Movie Review: Starship Troopers (1997)
This film is a brilliant dystopia, depicting a nightmare world in which arena football has become the national pasttime. shudder
The arena football motif carries through the film, where we see, over and over again, people we’d hope would be sensible do remarkably stupid things.
OK. Stop. “Starship Troopers” is based — I use this word loosely — on Robert Heinlein’s novel of the same name. I’m not sure about the history of science fiction, but this novel may have been the first to coin the phrase “bug hunt,” which we see most famously in “Aliens.” It’s combat science fiction, centering on the actions of soldiers from the future, who are recognizably types from today, only with bigger, fancier guns and spiffier uniforms.
The film picks up the plot points and the names: there’s a big battle, where the humans get their asses kick. Then there are other battles, and finally, this “brain bug” is captured at the end, giving the humans the key to victory. Woo hoo!
The film, however, is just plain empty. It skips through the novel’s plot points, but there’s very little behind it beyond a massive special effects budget — the animated bugs make Jurassic Park’s dinos look like something we saw in King Kong (no, wait, they were things we saw in King Kong) — and the soap opera antics of the gruff foot soldier, the dashing starship pilot (who, apparently, is named “Ace”), the woman that they love, and this other woman who pines for the GFS.
The heart of the novel is its moral vision. You may disagree strongly with what Heinlein thinks, but you can’t say that this novel isn’t animated by his moral code. The code is expressed in the trooper’s actions, his progress through the ranks, the lectures he receives, the conversations he overhears and the implicit comparison between bugs and humans.
The film’s fatal flaw is that it is entirely lacking in a moral vision. At most, it makes very nodding, very satirical references to it. No code or vision powers the film; all we have are special effects and soap opera. And when the protagonist finally declares that he understands the morality of this universe, that he knows the difference between “citizens” and “civilians”, it’s merely a point of melodrama, a tying of plot threads, and a reference to a question he couldn’t answer
previously. There’s no conviction.
But, the one positive thing about Starship Troopers, the movie, in the future, will become fodder for MST3K. To wit:
1) Where else will we “Doogie Howser, Psychic Nazi”? Crow T. Robot will have been saying, “Our minds are linked, your thoughts are my thoughts…” at one point. You’ll know when.
2) The continuing mis-casting of Michael Ironside, who, once again, plays the gruff professional soldier. I’m sure he can play a caring, sensitive role, if only they’d let him. Well, maybe not.
3) The insistence of all the troopers to get in real close to the bugs, despite the fact that they have guns, and the bugs have claws. It’s sort of like those bad action movies, where the villan, who has a big gun, decides that, yes, getting really close to Steven Segal is no problem — he can’t kick my gun away!
[Actually, this leads to one of the major deviations from the book — these movie bugs apparently haven’t really developed technology. In the novel, there are bugs with ray guns, who pilot space ships, and they’re clearly intelligent and scheming. Humanity has an equal opponent, and you can think of bug society as contrast and comparison to human society. I find this scarier, in a way, than the must-invent-wheel-must-discover-fire bugs they have in the movie.]
4) 24th Century Technology, in which they’ve invented a new form of information storage that looks remarkably like carbon copy.
5) 24th Century Music, which looks remarkably like 1980s music, but with less hair.
6) Tug-o-war with the brain bug. Humanity has apparently lost the ability to manufacture the “bulldozer”, and must resort to “Ten Commandments”-like teams of rope-pullers.
7) Arena football. Played with a silver football. ‘Nuff said.
I have to credit the film with one good thing, besides the special effects. There was a nice reference to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” at the beginning.