be a citizen, you've gotta enlist.  So they enlist, go through training in their various disciplines, and soon enough they're at war with about six hundred trillion giant bugs.

Starship Troopers takes place in a worldwide fascist utopia, cheerfully presented with either hilariously square earnestness or a cynicism so sublime that people who hold such a society as ideal wouldn't even know they're being satirized (while those that don't will find it screamingly obvious); hell if I know which.  Chock-full of propaganda within itself (like a "Do Your Part!" ad featuring children showing their patriotism by stomping on helpless, militarily disinterested cockroaches), both from its government and people who actually appear to believe it, and Basil Poledouris's score constantly trumpeting surety its own virtue, this movie is so happy to be fascist, you find yourself caught up in the enthusiasm and you almost wanna slap on a swastika.

This is one of those movies I should probably know better than to like as much as I do.  The science - even just simple logic - in this movie is howlingly bad. An outbound starship narrowly misses a head-on collision with an earthbound asteroid - at (if my estimates are correct) the space-hopping interstellar speed of what appears to be a few hundred kilometers per hour.   This asteroid was sent from Klendathu, which, as we see in a diagram, is way on the other side of the galaxy.  Let's see...it'd take...oh, about six trillion years for it to make the trip.  And we're to believe that the bug hostilities were started by Mormon colonists?  That's just one example; there's a LOT more where that came from (lots of the ol' "sound in space" and "fire in space" is only the beginning; hell, we see those in EVERY space opera).  If you think that's bad, chew on this: director Paul Verhoeven has a PhD in math and physics.

The military tactics aren't much better, even though the "making of..." special I saw on the Space channel made much ado of how there was some famous military consultant guy on the set.  If you want to wipe out a whole planet of enemies, sending the army down there to knock 'em down one at a time doesn't strike me as a particularly efficient method, although it's a lot more fun to watch than global nuclear bombardment.  Just how those sky-sparkle bugfarts are(n't) handled ought to provoke a chuckle from you.  And there's gotta be a better way to kill individual bugs than machine-gunning them, an obviously ineffective way which takes quite some time, while the damn thing dismembers your friends all the while.  Not that I mind.  Watching those bugs rip through soldiers like a lawnmower through squirrels was one of the most  howlingly good times I had in a theater in 1997.

Is this all just crap, bad plotting, a script more intent on...what script?  Or is there something more at work here, a sinister government agenda intent on (for whatever reason) drumming up public support for a war against alien bugs?  After all, we never actually see the bugs take any hostile action.  All the bad stuff we keep hearing about them is what's fed to us on hilarious newscasts which mix qualities of TV and the internet, which give us a soundbite and short glimpse of the story and ask us if we want to know more. (anyone who got a kick out of the TV ads in the Robocop movies ought to bust a gut at these) This is the theory I subscribed to for a while, but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny much longer than would the story had we assumed it was totally straight-faced.  So I really don't know.  And I don't care.  I'm too busy laughing at eerily true-ringing moments like how the news will show people getting mangled left and right, but they plaster a big "CENSORED" warning over a similar fate for an unlucky cow.

Now, I'm making this all sound like a pretty bad movie, and maybe it is.  But it's a bad movie that keeps me entertained almost nonstop, even during the first half which most people I know find pretty lame.

For starters, the special effects are some of the best I've seen, particularly concerning the bugs.  Almost entirely CGI, these things have what VERY few of even the most expensive CGI effects have: they actually appear to have mass.  A couple shots with humans on bugs (or on bugs' impalers) make the humans look a little hokey, but those bugs are always top o' the line.  But man, those battle scenes between the warring species are...wow.  They're not just exciting, but they're INCREDIBLY violent, Verhoeven as usual taking a sick, familiar glee in the carnage.

Heinlein's book featured spacefaring, high-tech bugs with ray/particle weapons n' everything.  The bugs in this movie are a little more, uh, grassroots - they just march on up to their enemies en masse and rip them to bloody pieces.  And rip they do; if you like seeing body parts flying all over the place, this is your movie.  After seeing what happens to one guy when about six or so of the bugs pounce on him, your flesh will crawl in phantom sympathetic agony when another guy is tossed over a fortress wall into a waiting, roiling sea of them.

And there are other bugs...giant beetle-like bugs that spray napalm from their noses, melting people down like G.I. Joe's, enormous bugs that stick their asses in the air and fart deadly sparkles at the sky (really!), flying versions of the arachnids...the list goes on.  There's even one bug that necessitates a scene where Michael Ironside pokes his fingers into a hole in some guy's skull and says "it sucked his brains out!"

Sure, it's halfway through the movie before we get much in the way of bug action, but even the first half has a lot going for it.  Clancy Brown is hilarious as a sadistic yet somehow well-meaning drill sergeant.  There's the much-discussed "co-ed shower scene" - intentionally drained of erotic content, but still slightly thought-provoking (especially in light of the contrary sexual politics of the book, which are contradicted left and right on the screen here).  We get to see futuristic football (with superhuman leaps and dodges), infantry training in many (often ridiculous) forms (including a live-ammo exercise in the MIDDLE of the training grounds, out in the open, with no apparent concern for stray bullets).  It's all cheesy, but it's entertaining and further helps to flesh out the world in which this takes place.

The actors are all pretty weak with their "roles" - all they have to do is appear fresh-faced and wholesome, and that's what they do.  Casper Van Dien and Doogie Howser are never going to give anyone pause on Oscar night, and Denise Richards' astoundingly high breast-size-to-talent ratio makes Pamela Anderson Lee look like Meryl Streep in comparison.  (although to be fair, I can think of few other actresses whose career is so solely dependent upon their sex appeal that would be willing to vomit on-screen) Of the young 'uns, only Dina Meyer shines a little, although what she sees in the object of her affections is impossible to fathom, and she gets the most undignified exit of any likeable character in recent memory.

The adults fare a little better; Ironside and Brown are totally at home in their fist-pumping military roles, and Brenda Strong is matronly yet charismatic as a starship captain.

It's a rare science fiction movie that really makes an attempt to flesh out the world it takes place in, and I appreciate it when that effort is made.  There's certainly such an effort here; satire or not, the fascist utopia seen here is as loaded with possibilities and minutae to consider as any SF environment filmed in recent memory.

I dunno, guys; I can sit here all night and list off things in this movie that are stupid, cheesy, or even offensive (although I'd hardly call it "the most racist movie I've ever seen", as a once-prominent rec.arts.movies.current-films poster went way out of character to declare).  But nevertheless, it comes down to this: I loved almost every minute of Starship Troopers, and other than Meyer's terrible last words, I don't think I'd change a frame.

BACK TO MAIN PAGE BACK TO THE S's