STARSHIP TROOPERS: INVASION (2012) Dir: Shinji Aramaki - Cine-Apocalypse

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Monday 27 August 2012

STARSHIP TROOPERS: INVASION (2012) Dir: Shinji Aramaki
















Do you want become a citizen? you can if you join the Mobile Infantry, the mobile infantry made me what I am today...who am I kidding, i'd never last 10 minutes in the military, but Johnny Rico did in Paul Verhoeven's incredible 1997 Sci-fi war movie Starship Troopers. Now after two lacklustre DTV sequels we get a third sequel only this time it's animated and Shawn Francis has had a look at it and has sent his review of the U.S dvd over. Would you like to know more?....yes?...then check out Shawn's words after the jump...

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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