*Starship Troopers* 1997 TriStar, Rated R. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Michael Ironside. Written by Edward Neumeier, based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein.
Review by Thor Thomas
The movie _Starship Troopers_ is full of sound and fury and blood and testosterone. A tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of Robert A. Heinlein's novel and war movies as fascist propaganda. So, what's in it? Macho women with guns! Macho men with guns! Phallic spaceships! Guns that shoot 23-skidillion bullets before reloading! Nuclear grenades! Decapitations! Mutilations! Defenestrations! Whipping! And bugs! Bugs!! Bugs!!! It's been a while since I have read the book, but as I recall, it was not much more than a series of battle vignettes framed by flashbacks to the main character's high-school civics class. Inspired in part by Heinlein's experiences during WWII, it is a platform for Heinlein to preach and philosophize about how the military is necessary for the survival of civilians, though as it is an allegory, it does perhaps get taken a bit far. The military rules society, and anyone who is not a member does not have citizen's rights. True, we have to be "not as nice" during war, we had to become a more militaristic society in order to beat the Nazis (check out posters of that era), and that was one of the points of the novel. The Bugs are an enemy with whom we cannot have peace (because we have nothing in common but a need for the same planets), only victory or defeat. Hence, a war that goes on pretty much forever as the two sides are fairly evenly matched. In this sort of scenario, the society Heinlein presents is perhaps justified, but it is a nasty world I could not like very much while reading the book, and the filmmakers evidently had similar feelings. Personally, I never felt the book was one of Heinlein's stronger works; for a better coming- of-age story in a military setting, I would recommend his _Space Cadets_ much more highly. In the book version of _Starship Troopers_, the Mobile Infantry does its fighting in power battlesuits that inspired the whole "Japanime" mech genre. One of the cooler parts of the book, and you might think something they would like to do onscreen, now that they have the computer graphics technology to do it; but no, these are just soldiers lugging around big guns and nuke-launchers. Perhaps someone figured they wouldn't need actors anymore if they did the CGI powersuits. The crypto-fascist society of Starship Troopers takes a back seat to the action, but between acts we do get treated to spoofs of interactive government propaganda. In the book, the Bug War had been going on for some time, which explained the militaristic society, but in the movie the war starts during the story, and the junta is already well-established, which is slightly more disturbing. Many of the uniforms and insignia have a definite "Nazi" look about them. I'm not sure Heinlein would have approved of the interpretation, but it's definitely an element of his story, whether he meant it precisely that way or not. Another difference: in the movie, the military is fully integrated, while in the book the infantry was all-male and only women flew the ships. The philosophy is still there, though in smaller proportions than the novel (which is a good thing, we wouldn't want to fall asleep in the theater, would we?), and the brutality is not as sugar-coated. Director Paul Verhoeven seems to be exposing some of the Heinlein's nastier subtext. Verhoeven is also a director who loves to depict death and blood, and this is not a movie for the squeamish. Nothing perhaps as blatant and gratuitous as the transit-station shoot- out in his movie _Total Recall_, but in addition to battlefield casualties shown in full view, we also have violence off the battlefield, including a broken arm, a knife through a hand, someone cut in half by a pressure door, and a death during a training exercise. Ironically, the only violence censored is one scene of a cow being slaughtered and one of cruelty to an alien. Despite the satiric element, the movie comes across as fairly mindless once all is said and done, mainly due to the testosterone-poisoned cornball plot and stock characters lifted from old WWII movies. But it is fun in the mode of _Independence Day_ - cheer the humans squashing those nasty alien bugs. And such pretty bugs, too: the computer graphics really turned out well! See it for the special effects and the bugs, or for the part of the novel that is still there, rather than the intellectual content or a retelling of the book, and be warned of the gore. DISCLAIMER: It has been a while since I read _Starship Troopers_ (I considered re-reading it before seeing the movie, but decided not to), so any misrepresentations of Heinlein's text are my fault entirely.
Review copyright 1997 by Thor Thomas, permission to distribute freely in complete form with copyright notice.
thor@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~thor
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