Simply A Masterpiece

Overrated

Good start, but then it gets ruined

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Paul Verhoevan's Starship troopers is a fantastic dark comedy masquerading as a cheesy science fiction movie. It is tragic that no one- not the critics or the audience gave this film a chance because the underlying theme is deep and worth debating. Much like all of Verhoevn's films this one contains everything from nudity (both male and female) and extreme gore and violence. Time will probably be more considerate to this movie as it is nowhere as bad as its ratings or box office performance imply. (Rico and space bugs are a treat for those who like layered satire)

Director Paul Verhoeven subverted the subtext of Robert A Heinlein's novel which had right wing underpinnings such as the rights of citizenship and the right to vote not being open to all.Starship Troopers is set in a future where Planet Earth is at war with bug like creatures from another planetary system that humans have encroached. Earth is a militaristic society, the media conditions the population to support the ongoing war effort. We follow four friends from High School in Buenos Aires where they study aspects of their civic society and then make their way through the military.Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) joins the infantry where he goes through basic training mainly to be neat his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) who has also joined up. As time goes on as Rico becomes battle scarred, he realises the difference between civilians and citizens.The action scenes in the film is intense with the bugs attacking and ripping up human body parts. Verhoeven has always gone for hard core action with all guns blazing yet the film is infused with satire.Verhoeven openly admitted he did not like the politics advocated in Heinlein's book and wanted to take a swipe at the fascistic elements of it. At one point in the film a character turns up wearing a Nazi uniform (without the Nazi insignia) and Verhoeven remarked that hardly anyone who saw the film noticed it!

It's not clear just exactly what Paul Verhoeeven and the writer Edward Neumeier were trying to do with this movie. I gather Heinlein's novel was pretty thoroughly tinkered with. The movie begins as a mediocre satire of war-time training camp movies. There's the loud and demanding drill sergeant, stern but fair. There are two high school football players vying for the same young girl. There is the less glamorous girl whose love for the handsome hero, Casper Van Dien, may be hopeless but resolute. There are brotherly insults in boot camp. Plenty of grabass in the shower, which is gender inclusive, a nice touch missing from my own boot camp. There's the rich kid who's about to drop out and take a walk down Washout Alley before a girl restores his faith in himself.Someone mentioned the actors' teeth, as well they should. What teeth! Incandescent! Brighter than a tooth whitener commercial, they'd light up a room if the fuse blew. And the principles are impossibly perfect, as if they'd just stepped out of a cartoon. Denise Richards, in particular, has this cygnette neck atop which sits a face full of good bone structure and a pair of lips so plush and prominent that they seem to have been photoshopped from somebody else. That Richards shows no evidence of having any acting talent is almost beside the point.It's not very funny. Not really. But it's identifiably a send up of a training camp movie to anyone familiar with the genre. That's not at all true for the remaining two thirds of the movie, which is treated as a serious science fiction film about our men and women in action against a planet ruled by "bugs", by "arachnids", according to dialog, though the images we see aren't arachnids at all but various forms of arthropods ranging from cockroaches to, well, other things, all of them creepy and mostly deft and speedy. They've destroyed Buenos Aires and "the Federation" has launched a war of retaliation against them. They far outnumber our men and women in uniform (all of them American) and our weapons are of little use against them. Full of martial pride, we attack them nonetheless -- and get clobbered.Some of the dialog is ripped off from World War II movies like "Sands of Iwo Jima." "Saddle up!" "Do you want to live forever?" "The only good bug is a dead bug." (Well, that's been attributed to a Civil War general but you get the point.) Some of the scenes are familiar too. The glorious last stand. The hordes of Indians, I mean bugs, charging the lone fort, mowed down in droves, only to be replaced by a million more. The sacrifice of the side kick. The last words being gasped from the bleeding mouth.Yet by this time the movie has turned deadly serious. There's nothing funny about soldiers being torn in half and flung into the air while still howling, or about a battleground with a hundred human body parts lying around in swatches of blood. It's frankly thrilling. You really WANT our troops to win, even if the war itself is stupid.So, what to make of it? Let's put it this way. Pre-teen minds (and some older) will enjoy it all the way through. More mature minds may have to put it on pause halfway through and think for a minute.

Being a massive fan of Paul Verhoeven's work, I was very pleased to be able to see this in the local cinema – where the BBFC kindly decided to award it a 15 certificate! The decision was later changed to 18, and its easy to see why. Along with ROBOCOP and TOTAL RECALL, this makes up the Dutch director's gore trilogy : science fiction actioners packed with as much extreme violence and gruesomeness as possible! Verhoeven has a bigger budget around this time, so nominally sets about filming a serious Robert Heinlein '50s sci-fi story. Instead the film turns out to be an epic, action-packed cartoon adventure ride, with cardboard characters and a whole lotta mayhem going on! Verhoeven also has time to satirise those gung-ho American characters but the whole thing is performed with such a love and sense of humour that you can't help but settle back and enjoy the ride.The special effects are out of this world and make STARSHIP TROOPERS one of the best effects films I've watched. The future is portrayed in a subtle way and seems real, even the battles in outer space. The aliens themselves are only CGI, but it's good CGI – especially those huge beetle bugs that crawl outta the ground to burn the enemy! The action comes thick and fast and is loaded with extreme gore. Numerous decapitations, people being impaled, burned, and all sorts of nastiness. The sickening 'brain sucking' climax really pushes things over the edge a la Peter Jackson. Verhoeven takes a moment to reference the British classic ZULU with a nail-biting siege attack, whilst a period at boot camp sees trainees being flogged, knifed, and having their arms smashed for failing! It's not hard to see the similarities to the Nazis, down to the uniforms and the trench coats, so you get to snigger as well as enjoy the action.The acting is the one weak spot of the film, with Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien absolutely terrible as the clear-cut, one-dimensional young, beautiful heroine and hero – but maybe that was the point??! Otherwise we have solid support from the always reliable Jake Busey (making his dad Gary proud) and Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris, as a member of the SS! Old pros Clancy Brown and Michael Ironside are on hand to supply the toughness. The film goes on a long time without losing focus, although the ending does seem to be a little abrupt in retrospect. Nevermind – this is a humorous, gruelling, ultra-violent, sometimes sick, always exciting war film like never before!