Film Review - Starship Troopers

I've never read Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers. It is one of the icons of science fiction. I can only guess that the filmmaker didn't stay close to the book. For a novel to becomes a classic, the story has to work. This film is all about pretty people, gore and bug splat. Starship Troopers is so bad, the group I watched it with were laughing at the film, not with it.

The plot involves an alien race of bugs that throw a rock at Earth from many light years away. Damn, these guys must really be something on a golf course! We Earthlings respond by attempting a ground war on the bugs' planet. We get our butts kicked.

There's so much wrong with Starship Troopers, I don't know where to begin. Let's take that ground war. If we learned anything from Desert Storm, it's that you soften up an enemy with ground bombardment. The bugs had tossed a rock at us. These rocks were their asteroid belt. Why not just toss their own asteroid belt at them?

Let's talk about the pretty teenagers we send to this war. The main characters are from South America, where people grow up speaking mostly Spanish. But our band of heroic teenagers all appear to be right out of the USofA speaking with a perfect Californian accent. How about just a little something to make me believe we had been to South America?

Starship Troopers is T & A and S & M. Teenagers are going to like the violence and blood-caked walls. This film spews gore just for the sake of spewing gore. The co-ed shower scene will be raising tent poles in the audience. But if you're past the age of say 21, you'll be going to work and laughing about the moronic dialogue. ("They sucked his brains out!") It's a pity Hollywood rarely figures out how to do science fiction well. The genre has so much to offer.

Dust Bag Full

Film Facts

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Released in 1997

MPAA Rating: R

Reviewed by Mongo