Subject: Review: Starship Troopers (1997)

From: Jason Overbeck <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Apr 1998 16:08:43 GMT

STARSHIP TROOPERS
**** OF ****

How many times has a person come up to you and compared a science
fiction movie to Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind? Don't worry, I wont
compare Troopers to those, and fact be told neither would anyone else. 
Picking to make a film about giant bugs, war and teen-angst is not going
to burn up the critic top picks or win many oscars, yet Starship
Troopers picks these disreputable genres and transcendes them to make an
epic.  This is the kind of film that Independence Day or Mimic could
have been with imagination, style, humor, and graphic carnage.

This film is fun in some sick minimalist way.  We see graphic telling of
a war with huge killer bugs, and along the way building a very funny
satire on high school and the way technology is leading us.  This film
is like Star Wars in the fact that they create not only a world new to
us but a new telling of an old story with incredible detail and
precision.

The film is also directed by the Dutch pro Paul Verhoeven who's work I
greatly admire.  His idea of a film is as much violence and sex as he
can fit (With the MPAA Ratings), the later is kept to suprising minimum,
you become shocked by the onslaught of drippingly grotesque eyecandy and
then made to laugh, not only by the outrageous way it is drawn out but
also at the style of news clips and media coverage of the war.

Starship Troopers was a flop in the US because most figured they woud
get another stupid film like Independence Day or The Lost World.  That
is not the fact at all.  This is one of the years best movies and one of
the most fun to sit through.  Adults: Just don't sit through it with
young ones.