Starship Troopers (1997)
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Set in the future, the story follows a young soldier named Johnny Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry. Rico's military career progresses from recruit to non-commissioned officer and finally to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an arachnoid species known as "the Bugs."
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In a scene reminiscent of All Quiet on the Western Front, high-school student Johnny (Casper Van Dien), his pal Carl (former Doogie Hauser Neil Patrick Harris), Johnny's girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards), and tomboyish Dizzy (Dina Meyer, the only character with any flesh and blood) listen in boredom to a lecture on citizenship from their instructor, one-armed veteran Jean (Michael Ironside).
Two of them were written or co-written by Edward Neumeier, and they are satires of the American commitment to the believe that no problem is so sophisticated that you can't solve it with a fuckton of violence, as well as the broken-down system of media consumption that permits such simple-minded amorality to thrive: RoboCop and Starship Troopers , and the writer was absolutely in on the joke, though it's not always clear that the audience was.
Director Paul Verhoeven ("Total Recall," "Basic Instinct," "Starship Troopers," "Showgirls") situates the story in a near-future Detroit (but filmed in Dallas) that has been overrun by criminals and in the process turned over to a private company, the OCP (Omni Consumer Products), for policing.
That's the real tragedy of RoboCop: that those romantic Robert Heinlein dreams (lest we forget that Verhoeven eventually tackled Heinlein with Starship Troopers) were tied to tenterhooks of satire and deep societal unrest all along.
Directed by Paul ''Tomorrow's Blockbuster Belongs to Me'' Verhoeven, who returns here to the nihilistic shock-comix mode of RoboCop and Total Recall, the picture is like Aliens, Star Wars, Top Gun, and Jurassic Park all jammed together, the whole concoction slathered with a gob of Verhoeven's smirking Euro-sadist perversity (leering jokes about lost limbs, much sexualized insect imagery).
Verhoeven has a rip-roaring, rootin' tootin' sci-fi war story that is way better than "Total Recall," and the equal of "RoboCop," his earlier box-office smashes of that genre.
Director Paul Verhoeven's filmic dalliances with sex ("Showgirls," "Basic Instinct") and sardonic sci-fi action ("Total Recall," "RoboCop") are genres merged here to entertaining, engaging, exciting results.
Director Paul Verhoeven's filmic dalliances with sex ("Showgirls," "Basic Instinct") and sardonic sci-fi action ("Total Recall," "RoboCop") are genres merged here to entertaining, engaging, exciting results.
But Verhoeven ("Basic Instinct," "Total Recall," "Showgirls") was wise to remember that hundreds of years from now, there will still be youth, smiles and gung-ho enthusiasm.
Some of the Dutch director's English-language pictures are easy to swallow ("RoboCop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct"), and others are just plain unpalatable ("Showgirls," "Hollow Man").
Starship Troopers represents director Paul Verhoeven's comeback attempt after the disastrously-received NC-17 cult favorite, Showgirls .
Some of the Dutch director's English-language pictures are easy to swallow ("RoboCop," "Total Recall," "Basic Instinct"), and others are just plain unpalatable ("Showgirls," "Hollow Man").
…out of Showgirls Starship Troopers (August 2/08) Based on the book by Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers likely marks director Paul Verhoeven's most gleefully over-the-top effort to date - as the movie, which is as unapologetically violent as anything within his filmography, boasts a tongue-in-cheek, downright campy sensibility that ultimately pervades every aspect of the proceedings.
Director Paul Verhoeven's filmic dalliances with sex ("Showgirls," "Basic Instinct") and sardonic sci-fi action ("Total Recall," "RoboCop") are genres merged here to entertaining, engaging, exciting results.
The delight is contagious, the black humor often hilarious, except when the cartoonish characters (Verhoeven's legacy from Showgirls, perhaps), the preposterous plot, and the relentlessly graphic carnage get in the way.
The irony should not be lost on the fact that David Fincher's Mank, a dramatized feature about the writing of one of Orson Welles's greatest films, Citizen Kane (1941), is being released by the streaming giant Netflix.
At its best, the film recaptures the kind of taut, visceral thrills offered by James Cameron's Aliens .
Sex among the troops doesn't seem to be much of a command concern, and women participate in infantry combat just as they did in "Aliens."
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Like Stanley Kubrick in "Full Metal Jacket," Verhoeven tells the story of "Starship Troopers" in two parts.
It's the kind of total character transformation portrayed in the stunning first half-hour of Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" -- sadism, all right, but carefully controlled sadism, with a point.
Since none of these young actors shows much talent, none of this much matters, but it does help explain why the film is so confused; it's trying to be "Melrose Place" and "Paths of Glory" at the same time.
Directed by Paul ''Tomorrow's Blockbuster Belongs to Me'' Verhoeven, who returns here to the nihilistic shock-comix mode of RoboCop and Total Recall, the picture is like Aliens, Star Wars, Top Gun, and Jurassic Park all jammed together, the whole concoction slathered with a gob of Verhoeven's smirking Euro-sadist perversity (leering jokes about lost limbs, much sexualized insect imagery).
Unlike the "Star Wars'' movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, "Starship Troopers'' doesn't resonate.
The creators of successful latter-day space operas, from " Star Wars " to "Independence Day," have always understood this.
And he topped all of them with his big budget debut, a nifty, very violent little satire called Robocop that emerged as one of the better science fiction films of the 1980s -- a bombastic, perversely humanist response to Dirty Harry.
Riefenstahl's images, which owe much to Albert Speer's design and staging, have been aped (cluelessly) in Star Wars and (cannily) in Starship Troopers, but laid end to end, they're less threatening than dull, the endless sounding of one Reich-prescribed note.
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There are many options — college, professional athletics — but like in Gone With the Wind, “joining up” is the only real option to any self-respecting youth.
Even Doogie Howser (Neil Patrick Harris) turns up looking eerily like the Gestapo bad guy from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"Jurassic Park" had solidified the use of computer graphics just four years before this film appeared, and "Independence Day" had proved its effectiveness in duplicating multiple aliens just a year earlier.