Viking Night: Starship Troopers
By Bruce Hall
May 24, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There’s often a wink and a nudge behind Verhoeven’s material, vaguely reminiscent of someone like Sam Raimi. The problem is that Verhoeven is half as talented, yet takes himself twice as seriously. The gulf between what his films aspire to be and what they actually achieve is usually considerable, but I have to admit I still consider myself a casual fan. Not everything he does hits the mark, but his work somehow demands to be loved despite itself. You forgive it the way you forgive someone in a cast for limping, or a dumb dog for barking at its own shadow. That kind of forgiveness is the very essence of love, and most people tend to really love Verhoeven’s work or they really don’t. For me, his films fall somewhere in between the “so bad it’s good” (Showgirls) and “too good to be bad” (RoboCop) categories. Where do I think Starship Troopers ranks? You can probably already tell, but this would be a bad place to end the article. So stay with me.
Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) is a conflicted young man; a resident of Buenos Aires, Argentina - which in this movie is populated entirely by ridiculously good looking Americans. Rico is at a crossroads; it’s time to go to college and his parents see him as a Harvard man, but Johnny’s not so sure. He’s got the wanderlust of a typical 18-year-old and he wants to join the military - see the galaxy, as they say. And what a galaxy it is - Western democracy has collapsed and been replaced by a completely hilarious form of fascism. There are two kinds of people in this regime - Citizens, who have the right to vote, hold office and bear children, and Civilians, who do not. For a Civilian to become a Citizen, he must swear two years of service to the Government, which usually includes an unbelievably hazardous military tour. This is more or less because humanity is waging galactic war with a disgusting race of insect like aliens, and the Government needs “fresh meat for the grinder”. Young men and women, eager to make a difference, sign up for service and quickly find themselves unprepared for the horror and senselessness of war.
The satire is obvious but it differs entirely from the book, where the fascist angle was more of a plot device meant to highlight the value of individual sacrifice to society. Verhoeven dispenses with the details almost entirely, leaving just a handful of character names, an insect horde and the title in common with Heinlein’s creation. This is what ticks off so many purists, and my argument would be that while this is good reason not to take the film seriously as canon, it doesn’t mean you should dismiss it entirely. Verhoeven (who admits he never finished reading the book) took bits and pieces of the original concept and used them to tell what was very nearly a semi-compelling original story. It’s not worthy of Heinlein, and it doesn’t even deserve to be taken as seriously as it wants to be, but it’s definitely never dull. And yet, it also never really goes anywhere. If you’re a fan of the book, you don’t have to watch for very long to notice that the adventure you remember has been condensed into a corny coming-of-age dramedy with a generous helping of fifties pulp - not to mention, great heaping gobs of gratuitous violence. It sounds horrible, but that’s exactly what makes it so stupidly fantastic. For proof, let’s go back to the story.
On the eve of graduation, Rico finds himself in something of a love pentangle (is that a word?) with four other classmates, each as one dimensional as the other. Rico is a meathead with a heart of gold. Florez (Dina Meyer) is his female equivalent, and is pathetically, deeply in love with him. Ibanez (Denise Richards) is a bullheaded optimist who loves to fly. Zander (the ever smirking Patrick Muldoon) is her male equivalent, and fights with Rico for her affection. Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) is a smarmy womanizer, pompous ass and a certified genius. He seems to be in love mainly with himself, but you get the idea he’d probably go to bed with any of them just for the hell of it. Together, they sign up for military service and naturally, they all turn out to be born leaders. Rico and Florez are outstanding foot soldiers. Ibanez and Zander are better pilots than Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer. Jenkins becomes an intelligence spook and vanishes from the story until the third act. Everything is going just swell, until of course, it’s not.
Things change when the Bugs launch a successful meteor attack against the earth, destroying Buenos Aires and prompting the Government to launch an all out invasion of the Bug Homeworld. At first separated by their service, Rico and his friends are brought back together again as part of the invasion force. The attack goes terribly wrong, as it turns out the humans have made a grave miscalculation about the Bugs. Suddenly in the midst of an absurdly hopeless conflict, the kids grow up fast. They each bear the burden of leadership, and they all learn important lessons in friendship and sacrifice...together. That sounds really lovely, and If Verhoeven was going to throw out the original story and invent a new one, he could have done a lot worse than this. But the problem, as with many of the man’s films, is less with the story than it is the execution.
Starship Troopers - the movie - begins “In Media Res”, meaning the film opens during a critical point in the middle of the story, showing us where the characters eventually end up. Then it takes the narrative back to the beginning, where the story really begins. That’s fine, except that for me this technique is almost always a deliberately aggressive attempt to be taken seriously. And it almost always comes across as either pretentious, silly, or unnecessary. In this case, it’s simply unnecessary. Starship Troopers isn’t Oscar bait; this movie is a sarcastic parody in the tradition of RoboCop. It’s a gory, big budget political rant by the guy who brought you Basic Instinct. Yes, it’s just a movie. But if a film sets out to make a serious point and just makes you roll your eyes and chuckle, are you likely to ever absorb that point? Part of the joke is how stupid the humans are, despite their supposed intellectual superiority to the Bugs. They indiscriminately throw wave after wave of infantry straight into the enemy, armed with laughably underpowered weapons and practically useless body armor. It doesn’t occur to anyone to attack a giant colony of crawling insects from the air until about halfway through the film. Nobody thinks to use artillery until the second act. It takes them 129 minutes to reacquaint themselves with five thousand years of military strategy.
Ha-ha. It gets old fast. Starship Troopers clearly wants you to buy into a political message, but the hook is this kind of idiotic parody. Supposedly, we’re supposed to be learning that modern society’s desensitization to war is a form of self imposed fascism. There may in fact be something to that but sadly, this film doesn’t possess enough structure to bear that kind of weight. For a send up to effectively deliver a stern message, it needs to take its audience more seriously than this movie does. Attempting to educate someone you clearly don’t respect tends to look suspiciously self serving and that tends to be the case here. Even from a superficial level, this is disappointing. The CGI deployed in this movie is outstanding for the time, and in my opinion it really holds up well. what could have been some truly incredible action sequences were reduced almost to pantomime by repeatedly lazy attempts at irony.
But my strongest complaint would be the same one I levied against RoboCop. This movie is far, far too graphically violent. I realize that the aim was to shock the viewer with reality, but it’s so poorly executed that it just comes across as vulgar and excessive. So, I can’t stress this enough - watch this as a straight comedy and try not to let the blood and guts bother you. It’s all just a big, stupid joke. Come on, Casper Van Dien as an action hero? Should I assume the second most boring tween of 1997 (Chris O’Donnell) was too busy ruining Batman to take this one? We’ve also got the same sort of simulated TV newsbreaks we saw in RoboCop woven into the story, only this time they’re played off as puffed up Government propaganda. And most of them are genuinely hilarious. There’s the great Michael Ironside playing The Great Michael Ironside, like he always does. The Worst Bond Girl Ever - Denise Richards - is on board, taking the wind out of every scene she’s in, the way few female leads can. Neil Patrick Harris plays Barney from How I Met Your Mother, if Barney lived in the future and dressed like Hermann Goring. I’m telling you - there is no reason whatsoever to take Starship Troopers seriously.
Taken solely as mindlessly amusing pabulum, Starship Troopers is really hard to hate. That is, unless you simply can’t stand the sight of blood. Stay miles away if that’s the case. And if you insist on comparing this film to the book whose name it borrows, you’re not just going to be disappointed. You’re going to be downright insane with anger. I don’t like to check my brain at the door any more than most of you probably do, but for me a Verhoeven flick is like eating an entire large pizza by yourself the day after getting dumped by your girlfriend. It’s definitely not good for you. It might even be downright self destructive. But a little indulgence now and then is a big part of keeping a smile on your face, and it just feels so damn good. So go ahead. Try not to laugh at Starship Troopers. Like I said, it’s Dawson’s Creek in space. With bugs. And fascists. How can you not have a good time with THAT?