Starship Troopers (DVD)

Humanity is locked in a fight for survival with bug aliens from the planet Klendathu. Starship Troopers is a very misunderstood little film. Dismissed by critics as being nothing more than yet another excuse for Paul Verhoven to blow things up and show naked flesh, it’s actually surprisingly intelligent and satirical. Oh, and it’s very entertaining to boot, with lots of explosions and naked flesh! The film can be watched on two levels – both of which are hugely enjoyable. On the first level, it’s nothing more than a gung-ho science fiction movie – the exact opposite of the slower paced, more thoughtful Pitch Black, which I reviewed last week. On ...  Read the complete review

STARSHIP TROOPERS Everyone loves Paul Verhoeven. I mean, imagine for a moment a world without the uber-violence of Robocop and Total Recall, the nudity and sex scenes of Basic Instinct and Showgirls or little seen Dutch gems like Flesh and Blood and Spetters, both of which caused a hell of amount of controversy for some explicit rape scenes and sexual content. The world would be a much duller place, wouldn’t it? This is the man who’s given us a malfunctioning ED-209 shooting an exec into curry paste with a couple of mini-guns, a rather stylish and unsubtle execution of a police officer (“give the man a hand”), a man melting in toxic waste, Arnie’s eyeballs ...  Read the complete review

Starship Troopers is a 1997 sci fi/action film from Dutch director Paul Verhoven and adapted from the novel of the same name by Robert Heinlein. In an unspecified time in the future and humans are now a(n even more) militaristic race where only those who have served in the army are able to vote and those that don't are seen as cowardly. They are also having strained intergalactic relations with the arachnid race from Klendathu. Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) joins up to impress his girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards) and goes along with her and his best friend Carl (Neil Patrick Harris of Dougie Howser MD fame), who has pyschic abilities. Carmen is selected ...  Read the complete review

Starship Troopers is a 1997 film directed by the popular dutch director Paul Verhoeven, it is set in the future when everybody from every nation must do military service before they can become citizens. That's not to say they can't marry, have jobs or raise children, but to have the vote and be considered an upstanding citizen they must do military service. The mainstay of this plot is that a load of high school kids decide it would be very cool to become citizens with all that it entails, however the timing of their decision is appalling as Earth is invaded by a race of gigantic insects. We follow our heros through initial training ...  Read the complete review

Having already heavily satirised America's gun-loving nature in Robocop, director Paul Verhoeven then turned his attentions to the gung-ho nature of American militarism in Starship Troopers: a futuristic war film in which humanity is locked in a deadly conflict with a race of massive, lethal, bug-like extraterrestrials, the film ultimately coming across as a bigger, dumber and more violent version of Aliens. The threadbare plot concerns a group of army cadets who go on to fight in the war against "The Bugs", the carnage of the war set against a love triangle between Johnny 'Rico', his ex-fiance Carmen and her new partner Zander, Johnny's military ...  Read the complete review