Kashif Ahmed, 13/08/2008
It's been over a decade since Paul Veerhoven's expectedly visceral, ultraviolet and unashamedly sadistic sci-fi satire; 'Starship Troopers' (1997), turned Robert A. Heinlein's cult novel into a blood & sun soaked bullet festival of co-ed showers, improbably huge guns and exploding heads. Released to some acclaim and respectable box office, the movie made good use of up-and-coming, though now pretty much down-and-out, stars like Denise Richards, Dina Meyer and iron jawed, All American hero; Casper Van Dien. Focused on an interstellar war between Earth and the Bug planet of Klendathu, our vacuous threesome join the armed forces on behalf of Earth. Earth, incidentally, is ruled by 'The Federation', with its Nazi symbolism and Spartan values; unseen rulers withhold citizenship to all but those who put in military service. And it was only months later that I picked up on the gag that our protagonists are part of some Aryan master race: whitebread North American bozos who seem to have taken over the world, how else can you possibly explain "Buenos Arians": Rico (Van Dien), Ibanez (Richards) and Flores (Meyer)? And what of the claims that 'Starship Troopers' is an ode to Hitler or Zionism? Well it is to an extent, but then again, how seriously are we expected to take a story that has soldier's making love to their clones (in the novel) or lines like "We're going to get the Big Brain on Planet P?" Its far-out fiction with a love of militaria, ideas of collective servitude and warlike camaraderie but one that's put up on screen as a camp, gaudy, tongue-in-cheek indictment of all that deadly propaganda frequently imposed upon the masses with furrowed brows and earnest sentiments, beneath the yellow tasselled flags of fascism. Caspier Van Dien is a good 'bad actor' in that he gets the premise immediately and we're laughing with him, not at him as Rico spouts some inane rhetoric about patriotism and honour or is confronted by a multiple amputee who beams: "Congratulations son, Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!". 'Starship Troopers' is the best of an unplanned trilogy and quite frankly, there was absolutely no need to go back: "Do You Want to Know More?". No, but I've a feeling you're going to tell me. 'Starship Troopers 2: Hero Of The Federation' (2004) is such utter bollards that not even an out-of-work Caspier Van Dien or Denise Richards could be tempted back, and who can blame them? After all, 'ST2' looks like someone saw 'Pitch Black' and decided to remake it, only removing all those unnecessary elements like story, character, suspense, SFX and cinematography. Scribe Ed Neumeier ('Robocop', 'Starship Troopers') seems to be winging it with some on-the-sly hokum about Troopers patrolling Quarantine Zones, whilst our humorously named heroes are a largely indistinguishable bunch of grunts, though I liked Pvt. Sahara (no dry spells for her, I hope) played by brassy broad Colleen Porch; an actress with the good looks of a beauty pageant winner, albeit a pageant held in a maximum security women's prison. Kelly Carlson's Pvt. Soda is essentially Eva Braun with an RPG though her comrades just blur into a rumble of gunfire, overacting and incomprehensible noise; one reasonably exciting battle sequence is the best you can hope for here. 'Starship Troopers 3: Marauder' proves that trying to remodel a concept that's been subverted to the point of satire is difficult, nay impossible, though 'ST3' can hold its head a little higher than its predecessor, in that Casper Van Dien returns to reprise his role as Johnny Rico. And I think its fair to say that Van Dien's a better actor than the material he's given to work with; for our all action uberman puts in a reasonably good performance (Van Dien proves to be somewhat of an offbeat comic genius, in that he does the entire movie as John Wayne) which begs the question: why wasn't this guy recruited for 'GI Joe'? After all, Casper didn't exactly embarrass himself acting opposite one Johnny Depp in 'Sleepy Hollow' and even turned in a none too shabby performance as Tarzan in 'Tarzan And The Lost City' . Ed Neumeier has another go, this time managing to work in some well written witticisms smashed home with the steel rod of irony, and yet, you can't help but notice that the material simply doesn't work in the 'Starship Troopers' universe anymore, mainly because the 'Starship Troopers' universe came to its natural end ten years ago at the 125 minute mark of Paul Veerhoven's 'Starship Troopers'. That said, 'ST3' still has some killer lines like Federation officials declaring " A) God exists, B) He's on our side and C) He wants us to win", lines not a million miles away from apostate Rabbi Khane's hate speech declaring Zionist Jews the superior race, SS Gestapo's with their 'God Is With Us' belt buckles or evangelical U.S. troops acting as modern day tools of the 'Knights Templar'. Alas, reality seems to have overtaken satire: for the banal, 'Robocop'-esque newscasts are no more absurd than the real ones you can see on 'Fox News' whilst 'Shock n' Awe' fascist degeneracy can no longer be viewed with the comfort that such things could never come to pass in our time; and that's more a sad reflection on the society that let it happen, than the political villains who made it so. Performances range from bad to awful, though Jolene Blalock lifts proceedings somewhat as hot ensign Lola Beck, and not quite knowing how to end it, they opt to rip off that power suit scene from 'The Matrix Revolutions' (itself a riff off Kazutaka Miyatake's OVA 'Uchû No Senshi' which was inspired by Henlin who got it from E.E. Smith who got it from Tokusatsu). 'ST3' keeps the Bug war rolling, though politicising it in an overt but inchoate manner, only serves to remind us that Neumeier probably should've saved his script for a different movie. And as for the Arachnids? I don't see much point in drawing direct parallels or analogies with any particular conflict, for the bug simply represents our implanted concept of 'The Other' as defined by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays in his seminal work 'Propaganda'. Whether that other is an Arab, Jew, Hispanic or Vietnamese person is irrelevant in terms of how impressionable, intellectually stagnant and vulnerable minds can be twisted to see the world as those in power want them to see it. But if I were compelled to offer some kind of real world equivalent, I'd have cite Fritz Hippler's loathsome Nazi propaganda film 'The Eternal Jew' (1940) in which anti-Zionist, orthodox Jewry were consistently equated with vermin in an absurd, demented, but tragically successful, ploy to manufacture consent for their extermination, in the European Holocaust to come. 'Starship Troopers' is the best of the lot here; an all or nothing, balls-to-the-wall sci-fi that doesn't brake for anyone whose not in on the joke, for is it any wonder that those who got 'Starship Troopers' giggled & cringed through 'Black Hawk Down'? 'ST2' & 'ST3' have their moments, but aren't quite deserving of the 'so bad its good' label, you'll probably watch them once for a laugh before they gather more dust than an abandoned outpost on Klendathu, but you may, like me, find yourself revisiting the original every now and then. For as a Mobile Infantryman once said: "Kill, kill, kill!"...I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't quite get the second word.
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