STARSHIP TROOPERS (Tri-Star) Starring: Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Ironside, Clancy Brown, Patrick Muldoon. Screenplay: Ed Neumeier, based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Producers: Alan Marshall and Jon Davison. Director: Paul Verhoeven. MPAA Rating: R (violence, gore, nudity, sexual situations) Running Time: 129 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Devotees of Robert A. Heinlein, be forewarned: Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS is less an adaptation of Heinlein's novel than it is a literary satire. The author's jingo-all-the-way militarism and his tendency to create plastic characters with plastic conflicts had me expecting a soulless, faceless parade of carnage from the film version. And I suppose that's exactly what Verhoeven delivers, with sometimes hilarious results. Heinlein's basic motifs are so faithfully rendered that their flaws become a source of amusement, while their strengths become the stuff of high-energy entertainment.
Outlining the plot of STARSHIP TROOPERS is a fairly silly endeavor, since it's basically a Big Bug Hunt...ALIENS in broad daylight. Sometime in the future, humanity is threatened by giant, malevolent insects which have evolved into twenty-foot-tall action figures (arachnids with super-impaling spikes, beetles that spew forth lava, dragonflies with guillotine legs). Among those who sign on to save the earth are a group of high school classmates from Buenos Aires: conflicted rich kid Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien); his math whiz girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards); Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who secretly carries a torch for Johnny; and Carl (Neil Patrick "Doogie Howser" Harris), who not-so-secretly carries a torch for Dizzy, and also has a talent for speaking telepathically to ferrets. While Carmen heads for flight school and Carl joins military intelligence, Johnny and Dizzy become mobile infantry, their various battles intertwining with romantic sub-plots out of a third season episode from "Beverly Hills 90210."
So if STARSHIP TROOPERS is another movie where one-dimensional characters wade through trite situations on their way to killing a bunch of aliens, what makes it any better than, say, INDEPENDENCE DAY, a movie where one-dimensional characters waded through trite situations on their way to killing a bunch of slightly different aliens? For one thing, you sense that the film-makers are aware of the pulp nonsense they have as source material. The very absence of major stars in the cast feels thematically appropriate, not just fiscally prudent. If STARSHIP TROOPERS had been turned into a TV-movie, Aaron Spelling would have produced it. It's a story which requires emoting, not acting; it's a prime time soap opera with big guns, played for all the dopey melodrama it's worth.
The no-name cast also plays into Verhoeven's treatment of Heinlein's most controversial conceit. In this society, we learn, one can only be a full citizen after completing some sort of federal service, military for most. Verhoeven pays the notion plenty of lip service, then proceeds to skewer it with brilliant mock recruitment ads (named after the World War II-era "Why We Fight" series) in which youngsters are indoctrinated into the joys of firearms, or the pleasures of stomping cockroaches. These characters really are just "fresh meat for the grinder," as one character puts it, which makes their lack of familiarity all the more fitting. It's not that STARSHIP TROOPERS is anti-military, because it never treats the true horror of war as anything but a great big, violent video game. In fact, the characters are living the propaganda (particularly Johnny, who receives so many field promotions he may not remember his own rank by the time the film ends). Verhoeven is actually having it both ways -- he's making fun of gung-ho boosterism even as he fires his fresh-faced recruits into battle on a gung-ho booster rocket of visual effects.
If that makes STARSHIP TROOPERS hypocritical, at least it's enthusiastically staged hypocrisy. There may not be a person worth caring about in the whole film, but it moves like nobody's business. Verhoeven stages some thrilling action sequences, sending swarms of bugs after the anonymous grunts then having various body parts strewn about the screen like landscaping. It is that rare special effects blockbuster which demonstrates a sense of pacing to match its budget; I was caught up in the action enough of the time that I wasn't perpetually groaning over the absence of real human beings. I wish I could find it in myself to work up more outrage over the callous way humans are dispatched in STARSHIP TROOPERS, but it didn't work out that way. That would be punishing Verhoeven for getting to the heart of his material.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 super troopers: 7.
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