STARSHIP
TROOPERS is a movie I knew I was going to love the instant I saw
the trailer. I remember when I saw it in a movie theater, too, back
in 1997. I had just been busted up in a near fatal car accident two
months prior and was still using a cane, and I remember this guy
bringing in his toddler. Keep in mind this is a rated-R Paul
Verhoeven movie with copious bloody deaths and every time a bug
killed someone, the kid cheered loudly. He did it so often, the guy
had to take him out of the theater.
I
remember thinking, ‘Man, it sure would be nice to see some
sequels.’
The
first thing the movie spawned was a short-lived CGI cartoon series in
1999 called, ROUGHNECKS: THE STARSHIP TROOPERS CHRONICLES. I
was not impressed. How can you take a bloody, violent movie like that
and distill down to a cartoon for kids? I caught snippets of the show
but the crude CGI was not to my liking. It wasn’t until 2004 when
we finally got our first official, live action sequel subtitled,
HERO OF THE FEDERATION. A second sequel followed in 2008
and that one was subtitled, MARAUDER. Both direct-to-DVD
movies, and even though Verhoeven didn’t have a hand in directing
either of them, I still enjoyed both, and still to this day, need to
add MARAUDER to my collection.
That
brings us to STARSHIP TROOPERS: INVASION. This movie is quite
a departure in that Sony decided to make a CGI anime out of it.
Reason given in the documentary is that you can do a lot more in a
CGI animated movie than you ever could in a live action. I agree, but
I personally feel this was the wrong direction to take for a fourth
movie, and there is no number four in the title. Fine by me, because
this does not feel in line with the first film, or even the sequels,
even though the characters of Johnny Rico, his ex-chick, Carmen and
their childhood buddy, Carl, are in it. It’s the format change from
live action to CGI that really separates this from the others. I love
anime, but I have never been too fond of CGI anime.
Nevertheless, I will concede this is a good-looking movie.
What
really dooms this whole eye-candy affair is basically the story
itself. They decided to set the entire thing, well, most of it,
anyway on the ship Carmen was piloting. Carl hijacks it and when the
soldiers find it again suddenly an EVENT HORIZON (1997) vibe
sets in. Carmen’s crew has been massacred; bodies and body parts
float around the ship until the artificial gravity is restored.
Strange things happen. Yes, the ship is being controlled, but not by
a force from another dimension, but by the Queen Bug herself.
Eventually, the EVENT HORIZON (1997) vibe gives way to
another, more overused one, one I keep seeing in movies over and
over, especially those wretched SyFy channel ones.
It’s
incredible how filmmakers these days are overly influenced, actually,
more like consumed, by ALIENS (1986) and PREDATOR (1987).
I see elements of those two movies in almost every other genre movie
I end up catching on cable. Sadly, this one is no different. Yup,
it’s pretty much a rip-off of ALIENS. You got the Queen Bug,
whose design, especially in the head, and gelatinous termite-like
body, is very reminiscent of Stan Winston’s Alien Queen from
Cameron’s movie, holed up in the engine room, and her soldiers
scouring the ship trying to kill the humans. If by some insane chance
you end up doubting me, then try and explain away the motion tracker
one of the soldiers uses. Sure the physical design is light years
apart, but the screen and the blipping sounds it makes are dead on
reproductions. I mean, fucking, exactly alike.
The
only novel ideas this movie manages to bring to the table is Carl’s
experimentation on the soldier bugs in the hope of trying to
psychically control them, which he actually does, for a time, and how
the Queen manages to get herself and her soldiers onto earthen soil.
Yes, these are spoilers, but it doesn’t matter, if the bulk of the
movie wasn’t just a retread of what’s come before, I would have
taken those spoilers to my grave.
The
transfer is a crisp 1.78:1 and for a crappy movie they really put
some quality extras on the DVD. The main extra is a documentary, THE
MAKING OF STARSHIP TROOPERS: INVASION, which clocks in at a
running time that almost equals the movie itself—1:20. Here you
will learn many things, none of them being why the writer decided to
go with the EVENT HORIZON/ALIENS tone. Some random interesting
points: STARSHIP TROOPERS is big in Japan; the reason you
never saw the famed power suits in the first film is that they didn’t
have enough money to do them and the bugs; at the time, this
was the most expensive movie Sony had ever made; for INVASION,
they used motion capture for the entire movie, but the voices of the
actors they hired for that process aren’t the ones heard in the
film. They hired a completely different set of thespians to voice the
final CGI characters.
There’s
a GAG REEL (3:24), which is mildly amusing, of the voice
actors flubbing their lines and two deleted scenes that runs 1:37.
Previews for RESIDENT EVIL; DAMNATION, THE RAID: REDEMPTION,
LOOPER, 6 BULLETS and MEETING EVIL round out the disc.
Written By Shawn Francis
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