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Product Description
Years in the future 30 million miles from earth three brave soldiers join forces for an intergalactic battle that may be the one hope for the survival of the human race. It is up to them to gain freedom for the human race and save the galaxy. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 10/31/2006 Starring: Casper Van Dien Denise Richards Run time: 130 minutes Rating: RAmazon.com
In the first and finest RoboCop movie, director Paul Verhoeven combined near-future science fiction with a keen sense of social satire--not to mention enough high-velocity violence to satisfy even the most voracious bloodlust. In Starship Troopers, Verhoeven and RoboCop cowriter Ed Neumeier take inspired cues from Robert Heinlein's classic sci-fi novel to create a special-effects extravaganza that functions on multiple levels of entertainment. The film might be called "Melrose Place in Space," with its youthful cast of handsome guys and gorgeous women who look like they've been recruited (and in some cases they were) from the cast of Beverly Hills 90210. Viewers might focus on the incredible, graphically intense action sequences (definitely not for children) in which heavily armed forces from Earth go to off-world battle against vast hordes of alien "bugs" bent on planetary conquest. The attacking bugs are marvels of state-of-the-art special-effects technology, and the space battles are nothing short of spectacular. But Starship Troopers is more than a showcase for high-tech hardware and gigantic, flesh-ripping insects. Recalling his childhood in Holland during the Nazi occupation, Verhoeven turns this epic adventure into a scathingly funny satire of fascist propaganda, emphasizing Heinlein's underlying warning against the hazards of military conformity and the sickening realities of war. It's an action-packed joy ride if that's all you're looking for, but Verhoeven has a provocative agenda that makes Starship Troopers as smart as it is exciting. The DVD includes an above-average commentary by the director and Neumeier, several deleted scenes, a behind-the-scenes documentary and promotional featurette, cast bios, production notes, and more. --Jeff ShannonSimilarProduct
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Customer reviews
'War makes fascists of us all.' 
by .. John S. Ryan (Silver Lake, OH)
So says Paul Verhoeven, who has said (and says again in the commentary on this DVD release) that it's one of the statements made by this morally complex film.
I love listening to Verhoeven's commentaries (especially the one he does with Arnold Schwarzenegger on _Total Recall_). Here he shares the task with screenwriter Ed Neumeier, and putting the two of them together was an excellent choice. The commentary is one of the best features of the special edition.
The film itself is hard to evaluate. Because it's Verhoeven, it's got sex, gore, and social satire. What it's also got -- and something that was arguably missing from the Robert A. Heinlein novel on which the film is based -- is a high level of moral complexity that doesn't divide everyone neatly into Good Guys and Bad Guys.
The effect is odd, and oddly disturbing. On one hand, the film succeeds quite well as a combat shoot-'em-up in the style of the great World War II films. At that level, if we like, we can take the 'bugs' of Klendathu, playing as they do into our 'natural' loathing of insects, as a politically correct version of the sort of enemy Heinlein probably intended. (As long as we don't take the film's incompetent 'military action' too seriously.)
On the other hand, the film also contains lots of sly references to the Third Reich, lots of little clues that suggest the 'bugs' didn't start the war, and lots of opportunities for the characters _and_ the audience to conclude that war may not be the best way to approach the problem here at issue.
Okay, this latter stuff is a huge departure from Heinlein's novel, which was primarily focused on what makes military folks tick and what it means to be a responsible citizen. Heinlein's civics lesson is duly incorporated into the film, of course: a 'citizen' is one who takes personal responsibility for the safety and well-being of the body politic. But the film doesn't stop there.
In fact, it incorporates elements that could have come from two other SF novels that have been read as responses to _Starship Troopers_, namely, Joe Haldeman's _The Forever War_ and Orson Scott Card's _Ender's Game_. I don't _know_ that Neumeier had either of these novels in mind, but there's an important reference to Mormons in the screenplay that in this context might suggest Card. Be that as it may, Heinlein's civics lesson is here subjected to severe scrutiny and even dark satire.
That's okay by me. I regard _Starship Troopers_ as one of RAH's better novels (and as a success in its exploration of the military-man-coming-of-age mindset; I can see why military readers like it so well). Nevertheless there are problems with it that a straightforward screen adaptation wouldn't have been able to address. Neumeier and Verhoeven address those problems precisely by exaggerating them and sometimes openly ridiculing them -- while still managing to remain sensitive to the integrity of the military outlook.
Such nuance may unfortunately be lost on much of the film's audience. Heinlein fans may either disapprove of Verhoeven's approach or miss it altogether; viewers who haven't read their Heinlein may not even be aware that there's an argument going on (and mistake this gorefest for nothing more than an earlier version of _Independence Day_).
That's too bad, because this well-scripted, special-effects-laden film is a cinematic triumph on several levels -- only one of which is the gut-wrenching battle between humans and bugs. Verhoeven has long been clear that this film is _not_ an endorsement of either war itself or the fascistic society it tends to promote; that this isn't just obvious is a testament to Verhoeven's subtlety and, indeed, his _refusal_ to engage in 'propaganda' of the sort he satirizes.
It's an odd film in the sense that, in order to like it properly, you have to dislike it. If you enjoy it too much, you're missing the point its director wanted it to make.
I'm amazed that so many people miss the point ! by .. Mike Gambit (UK)
I'm amazed that so many people can blindly miss the subtleties of this movie. While it works as a brainless, enjoyable gung-ho piece of sci-fi cum war hokum it's also quite a clever piece of satire, taking a pot-shot squarely aimed at the kind of control that governments, regardless of ideology, exert over their populace. While the spoofed propaganda TV commercials most obviously display the parody in this movie, one can also see it littered throughout the movie. The director has chosen to ape Nazism as it's an extreme view of what can happen when a government has a strong grip on its people, because of his childhood experience being under Nazism and because by cloaking the heroes of the movie in Nazism he shows a self-mocking sense of ironic humor.
Like...
Johnny Rico being a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan. While Van Dien's abilities as an actor are frequently ridiculed at there's no doubt that he is perfect for this movie's take on the character. He *looks* like an actor straight from WWII German and Soviet propaganda films and indeed that is exactly what he's supposed to appear like.
Ok let's clear up some other points:-
BAD ACTING:-
It's not bad acting. Bad acting implies that the actor does not bring fully to life the character he/she is playing or overplays the part ect ect. The characters in ST are supposed to be parodies, tongue-in-check cardboard cutouts. Given that all the actors in ST play their roles pretty well. That they are all very pretty (especially Dina Meyer) is the intention. Like any good propaganda it shows people whom we'd like to be or be with trying to become citizens and succeeding, whilst following the 'state line'. The love triangle is thrown in there for entertainment value and it works in a cheesy way.
DIALOGUE:-
I fail to see how intelligent people can so miss the point of the dialogue. It's cheesy because it's parody, because it apes political propaganda and laughs at it. The dialogue is perfectly suited to the mood of the film as a whole. There are very few wasted lines in this movie and I won't waste *my* time trying to point them out to you if you didn't 'get' them.
STUPID PLOT:-
Guess what? Yep here comes the parody bit again. People point out that the military tactics in this movie are laughable and they are perfectly correct. But... Don't you think the military tactics are just too stupid to be there as a result of incompetence or sloppiness on the part of Verhoeven - I mean it doesn't take a budding Guderian, Napoleon or a Sun Tze to know that just using machine guns when you have orbital nukes, cluster bombs, mines, armor ect is just plain stupid. But the whole point of the film is self-parody at governments, who see the people as their tool, to be manipulated and scarified for the 'greater good' of the nation, or in this case the species.
LACK OF RESPECT FOR ROBERT HEINLEIN'S BOOK:-
I feel many distracters of the film simply do so because they expected a faithful recreation of the book. While that's disappointing for you try and see the film for its merits. It really only borrows from Heinlien's book in superficial terms; to set the scene, the basic plot and basic outlines of the characters. Surely you can see that it never was an attempt to seriously follow the book. Instead Verhoeven chose to follow his own path and make his own movie. Try and see it for that...
Anyway to sum up; the movie is loud, entertaining, gory, packed full of good looking leads and sci-fi fx, but also very subtle and clever. People who dismiss this movie out of hand as mindless nonsense completely miss the point. Godzilla is mindless nonsense. Independence Day is mindless nonsense.
Starship Troopers instead is a very well-made, clever movie, which has a tongue-in-cheek gibe at the way governments can and will manipulate their populace for the 'good of the state'. I wonder whether any American hollywood director would have had the balls to make it this way.
Buff Bods, Big Guns, & Bugs: Friendly Fascism in Troopers by .. S. Hall (NW Ohio, USA)
No stranger to the nuances of speculative fiction as seen through the camera lens, Paul Verhoeven throws controversy into most of his productions, including the increased violence of Robocop and the continually questioned reality of Total Recall. Starship Troopers is no exception to this trend, creating a very distinctive schism in film criticism between those who saw it as an endorsement of a pro-military stance and those who consider it to be a wry attack on the ideas it purports. Both groups keyed in on the visual appeal of the film and formed their opinions based on their perceptions of audience reaction. In choosing to adapt Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel, Verhoeven creates a film which manages to simultaneously negotiate the controversy and add to it. Verhoeven concentrates on the visual pleasures inherent in this future of killing, raiding the casts of various soap operas (and linking the thrill of viewed combat with the voyeurism of attractive people) for his characters to exemplify the portrayal of killing the enemy as a glamorous occupation in most war films. As an intelligent satire of war films, the dialogue is filled with ironic machismo that implicates media from WWII era recruitment films (both US and German) to coverage by CNN. Through the "breaking news" appearing in the film, Verhoeven plays with the societal changes as speculated by Heinlein, or what Heinlein called "a democracy in which the poll tax is putting in a term of voluntary service--which could be as a garbage collector." While the troopers are out there cleaning up the galaxy, Verhoeven deliberately invokes Nazi imagery - including copying shot compositions from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of Will and World War II newsreels like Prelude to War - as an integrated part of the film's microcosm; the attainment of this bright future is not without a hidden cost. Verhoeven throws the audience headfirst into Starship Troopers without defusing any of the controversial landmines which pepper the different layers of this seductive dystopia.
Perhaps only echoes of the novel's controversial political subtext have survived, and yes, the film may occasionally falter as social satire as the "two parts ultra-violence" component of Verhoeven's film formula is overamped and coupled with the fascistic imagery; even one of the film's producers, Jon Davison, has referred to the veteranocracy of Starship Troopers as a "fascist utopia", which has to be one of the boldest representations of a future world ever filmed. As a cheeky futuristic hybrid of Saved by the Bell and The Green Berets, the snippets from the recruiting videos and news bulletins (deftly used in the previous film Robocop) show that Verhoeven has dished up a "really tasty" (in a Naked Lunch fashion) propaganda period piece for the American film system using many of its own World War II conceits. Taking a different turn from the "combat science fiction" so adroitly exemplified in Cameron's Aliens, Starship Troopers invites discussion of the imagery and military/political rhetoric laden in the film. Goebbel himself perceived the weakness of propaganda in the face of education, as evidenced through his speech at the Berlin Krolloper in 1937 where he said, "At the moment that propaganda is recognized as such it becomes ineffective."
As for the DVD treatment, this is a first-class disc, loaded to the brim with lots of amazing extras. Pay particular attention to Verhoeven's commentary as you watch the film. The additional materials will give you an interesting insight into the world of cinema. In terms of technical specifications, the 5.1 Dolby sound will rock the foundations of your house, and the quality of the transfer is one of the best I've seen (the CGI looks amazing). A superb film, both in terms of technical prowess and content.
Very Cool. by .. J. Bollen (Fort Plain, New York United States)
Yes, the film bears weak resemblance to the novel. Yes, the time it takes for an asteroid to travel across the galaxy is enough to allow our sun to collapse. Yes, asteroids cannot be simply taken care of with a couple missiles (because it creates many smaller asteroids that will probably not disintegrate in our atmosphere). But God, can't anyone just have fun with a film like this? I mean, even I, a hardcore sci-fi action buff, hated "Red Planet" and "Battlefield Earth." Let me tell you, "Starship Troopers" is infinitely more enjoyable. It features incredible battle sequences, outstanding special effects, and a somewhat disturbing but enlightening look at a Neo-Nazi Fascist society where violence does solve anything and everything.
The shower scene is not meant to exploit anyone. It's just a good metaphor for the belief that everyone is equal in every way during those times. Jesus, most everyone who writes a bad review of this film (not movie) merely says that it was stupid. They never say why, and these are the type of people (...) who don't like anything. Just kick back, watch several awesome fights, experience the incredible effects, and enjoy the cast, especially the veteran favorite of mine, Michael Ironside.
Elegant proof of intelligence by .. ()
It's incredible that Hollywood let Verhoeven make this subversive masterpiece. On the surface this film is about a future war, but in reality it is a critique of nationalism and fascism. Heinlein is spinning in his grave like a top, and Verhoeven planned it that way, drawing directly from WWII Hollywood films and Nazi epics such as 'Triumph of the Will'.
The underlying truth of this film is that the humans are the aggressors, not the bugs. If you pay attention, the movie even mentions that the first human colonies in the Arachnid Quarantine Zone were by crazy Mormon separatists i.e. the humans invaded the bug planets first.
Another oft cited criticism revolves around the asteroids that the bugs are allegedly directing towards Earth. The movie spells this out clearly too - Klendathu is shown as being many lights years away on the opposite side of the galaxy. How exactly are the bugs getting asteroids all the way to Earth? It's called propaganda folks, and the Buenos Aires 'asteroid attack' sequence is a classic. How, for example, does the government news channel have a rolling body count in the millions only minutes after the attack occurs? If you watch this movie a couple of times, you begin to see the signposts that the moviemakers left in plain sight.
Other criticism falls into the same area. Why is the military intelligence (in their SS uniforms) so bad and the military weapons so useless against the bugs? Why does Buenos Aires look like an American city full of beautiful Americans? How does Jonny Rico make it through the first attack alive when we see him apparently killed by bugs? These are not just accidents but instead are subtle satire and propaganda.
In the post 9/11 era, it is interesting to compare the words of the Sky Marshall (for example) to various world leaders. Substitute 'bugs' for 'terrorists' and there is little difference. The hyper patriotic graphics of the movie's Federal Network are only a few steps removed from cable news networks like Fox.
Verhoevens ideas come through on the DVD directors commentary, and he has also discussed them in interviews. It's unfortunate that so many American viewers see this movie as just a violent sci-fi flick with weak acting by attractive young people, or a failed adaption of a dated pseudo-fascist novel. European reviewers seem to understand it a little better. In retrospect, I guess that is why Verhoeven felt the movie had to be made. I think it achieves the goal admirably.