Starship Troopers

Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast:
Casper Van Dien
Neil Patrick Harris
Denise Richards
Jake Busey

Okay, so a movie like "Starship Troopers" is an easy target. Five minutes into this thing, and you realize you may have stumbled onto something truly awful—Casper Van Dien's square-jawed football captain idiocy, Dina Meyer's 21st century Marine-grunt feminism, Denise Richards' impossible breasts—all of it set in a Brave New World of space travel, army citizenship, and the threat of giant galactic bugs that shoot huge plasma balls of destruction out of their collective asses. It's no coincidence that Richards and Patrick Muldoon (who plays the super-smug Zander Barcalow) were both characters on Melrose Place; the dialogue and "subplots" all play out like a wooden Aaron Spelling fantasy. It's exactly that stupid.

But then you gotta think to yourself: Paul Verhoeven, creator of the hard-to-deny "Total Recall," "Robocop," and his masterpiece "The Fourth Man," is no dummy. He's up to something here, and after a while, it begins to sink in. "Starship Troopers" is actually delicious satire cloaked in cluelessness, an excoriation of all space gore movies hidden within the framework of the goriest, spaciest movie of them all. If he indeed intended this movie as a joke, he may have pulled off one of the funniest tricks in the history of show business, because the biggest joke is on the movie itself. His actors, all culled from the most genetically pure parts of Hollywood, are all too stupid to know what he was doing, which makes them the perfect people to play the elite squad of genetically pure army goons determined to rid Outer Space of the giant cockroaches that are terrorizing the solar system.

Doogie Howser as the psychic genetic engineer who wears a jacket reminiscent of the SS guards from World War II? How about the tracking shots of the space army, straight out of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi paean "Triumph of the Will"? The "newsreels" that piece this movie together with the kind of propoganda that sent Japanese Americans to interrment camps? There is a decidedly dark underbelly to Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" that makes the whole experience electrifyingly funny, horrible and unforgettable—and if you ask me, those three things are hard to find in such entertaining quantities.

—Ian Williams

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