Post by StevePulaski on Apr 28, 2016 17:08:01 GMT -5
Starship Troopers (1997)
Directed by: Paul Verhoeven
Directed by: Paul Verhoeven
Rating: ★★★
While Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop was a bold example of how Verhoeven could make a compelling action film with some seriously substantial social commentary, his film Starship Troopers shows what could be achieved if he gets to collaborate on a satire. Widely misunderstood or shortchanged as an empty and modern monster movie about giant bugs (see Eight Legged Freaks), Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier work to create biting commentary about the military, imperialism, and jingoistic sensibilities, yet again, disguised as big-budget spectacle.
The film takes place in the 23rd century, where humans have worked to accomplish the means of regular intergalactic travel and have successfully began colonizing different planets. It opens with, and often interrupts the narrative by showing, a propaganda short demanding that young people join the military and work to fight gigantic mutant bugs who have been discovered on planets light-years away. Exiting high school to go off and fight enormous rodents is essentially the new "go off to the military and kill terrorists/communists" and this generation's kids have taking a liking to their new American duty.
This is largely because citizenship in the military federation is a privilege that need be earned by serving time in the military. The film focuses on a group of friends, Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), his girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards), and best friends Carl (Neil Patrick Harris) and Dizzy (Dina Meyer) all decide to join the military right after graduating high school in Buenos Aires. The gang undergoes basic training with Career Sgt. Zim (Clancy Brown) before being dispatched to actually fight the bugs, who come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but are assisted in combat by being incredibly tall and harmed with ferocious spikes and legs that can easily penetrate through the human body.
The combat sequences and visual effects of Starship Troopers are unanimously impressive, if a bit monotonous by the end, as the two-hour runtime for a film of this nature remains a bit of a taxing investment. The film features a copious dose of bug-blasting that makes it appropriately classifiable as an action film, yet enough substance to make this a pretty thematically compelling science-fiction. Verhoeven and Neumeier make us spend time with a group of characters who we generally don't realize until halfway through the film have nothing very interesting to offer us. They are nothing other than military archetypes from various propaganda films about war come to life to breathlessly tell us to perform our duties and serve our countries.
Don't be surprised if halfway through the film you begin rooting for the bugs because of how simple-minded and generally uninteresting the characters are. Nobody is poorly acting in this film (in fact, Van Dien and Richards do pretty well at performing their vapid characters, while Harris gives a pretty lukewarm "Stifler" impersonation), but the general attitudes of the characters make them off-putting caricatures perfectly fit for a film where they themselves don't realize how senseless and irrelevant they are.
Once again, Verhoeven handles the delicate balance of this film so well in terms of keeping things controlled chaos. Where Starship Troopers could've been nothing more than dumb fun in the hands of one director, or a boring, overblown allegory to another, like RoboCop, he keeps things balanced so serenely by allowing both perspectives to take hold that the dualities create a beautiful harmony with one another. His craft is the kind to go unrecognized until you realize it will not beat you over the head with its symbolism and its ideas. That's the part of Verhoeven that forces you to work for yourself as a viewer, and the part that ultimately shows he puts his trust in the viewer as a means to adequately define the film.
That method allows for some patience on behalf of the writer and director because it may take people longer to discover what you want them to take away from said film. Starship Troopers is one of the riskiest films to employ this method, I feel, because of the thought of its inherently simple-minded concept providing for such grandiose concepts about American exceptionalism to be casually offered in the mix is daring but wonderful all at the same time. That's Verhoeven's essence as a director, come to think of it.
Starring: Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, Dina Meyer, and Clancy Brown. Directed by: Paul Verhoeven.