Mania Grade: B+
Disc Grade: A
Reviewed Format: DVD
Rated: R
Stars: Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Neil Patrick Harris
Writer: Ed Neumeier, based on the novel by Robert Heinlein
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Distributor: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment
Original Year of Release: 1997
Suggested Retail Price: $27.98
Extras: two-disc set; widescreen anamorphic; Dolby Digital 5.1; commentaries; trailers; isolated score; filmographies; documentaries and featurettes; special-effects comparisons; storyboard comparisons; conceptual art galleries; scene deconstructions; deleted scenes; screen tests; bug test film; French Dolby 2.0; English, French and Spanish subtitles

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STARSHIP TROOPERS

I've probably gotten into more arguments about Paul Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS than any other movie. To me it's a work of subversive genius, but the movie's detractors can come up with a million reasons to hate this incredibly violent tale of a fascist future society fighting a war against vicious, ugly space bugs. To some it's a betrayal of Robert Heinlein's novel. To others it's a travesty of bad acting and unlikable characters. Still others say it glorifies fascism. It's too violent for children and too silly for adults. The film is a grab bag of everything that's wrong with America...or it's a mortal insult to America's fighting military. The satire is too broad to make its point...or it's too subtle to register on the adolescent boys who should have been the film's major audience (the movie opened big in October of 1997 but quickly went into the toilet and is recalled now as a box office failure).

You make the call! If you want to hate STARSHIP TROOPERS, you've got a smorgasbord of reasons to do so. Me, I just love this movie. Yes, it is flawed and it does not deliver a hundred percent either in terms of its action (it's one action scene short of a full deck), drama (it blows its two most appealing characters in a pre-climactic battle, leaving the film's final martyrdom to a character we've barely met) or satire, but when you look at this movie, you have to bear in mind at all times exactly what you're looking at: a hundred million dollar action movie. The rules for hundred million-dollar action movies are simple: you take no risks. God forbid you offend one member of your audience who might badmouth the film and somehow prevent the studio from making back such an enormous investment. You make the audience love your characters at all costs. You don't make them think about anything: thinking is bad. You put all your cards on the table: in a $100 million action movie, there is no such thing as subtext. You leave the audience feeling flushed with victory, happy and maybe ready to see the film again.

STARSHIP TROOPERS gleefully undermines all of those rules, but it does it in an insidiously subtle way. On its surface, it's just a bloodier version of the same action movies we've seen a hundred times: a hero faces an overwhelming threat and wins. Every action film needs a villain, and STARSHIP TROOPERS provides some of the most visceral ever seen in a movie: hacking and slashing, screeching insects that chop human soldiers to pieces in front of our eyes or suck their brains out of their heads like milkshakes. The cast of the movie was mostly drawn from young actors who had appeared on BEVERLY HILLS 90210, all impossibly good-looking, perfect movie heroes. And Paul Verhoeven drew on the finest special effects technicians in Hollywood, including master dimensional animator (and, I would say, animal behaviorist) Phil Tippett, to create some of the most stunningly convincing special effects ever put on the screen.

So what's not to love? Well, in STARSHIP TROOPERS, Verhoeven immediately establishes a brilliant and quietly disturbing point of view: this movie is seen through the eyes of the society it depicts. We watch STARSHIP TROOPERS as audience members involved in this future war against the bugs, and the screen language is that of an old time WWII propaganda film. Tub-thumping "Fed-Net" broadcasts interrupt the film like commercials, capsulizing the action and in effect telling the audience how to think and feel about what they're seeing. The attitude of the film's avuncular "mentor" figures (i.e. Clancy Brown's Drill Sargent Zim and Michael Ironside's teacher and squad leader Rasczak) is coldly brutal, Nietzchean. Our hero, Johnny Ricco (Casper Van Dien) is a beautiful-looking moron (early on he scores a record low in a qualifying math test), and his best pal (Doogie Howser's Neil Patrick Harris) is a mind-reading psychic who quickly becomes an intelligence officer in the militaryan organization which looks suspiciously like Hitler's Gestapo.

In fact, Nazi iconography is all over the film, an aspect acknowledged by Verhoeven and the filmmakers. You can easily read the movie as an attack on American militarism, an analysis of how nations respond psychologically to war (the dehumanization of the enemy and the animalistic hatred of human beings for the bugs is a constant drumbeat in the film), and a thesis on the use of propaganda (an unasked, but implicit question in the film is whether the bugs launched the war on humanity or whether the human government is simply portraying them as the aggressors in order to further their own ends). But maybe the reason STARSHIP TROOPERS is so reviled by some is that its most subversive aspect is its ultimate indictment not only of American action movies, but also of the audiences that watch them. Verhoeven revels in the gore and terror a real war entails, ripping aside the sanitized violence we see in movies like the STAR WARS films to show us the hideous results of real killing. As the film ends, a massive troop formation straight out of TRIUMPH OF THE WILL appears in a stylized recruitment film, and superimposed over the soldiers is one word: YOU! The message is clear: eat up all the rah-rah action and ultraviolence you want, but you're falling for the same line Goebbels fed the German people during World War II.

Pretty tough stuff for a movie about attacking space bugs. We've had one "Special Edition" of STARSHIP TROOPERS, but if you love the movie this new version is the one to get. I don't know what the advantage of actors' commentary by Van Dien and Neil Patrick Harris is apart from reinforcing the glamour-boy satire of the film, and the Verhoeven/Ed Neumeier commentary is the same as that of the original DVD. But this new version offers more in-depth coverage of the film's bug and starship design and choreography, tons of production artwork, picture-in-picture comparisons of special effects animatics to the finished shots and a comprehensive new documentary on the film. Best of all, the first disc features a stunning high-def anamorphic transfer of the movie that blows away the one on the original DVD, plus Basil Poledouris' magnificent score isolated in fantastic sound, with commentary from the composer.

There are crazy rumors floating around right now of a STARSHIP TROOPERS sequel, but even were that unlikely event to occur, I don't see another movie like STARSHIP TROOPERS being made, ever. Somehow this unsettling vision slipped past the folks at Sony, and at least a few of us are better off for it.