Starship Troopers [Superbit]

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As a member of the Online Film Critics Society, one of my very first tasks requested of me was to name my top twenty-five Science Fiction films of all time. I thought a little bit about creating this list and narrowed the list of potential candidates down to about forty-two films. Finally, I narrowed the list down to the necessary number and started to place the films in my order of preference. Starship Troopers was moved around the list quite a few times. Finally, it rested in spot number fourteen. This is a film that I hold in very high regard, though feel it missed out on some of the great elements of the book. Regardless of the shortcomings I find in Verhoeven´s translation, the film is one of my all-time favorites.

Starship Troopers is Paul Verhoeven´s telling of fascism in time of war and how even the most innocent and sincere people can become wrapped up in a fascist cause. Having admittedly never read the book, Verhoeven has done an excellent job of capturing the political and social views detailed by Robert A. Heinlein´s book. The telling of how Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) and Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) graduate from high school in a society where military service is required for citizenship and each enroll to seek citizenship and do their part in the war against a bug-like race perfectly states the messages carried by Heinlein´s 1958 classic. Granted, many of the characters have been completely changed or melded in Verhoeven´s retelling, but he has done well in keeping the essence of the book and injecting his own trademark violence and gratuitous nudity.

Verhoeven has taken the approach of paying homage to the classic World War II propaganda films and using their style in creating the look and feel of Starship Troopers. The film feels very campy and cheesy at times, but this was purely by design. The dialogue, the depictions of combat and the ´commercials´ that appear throughout the film are all throwbacks to the newsreels used to boost national morale during the last of the great wars. I have heard many a comment of how Starship Troopers is just an over glorified B-Movie and how it was so cheesy it was bad, however, those comments come from people who simply do not understand that this visual tour de force was intended by Verhoeven to be exactly as it appears. It has gathered more appreciation on video, and I think that many people are just now starting to understand what Verhoeven achieved with this incredible film.

I stated before that I felt Verhoeven and his team of filmmakers missed out on some of the great elements of the book. Most of these elements were omitted because of budgetary reasons or simply because changing one aspect or another added to dramatic effect in the final film. These elements range from the power armor used by the troopers and their ability to jump out of harms way, to the drop capsules used to send them to combat. These were intricacies of the book that I enjoyed and would have loved to seen on the large screen, but I understand the reasons they were not included and do not feel that their removal from the screenplay lessoned the overall power of the final film by too much, as they would have just added to the visual splendor of the combat sequences.

Paul Verhoeven may be a madman who strives to include gratuitous nudity and horrific violence very chance he gets. However, he is perhaps my favorite director. Starship Troopers was not the commercial success that Robocop, Basic Instinct and Total Recall was, but I feel it is his masterpiece. The film features some truly remarkable CG moments and its story is captivating and entertaining. If of course features decapitations and full frontal nudity, but there is nothing wrong with adding a little mature content to a film. Verhoeven is the best at injecting these moments to a large Hollywood production. Granted, every red-blooded male would have liked to see Denise Richards take part in Verhoeven´s fascination with the female form, but we can´t have everything. Starship Troopers is a film that I loved the first time I saw it and my fondness has not diminished one bit after many repeated viewings.

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