There are some significant reasons why Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers should be a bad film — it takes every clich‚ from World War II movies in the middle part of the century and translates them for interstellar combat; it has a cast of relative no-name pretty faces who don't show much range; it's a Johnny-come lately entry into the rest-of-the-universe-is-out-to-destroy-us genre that's regained popularity in the last couple of years (notably the box office smash, albeit lame, Independence Day) but you know what? It's a helluva movie.
Adapted from Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel of the same name and set in the future, Starship centers on a recent high school graduate named Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) who enlists in the infantry to impress his girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards), who, herself, enlists in the service as a pilot. While Rico is in training, a race of giant bugs from the planet Klendathu launches a meteor at earth that kills more than 8 million people, and Rico, Carmen and the rest of humankind are at war.
To be sure, there's not a lot new here: from the basic training sequences in which Rico encounters a tough-but-caring drill sergeant, receives a "Dear John" letter, and almost washes out, to the battle scenes featuring the cowardly, incompetent superior officer who cowers while his troops get slaughtered, and of course, the obligatory good buddy who gets wounded and tells everyone to go on without him while he holds off the enemy so the others can retreat.
Despite all this familiarity, Starship Troopers is effective for a number of reasons.
First, it uses all of those war movie conventions well. Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Edward Neumeier (Robocop), understand that the principle objective in a film like this is to manipulate an audience's emotional response in significant ways, and that it takes a solid, patiently built structure to achieve that. To that end, the filmmakers use the first third of Starship to good advantage, opening in the midst of the war, giving us glimpses of an ugly battle scene, in which the bugs rout the human infantry severely, with significant carnage. Giving us a taste of the action that will constitute the greater portion of the film and to pique our interest during the slower scenes that follow immediately, the movie then cuts back to a year prior to the war, when Rico and Carmen are still in high school, concerned primarily with flirting, sex and a futuristic version of football. Starship then gives us a fairly patient half-hour of exposition, using sequences at a graduation dance and later at boot camp to draw us to the characters who will go to war. The groundwork pays off, because later, when the characters are in serious trouble, and some of them get brutally killed in battle, we care about what happens to them. As for the battle scenes themselves, they work because, although they deliver significant action, the filmmakers remember that it's not enough to deliver a big bang — that the suspense that comes from waiting for the confrontation is more important: In many ways, the most interesting aspect of a cinematic search-and-destroy mission is the search.
Second, it stretches a few of those war movie conventions, largely through an assumption it makes that women and men are equals in the service. They train together, they fight together. In one interesting scene, the troopers in Rico's outfit shower after a tough day of training. Although it's a coed shower, it's a surprisingly asexual scene, with both men and women taking part equally in the locker room rowdiness and insults.
Third, the film earns points by not taking itself seriously. Interspersed, for example, among the boot camp and battle scenes is a series of effective parodies of World War II propaganda news reels. In one that is reminiscent of all of those clips of 1940s' schoolchildren bringing tin cans and used tires to recycling centers, children gleefully stomp on a horde of insects while the announcer tells us that "everyone is doing their part in the war against the bugs."
There is one caveat about the film, however: Verhoeven once said that he strove to make his films as realistic as possible, and the violence here certainly is that, with numerous scenes of agonized deaths and grossly dismembered and decapitated soldiers.
If you can handle such graphic violence, however, go see Starship Troopers. It's the best science fiction action flick to come along in years, and if you aren't already convinced that Independence Day is plainly a bad film, you will be when you see the same genre in the hands of people who know how to pull it off.
by Joe Schuster
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