Long rambling review ahoy!
Starship Troopers (1997)
I imagine like a lot of teens in the 90s who watched
'Starship Troopers', I loved it and appreciated the satirical
Judge Dredd-style humour present in the cutaways to news broadcasts and advertisements (in the same way
Paul Verhoeven had done in
'Robocop'). What we maybe didn't realise was that those bits weren't satirical interjections, the whole film is that way. It's all a fictional fascist recruiting film beamed from a nightmare human future. Verhoeven begins with no credits, as mentioning the names of people from 1997 would break the illusion that it was made by people from another time. You don't have to watch it that way, you can just enjoy a high-octane action adventure.
If you view youtube reactions to people watching 'Starship Troopers' for the first time now, they usually say something like
"Wait, what? Is Neil Patrick Harris dressed like a Nazi?" when he walks out in full SS trench coat and peaked cap about 30-minutes from the end. But if you look closely people have lightning strikes on their uniforms from as early as 17-minutes in (a detail that was probably less obvious on the VHS) and the school Biology teacher looks straight out of a 1970s Nazi exploitation film. It's intent is deliberately obfuscated in one of the first scenes as we watch our "hero" and "heroine" flirt in class, while their teacher is heard in the background delivering a lecture about how violence solves all problems. I used to have a very specific brain malfunction when it came to geography, so originally I didn't get that although the characters are all obviously cliched American high schoolers they come from Beunos Aires (in Argentina). The USA does have a lot of Spanish place names, so I guess I thought
"Beunos Aires, El Paso, Santa Fe... what's the difference?" . This geographic detail implies that South America has at some point in the future been conquered and colonised by the USA. Although the main characters have Latin surnames, they are all chisel jawed himbos and bimbos, your classic 1990s 90201 rich white kids, further implying some kind of eradication of South American culture. Or, that this is simply a dramatisation of a "real" in-universe Pearl Harbour-type event and the in-universe makers of this propaganda film have whitewashed the cast but kept the "based on a true story" names.
The only guy in the cast who isn’t "perfect" looking is a dishevelled, unshaven guy we see being sentenced to death live on TV, his resigned, traumatised face the only thing suggesting to us the viewer that he's really an innocent "undesirable" of the UCF regime. Single lines in a news broadcast like
"Mormon extremists" imply that religion has been banned, or heavily discouraged (I don't recall any other religious reference in the film) and the bit about needing
"a licence" to have babies only if you submit to military authority is straight out of '1984'. Many lines contradict the surface narrative that the "Bugs" are the aggressors, the human news propagandist anchor goes as far as describing the very gravity round the bug home world as
"violent", yet lets slip that the war started when humans colonised a bug planet. By the end the innocent kids we met at the beginning have been turned into dead eyed soldiers and they've being reinforced by actual child-soldiers, the teachers are now soldiers, the drill instructors are soldiers, all joining together for one last glorious sacrifice to achieve victory, even though the desperation of the recruiting suggests otherwise. The only character that seems to escape without being horribly injured (if they didn't already begin the film with limbs missing), or killed is
Neil Patrick Harris, new recruit to the ruling class.
I hadn't realised before that the whole second half of the movie is on 'Planet-P', with all the introductions, world building and training packed into the first hour. Its a precise 50/50 structure that worked for
'Jaws' and
'Aliens'. I don't think 'Starship Troopers' gets enough credit for the seamless FX. This is how films should be done. Everything that should be practical FX, models, in-camera tricks and puppets is and everything that is much better done with CGI and then smoothly composited digitally is too. There is one long slow shot where a moving camera pans down onto a space ship model, gets closer and closer and right into the live-action bridge that is as good as anything today.
'Jurassic Park' rightly gets a lot of praise for about 5-6 minutes of brilliant dino CG in 1993 but just 4-years later 'Starship Troopers' has thousands of CG bugs running everywhere, for half the film, mostly in bright daylight and they still look perfect a quarter century later. Only the wobbly low-texture skin of the "brain bug" lets the side down. The only way 'Starship Troopers' could've been improved was if the Mobile Infantry were actually Colonial Marines and the Bugs were actually Xenomorphs. Please can we have a Colonial Marines movie Hollywood?
Yay! a 35mm trailer scan:
Composer
Basil Poledouris delivered a score as good as anything from 'Conan' or 'Robocop':