Subject: Review: Starship Troopers (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Cheng-Jih Chen)
Date: 10 Nov 1997 03:59:22 GMT

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.

-- 

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