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Festivale February, 1998 Starship Troopers movie review

Starship Troopers Dumbship Troopers For those of us who are visually oriented, this film looks great. Spaceships galore, thousands of giant anorexic rhinoceros beetles attacking extras, big fat bugs the size of Kenworth trucks spitting some kind of fire-acid stuff at soldiers and other bugs as big as houses are farting plasma into space to nail the orbiting starships (I kid you not). There is also some good gratuitous nudity and a brainy bug that looks like Godzilla's haemorrhoid. For the bloodthirsty there are gutted bugs, decapitated, maimed and dismembered extras strewn around the place and nuclear grenades carefully designed so that main characters can outrun the blast. For fascists, there's a future world where, it seems, the RSL (Returned Serviceman's League) threw a planetary coup d'etat and turned the world into a place where only surviving cannon fodder can vote. (I know that part was in the original Heinlein book, but I'm reviewing a movie here, not a novel.) Unfortunately, for an intelligent viewer, there's not a hell of a lot. Riddle me this, Batman. You've got a solar system full of bugs who are (without having any visible presence in space) lobbing asteroids through hyperspace at the Earth. What do you do?

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If it was me, or anyone who'd ever read an issue of Analog, you'd lob around fifty times as many asteroids back at the bastards until their planets glowed like jack o'lanterns. Or you'd whack them with some really mean nanotech disassemblers that specifically attack organic material. Or you build a bloody big gamma ray laser and destabilize their sun or you simply strap some boosters to the asteroid belt that, for some reason, seems to be orbiting their home planet and use their own weapon against them. Not in this film. They sit a fleet of spaceships within striking distance of the surface and send down ground troops en masse, killing 100,000 of them in the first wave of attack. Meanwhile, up above, the starship captains think that the big flares coming up from the planet are just like fireworks and as harmless as the New Year's Eve display on Sydney Harbour. Until the pyrotechnics start setting their spaceships on fire. (Yep, fire in a vacuum.) The acting is competent, though, as my friend Jamie Reuel pointed out, everyone had big bright teeth that they flashed at every opportunity. But there's no real humanity in this film. It's empty of everything we know about people. Friends and lovers are chewed up by bugs and ten minutes later, are forgotten. Hatred of the enemy and reckless bravery are held up as virtues. This is a fascist future that is so repugnant that there were moments where I wished the bugs had've bombed more than just Buenos Aires. Maybe it's because all the human qualities I've been coming to terms with all my adult life; fear, aggression, hatred, jingoism and xenophobia, are glorified here. Starship Troopers will play well to fifteen year old boys, if they can sneak in to see it, and to those who haven't progressed since they were fifteen. This is cinema for the mindless. Unfortunately. I may be naïve but I would've thought that if some companies were going to spend $US100 million on a film, they'd perhaps consider getting someone like William Goldman to write the script and make it work. I had much more fun watching Verhoeven's Showgirls. That flick was a weird combination of soft-porn and All About Eve. It was no less dumb than Starship Troopers but there was more fun in the dumbness.

	Terry Frost
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Enter movie, TV show, or person   Provided by Internet Movie Database.	Just the facts: Title: Starship Troopers Running time: 129 minutes Written by: Ed Neumeier, based on the novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Directed by: Paul Voerhoven
	The Players: Johnny Rico: Casper Van Dien Dizzy Flores: Dina Meyer Carmen Ibanez: Denise Richards Jean Rasczak: Michael Ironside Ace Levy: Jake Busey Carl Jenkins: Neil Patrick Harris Sgt. Zim: Clancy Brown
	For session times of current films, use the cinema listings on the Movie links page. For scheduled release dates, see the coming attractions section.

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