For the second movie in a row, Paul Verhoeven has taken the brave step of going without a headlining name, preferring to rely on more visceral enticements to get the crowds in the door. But, after the relative commercial failure of 'Showgirls' (a movie about power rather than sex, despite an advertising campaign that begged to differ), he has returned to the arena of hard-edged SF in which he made his international name.
As in 'Robocop' and 'Total Recall', he works in a world of Lynchian qualities, where a thin veneer of normality conceals a vicious underbelly of death and destruction. The difference in 'Starship Troopers' is that the threat is external: F-sized bugs who launch meteors at Earth. In Verhoeven's universe, there is no room for moral ambiguity: the aliens may be more civilised or more intelligent than us, but who cares? They've got to die, except it is BLOODY hard to kill them.
And this is the crux of the movie. You must buy into the concept that it is acceptable to go into space with the aim of wiping out an alien species. For 'Starship Troopers' is basically a propaganda movie, both beginning and ending with an exhortation to join up, while in between you follow the exploits of the square-jawed hero (Casper van Dien) and his beautiful girlfriend (Denise Richards, possessor of perhaps the most attractively turned-up nose in cinematic history).
Perhaps as a result, this is not a film which stands up to logical analysis. The obvious tactic would be to stand a long way off the surface of the bug planet, and dump large, thermonuclear devices onto it, rather than land and fight hand-to-hand battles with a large and vicious enemy. It also remains a curiously CLEAN future, however; even in the depths of war, the dirt seems to just fall off the uniforms -- though insect ichor and blood seem magnetically attracted to them.
Such flaws can be forgiven, however, when the end result are so... well, at the risk of sounding like Beavis & Butthead, the word "cool" does leap to mind. Phil Tippett's special effects surpass anything seen before, both in quality and sheer quantity. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe", to borrow a line from long-time Verhoeven collaborator, Rutger Hauer, and 'Troopers' marks a quantum leap in SFX technology, with the occasional flawed shot rapidly overtaken by the next jaw-dropper. Against these, it's hard for the unknowns in the cast to deliver any memorable moments, and it's left to Michael Ironside and Clancy Brown to provide the best human performances, both playing hard-as-nails military men. With friends like these, the aliens don't stand a chance.
Effects alone aren't enough - as shown by 'Independence Day' and the 1997 slew of disaster movies - and more intellectual viewers can try to work out whether Verhoeven seriously espouses the fascist philosophy which appears to inform the movie. For every scene that does so, such as Ironside's referral to "the failure of democracy", another pokes sly fun at it. A recruitment officer gleefully informs the hero that the mobile infantry made him the man he is today -- then pushes back his chair to reveal that a count of his natural limbs would end at one. But Verhoeven did grow up in Nazi-occupied Holland, which would suggest the ambivalence is entirely deliberate.
Most of the year's crop of SF films singularly fail to merit a second glance. On this basis alone, 'Starship Troopers' is an improvement, since it's worth seeing more than once, simply to try and work out what, if anything, is going on behind the glorious effects. Where do I sign up?
Film stills courtesy of TriStar Pictures
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