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Special Features
Blu-ray Exclusive: Recruitment Test
Director and Cast Commentary
Commentary with Paul Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier
Death from Above
Know Your Foe: Bug Profiles
The Spaceships of Starship Troopers
FX Comparisons
Storyboard Comparisons
The Making of Starship Troopers
Scene Development: Tanker Bug Ride with Commentary by Paul Verhoeven
Behind the Scenes: Rodger Young Destroyed with Commentary by Paul Verhoeven
Deleted Scenes
Screen Tests
Bug Test Film: "Don't Look Now"
Editorial Reviews
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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.
As far as the movie goes, I would have given it 5 stars if not for this issue with the disk. It's a great action flick with great special effects that look even more awesome on blu-ray. Excellent satire of blind alligence to government and military. I didn't read the book, so I don't have a problem with it not being true to the original story.
Highly recommended, just realize you will need to load extended memory to play.
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.
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