Starship Troopers

Rating:
Summary: A Good Space Military Movie With Some Jokes
Review: Starship Troopers was a good space military movie but it cannot beat Star Wars if it ever became a formidable competitor. The basic story is, a swarm of giant bugs are trying to take over the world and it's up to an army of humans to stop the onslaught. Johnny Rico, wants to become a citizen by joining the Army. The same thing for his girlfriend, Carmen Ibanez. However, they become separate because Johnny joins the infantry as Carmen pilots spaceships. The movie shows propaganda and facist ways in the future, proving that democracy does not exist in this movie. In the psychological aspect, there's something that I don't understand. If bugs kill too many human ground troops, putting the humans in risk, how come they can't send bombers and space fighters more frequently? I have no clue why, but however, the movie has little resemblance of the book. If Robert A. Henlein was here to see this movie, he would be slightly disappointed because there was some things they skipped and the troopers, the spaceships, the bugs, and the scenery would look different.

Here's why I gave this movie five stars:

1. The action was pretty impressive

2. The bug animation was detailed and looked real

3. Good story to convince some viewers to see this movie

4. Good character developement

5. There's jokes in it.

Good movie but it could have been better.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best in sci-fi action.
Review: Supremely entertaining sci-fi action film takes place in the future, where Earth lives in a basic fascist society, and is at war with giant insects from a distant planet. It's up to Casper Van Dien and company to blow as many of them away as possible. A hilarious "character" piece in the first half gives way to non-stop action and big, bloody battle scenes in the last hour, some of the best I've ever seen. Silly, but also exciting, energetic, and just unbelievably entertaining this is director Paul Verhoeven at his best, with standout performances from Clancy Brown and Dina Meyer. Very enthusiastically recommended.
**** 1/2 out of *****

Rating:
Summary: Nice Black Comedy--Refreshing
Review: This film pushes the style of Robocop, one of the director's earlier movies, into the realm of full-blown black comedy and satire. If you've ever wondered whether Americans are brainwashed by propaganda, this film offers a chilling answer. I'm not sure why humans are so susceptable to patriotic blather, and why they can be so easily convinced that someone is their enemy, but this film does a good job of letting you recognize such tendencies in yourself. It doesn't matter who started the war, why the war was started, or how it will end. Once we're in a war, we are extraordinarily susceptable to the suggestion that we are right and just--and that the ends justify the means. And as you watch the "brain" creature get prepared for experimental surgery, a number of chilling analogies come to mind. No doubt, we as a species are more than capable of horrific brutality portrayed in this film. It is "The Will to Power" for the Twentieth (and now Twenty-First) Century. Entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Kill 'em all
Review: While some say the storyline is cheesy and the acting bland, what remains is that Starship Troopers is one hell of an action thrill ride. Based on the controversial book, Starship Troopers tells the story of a young man named Johnny Rico who joins the military so he can become a "citizen". In fact, all of the new recruits are all real young men and women, but what they don't know is the horrors that await them. Director Paul Verhoeven's patented penchant for graphic violence (see his other films Robocop and Total Recall if you wanna see what I mean) is in full effect here, human soldiers are dismembered in full gorey glory here, and the special effects are some of the best I've ever seen in a movie (and this was made in 1997). But behind the excellent special effects and gut churning gore, there is an underlying theme leftover from the novel, the horrors of war and the loss of innocence when youngsters must endure it. The ensemble cast includes Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Jake Busey, Michael Ironside, Clancy Brown, Neal Patrick Harris, and Patrick Muldoon. Highly recommended to any fan of sci-fi or action in general.

Rating:
Summary: Elegant proof of intelligence
Review: It's incredible that Hollywood let Verhoeven make this subversive masterpiece. On the surface this film is about a future war, but in reality it is a critique of nationalism and fascism. Heinlein is spinning in his grave like a top, and Verhoeven planned it that way, drawing directly from WWII Hollywood films and Nazi epics such as 'Triumph of the Will'.

The underlying truth of this film is that the humans are the aggressors, not the bugs. If you pay attention, the movie even mentions that the first human colonies in the Arachnid Quarantine Zone were by crazy Mormon separatists i.e. the humans invaded the bug planets first.

Another oft cited criticism revolves around the asteroids that the bugs are allegedly directing towards Earth. The movie spells this out clearly too - Klendathu is shown as being many lights years away on the opposite side of the galaxy. How exactly are the bugs getting asteroids all the way to Earth? It's called propaganda folks, and the Buenos Aires 'asteroid attack' sequence is a classic. How, for example, does the government news channel have a rolling body count in the millions only minutes after the attack occurs? If you watch this movie a couple of times, you begin to see the signposts that the moviemakers left in plain sight.

Other criticism falls into the same area. Why is the military intelligence (in their SS uniforms) so bad and the military weapons so useless against the bugs? Why does Buenos Aires look like an American city full of beautiful Americans? How does Jonny Rico make it through the first attack alive when we see him apparently killed by bugs? These are not just accidents but instead are subtle satire and propaganda.

In the post 9/11 era, it is interesting to compare the words of the Sky Marshall (for example) to various world leaders. Substitute 'bugs' for 'terrorists' and there is little difference. The hyper patriotic graphics of the movie's Federal Network are only a few steps removed from cable news networks like Fox.

Verhoevens ideas come through on the DVD directors commentary, and he has also discussed them in interviews. It's unfortunate that so many American viewers see this movie as just a violent sci-fi flick with weak acting by attractive young people, or a failed adaption of a dated pseudo-fascist novel. European reviewers seem to understand it a little better. In retrospect, I guess that is why Verhoeven felt the movie had to be made. I think it achieves the goal admirably.

Rating:
Summary: Workmanlike but weird
Review: This was initially a successful science fiction novel written by a veteran of the Pacific Campaign during the second world war. It was part an action adventure with parallels to the Guadacanal Campaign and also a political tract. The political ideas in the book were something which upset leftist commentators. Effectively they involved absolute unquestioning obedience by military personnel and a notion that government should only be run by people who had served in the armed forces. Ironically these values of course brought Japan to the brink of oblivion.

The film is rather unusual in a number of ways. The book was largely concerned with portraying a future society so that most of the narrative involved was the main characters training and his conflict with his parents. The war itself was very high tech and the enemy a race of insects also shared the sort of technology used by humans.

The film is sort of satirical in a strange way. It approaches the values of the future society in a sceptical way. The heroes wear Nazi uniforms and the experiments carried out on the aliens are inhuman. News reports are used to convey information and they resemble those of a totalitarian government. Critics have cottoned on and some of them have suggested that the film raises the question about who are the baddies as if it was some massive insight.

The other strange thing is that the alien enemy is shown to have no technology at all. Their troops do not have weapons and they move about the starts by flinging eggs to distant planets. All this makes no sense at all. One of the scenes in the film recounts how a large city on the earth was destroyed by the aliens pushing a meteor into a collision path with earth. However if there was no technology how would they know where earth was let alone push large boulders in that direction. The reality is probably that it would have been difficult to animate the aliens so that they could carry weapons so that the plot of the book was altered accordingly.

Despite the plot holes, the improbabilities and the question marks about whether you are barracking for the new Reich, the film is in its own way entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Good special effects, but bland acting
Review: This movie bored me pretty quickly. The fighting scenes were a little drawn out, & too fake-gory to take too seriously. Not to mention some actors (AHEM, denise richards) need some acting lessons. It's got something for everyone I guess. Special effects I suppose would be the only saving grace, cuz the story line is pretty boring & predictable. Good looking cast for members of the opposite sex to both drool over (if you like the totally fake pretty ditsy types anyway), & at least Casper Van Dien's character did it some justice. I got most frustrated in some scenes where some of the characters should've died a LONG time ago, yet somehow nothing happens to them (ahem, denise richards). Ya, so movies aren't supposed to be realistic, but c'mon!! Worth watching for the fighting scenes, but everything in between, you're not missing much by doing something else.

Rating:
Summary: If only I hadn't read the book.
Review: I had been wishing for a long time that someone would film a version of "Starship Troopers" that would do justice to the original book. I'm still waiting.
The effects were good - especially the bugs - but the movie didn't make the CGI artists' efforts worthwhile. They left out almost all of the things that made the book great - the emphasis on personal responsibility, the bloody failures in the early part of the war, and the whole motivation for the war. I don't remember them mentioning the whole "we make them extinct or they make us extinct" angle anywhere.
The amplified armor? Couldn't do that - you might hide the faces of the actors. What you ended up with is a goofy story of a bunch of teenagers shooting bugs, and a lot of extras getting sliced up.
This movie sucketh, and sucketh mightily.

Rating:
Summary: A spectacular sci-fi event!
Review: First of all, this is a Paul Verhoeven movie, and all of his movies are stunningly beautiful pieces of cinematography. The characters, particularly the women, are incredibly good looking. I don't know why this movie didn't do better at the box office. The buzz that I heard was that the studio didn't market it well. Unlike "Independance Day", which successfully blended sci-fi, patriotism, and comedy, "Starship Troopers" is great sci-fi but takes a darker, more cynical view of patriotism, and the comedy is more subtle and tongue in cheek, as if you are supposed to roll your eyes and shake your head. Some scenes are intended to gross you out and the violence is extremely graphic. That said, the spaceship scenes are as good as "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" and the special effects are as good as "The Mummy". Against the wishes of his rich parents, high school hotshot Casper Van Dien joins the starship troopers to please his gorgeous girlfriend Denise Richards who is going to the Fleet Academy to become a starship pilot. Another classmate is a vivacious blonde who also joins the starship troopers because she is carrying a torch for our hero and wants to be near him. Their lives are totally changed when we go to war against a race of alien bugs from another star system. That's the story. As a note of interest in the post 9-11 era, at the end of the movie we end up with the starship troopers pulling the top bug out of a cave on a planet that looks like Afghanistan. As a wise and funny man once said, "It's deja vu all over again!"

Rating:
Summary: Nasty satire goes right over most people's heads...
Review: I'm honored (I think!) to write the 500th review for "Starship Troopers."

I'd almost passed it by because of the mixed and negative reviews. Glad I didn't, because it's a gloriously nasty anti-war/anti-fascist satire.

"Starship Troopers" is scripted as a parody of World War II war flicks, and (except for the over-the-top government broadcasts and recruiting ads) played absolutely straight by the writers and the director.

This doesn't keep the film from being hysterically funny. The sequence in which Dizzy is attacked by an arachnid and dies had me rolling on the floor in laughter. (If you don't "get" the humor, write me and I'll explain.) It's almost as good a send-up of the "I'm dying -- go on without me" scenes from war films as Doe Dante's parody of 50's scifi/horror films in "Matinee" (also recommended).

The satire is so subtle it's not surprising slow-witted reviewers saw the film as a glorification of mindless patriotism. One easily missed point comes near the end when the psychic contacts the brain bug and announces -- to universal cheering -- that the bugs are frightened. The obvious next step -- using this ability to communicate and end the war -- doesn't occur.

...

The DVD transfer is one of the best I've seen -- detailed, razor-sharp, and vividly colored, with little or no overshoot or ringing.

Strongly recommended to every adult viewer, even if you can't stomach Paul Verhoeven's obvious glee in ripping people in half. Definitely worth viewing with your children, so you can discuss the film's politics and Weltanschauung.