← Back to Reviews
in
#304 - Starship Troopers
Paul Verhoeven, 1997
In the future, a young man and his classmates join an intergalactic war that is unfolding between the human race and a race of giant insect-like aliens.
I like the idea of thematic trilogies, whether they are deliberate efforts on the part of their creators or not. I'm starting to think of this as the third part of a loose thematic trilogy of Verhoeven's along with RoboCop and Total Recall. All three are tied together by futuristic settings, B-movie plotting, gratuitous violence, and no small amount of satirical subtext. Starship Troopers ups the scale considerably by foregoing urban dystopia and Martian espionage by launching into an effects-heavy space adventure involving a bunch of photogenic young recruits and their grizzled mentors going up against some well-rendered arachnids, but I still can't help but feel like it's the fact that this loose trilogy's attempt to outdo its predecessors in every regard is ultimately what makes it the weakest.
It almost goes without saying that one of the reasons that Starship Troopers is elevated above regular sci-fi B-movies these days is that it supplements its fundamentally cheesy plot with satirical elements of both blatant and subtle varieties. That definitely bleeds into the main narrative that foregoes focusing on the space war in favour of a teenage love triangle straight out of a soap opera as Casper Van Dien's pretty-boy football hero protagonist (who looks an awful lot like the hero of Team America: World Police) is torn between his feminine upper-class girlfriend (Denise Richards) and his tomboyish best friend (Dina Meyer) who has unrequited feelings for him. They all end up signing up for the war because in this subtly fascist society, joining the war effort guarantees them basic human rights. From then on, the film turns into a play-by-play war movie as our heroes go through basic training and then get thrown into the fray again and again until the movie ends and enough of the cast have died gruesome deaths.
Considering the flatness of the plot and characterisation (even considering the presence of memorable B-movie actors such as Michael Ironside or Clancy Brown), the much-lauded satire seems to be the only thing that gives the film any kind of genuine personality, and even then just because it's there doesn't mean it's handled well. If anything, it just seems to exist as an excuse to get away with a film that combines worn-out war tropes with vapid teen drama and sci-fi horror. Details such as the military's uniforms being modeled off those of the Nazis or the RoboCop-style news program that functions as wartime propaganda are fairly amusing but there's hardly any depth to them and this becomes very clear on a repeat viewing. It's hard to get the balance right when it comes to telling a story about supposedly heroic characters who are actually oblivious pawns of a villainous regime - once you realise that, it becomes difficult to either cheer on their victories or mock their defeats. Throw in the fact that they are badly developed cookie-cutter characters (by design, no less) and you do have quite the substance-free mess on your hands.
Even considering these weaknesses, the film delivers reasonably well on the action front. I respect the ambition of the CGI as it holds up reasonably well for a film from 1997, whether it's rendering the bugs themselves or depicting outer space sequences. Of course, the poor characterisation means that the action holds very little weight beyond some ludicrous displays of gore and explosions that do wear off fairly once the grunts start fighting the bugs and get themselves killed off in quick succession. As a result, Starship Troopers is a rather middling example of a sci-fi blockbuster that may have some lurid thrills and sophomoric cleverness to back up its not-too-dated technical skill, but it definitely doesn't end up being enough to truly make the film work as a whole.
Paul Verhoeven, 1997
In the future, a young man and his classmates join an intergalactic war that is unfolding between the human race and a race of giant insect-like aliens.
I like the idea of thematic trilogies, whether they are deliberate efforts on the part of their creators or not. I'm starting to think of this as the third part of a loose thematic trilogy of Verhoeven's along with RoboCop and Total Recall. All three are tied together by futuristic settings, B-movie plotting, gratuitous violence, and no small amount of satirical subtext. Starship Troopers ups the scale considerably by foregoing urban dystopia and Martian espionage by launching into an effects-heavy space adventure involving a bunch of photogenic young recruits and their grizzled mentors going up against some well-rendered arachnids, but I still can't help but feel like it's the fact that this loose trilogy's attempt to outdo its predecessors in every regard is ultimately what makes it the weakest.
It almost goes without saying that one of the reasons that Starship Troopers is elevated above regular sci-fi B-movies these days is that it supplements its fundamentally cheesy plot with satirical elements of both blatant and subtle varieties. That definitely bleeds into the main narrative that foregoes focusing on the space war in favour of a teenage love triangle straight out of a soap opera as Casper Van Dien's pretty-boy football hero protagonist (who looks an awful lot like the hero of Team America: World Police) is torn between his feminine upper-class girlfriend (Denise Richards) and his tomboyish best friend (Dina Meyer) who has unrequited feelings for him. They all end up signing up for the war because in this subtly fascist society, joining the war effort guarantees them basic human rights. From then on, the film turns into a play-by-play war movie as our heroes go through basic training and then get thrown into the fray again and again until the movie ends and enough of the cast have died gruesome deaths.
Considering the flatness of the plot and characterisation (even considering the presence of memorable B-movie actors such as Michael Ironside or Clancy Brown), the much-lauded satire seems to be the only thing that gives the film any kind of genuine personality, and even then just because it's there doesn't mean it's handled well. If anything, it just seems to exist as an excuse to get away with a film that combines worn-out war tropes with vapid teen drama and sci-fi horror. Details such as the military's uniforms being modeled off those of the Nazis or the RoboCop-style news program that functions as wartime propaganda are fairly amusing but there's hardly any depth to them and this becomes very clear on a repeat viewing. It's hard to get the balance right when it comes to telling a story about supposedly heroic characters who are actually oblivious pawns of a villainous regime - once you realise that, it becomes difficult to either cheer on their victories or mock their defeats. Throw in the fact that they are badly developed cookie-cutter characters (by design, no less) and you do have quite the substance-free mess on your hands.
Even considering these weaknesses, the film delivers reasonably well on the action front. I respect the ambition of the CGI as it holds up reasonably well for a film from 1997, whether it's rendering the bugs themselves or depicting outer space sequences. Of course, the poor characterisation means that the action holds very little weight beyond some ludicrous displays of gore and explosions that do wear off fairly once the grunts start fighting the bugs and get themselves killed off in quick succession. As a result, Starship Troopers is a rather middling example of a sci-fi blockbuster that may have some lurid thrills and sophomoric cleverness to back up its not-too-dated technical skill, but it definitely doesn't end up being enough to truly make the film work as a whole.