Starship Troopers: The Twentieth Anniversary Special

 

The film begins with a propaganda streaming video reminiscent of WWII (and I have to give props to Veerhoven for predicting the existence of the YouTube and for that matter the iPad nearly ten years before they existed.) it’s purpose is to fill you on the ST universe and set up the first action scene. The First Battle of Klendathau.

 

Now this was it’s own chapter in the book and it was Rico’s first combat drop

 

Operation Bughouse should have been called “Operation Madhouse.” Everything went wrong. It had been planned as an all-out move to bring the enemy to their knees, occupy their capital and the key points of their home planet, and end the war. Instead it darn near lost the war. I am not criticizing General Diennes. I don’t know whether it’s true that he demanded more troops and more support and allowed himself to be overruled by the Sky Marshal-in-Chief—or not. Nor was it any of my business. Furthermore I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts. What I do know is that the General dropped with us and commanded us on the ground and, when the situation became impossible, he personally led the diversionary attack that allowed quite a few of us (including me) to be retrieved—and, in so doing, bought his farm. He’s radioactive debris on Klendathu and it’s much too late to court-martial him, so why talk about it?

And that was about it.  Rico himself didn’t do much until he suddenly got a retreat order.  Then he found a drop-ship and escaped.

 

In the film version you see a very large, expensive-looking battle that looked like it came from a film during the war years.  It ends with Rico being severely injured before the flashback to highschool.

 

This is an acceptable variation even though they left out Rico’s opening dialog.  What wasn’t acceptable was the creepy vibe the propaganda video gave you.  It didn’t feel like American propaganda at all. It felt like something from 1940s UFA-Film GbmH.  It felt like something Goebbels had greenlit.  This was intentional.  The uniforms for an outstanding example closely resembled Wehrmacht field gray right down to the cappe with an eagle on them.

 

Then the high school scenes began and holy fuck was that awful.  It felt like Starship 90210.  A lot of the characters from the book were present.  Rico’s best friend Carl Jenkins was there.  His beta mooning obsession love interest Carmen Ibanez was also there.  An odd addition was Dizzy Flores who was in love with Rico.  There was a Dizzy Flores in the novel but he was a man who died at the end of the first chapter.  In fact in the book all of the ground pounders were men, the women ran the navy.

Carmen was a semi-love interest in the story she only showed up a few times and she was the one who had decided to pursue Rico.  In the movie she had Rico completely friend-zoned. Johnny was a total high school, Beta-Orbiter and he was never going to be allowed to come in for a landing.  Carmen herself was much more interested in Rico’s Alpha rival  Whatshisname, who wasn’t in the book in any form.

None of the characters in the novel resembled any of the loathsome characters on screen.

But even Sergeant Zim was turned into a caricature of the character who in response to a question during his knife throwing class had said, “If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off? Of course not. You’d paddle it. There can be circumstances when it’s just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an axe. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him…but to make him do what you want to do. Not killing…but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how—or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—’older and wiser heads,’ as they say—supply the control. Which is as it should be.”

In that scene Zim did not nail Ted Hendricks hand to the wall as a fucking exclamation point.

But that scene is this movie in a nutshell.  Something that vaguely resembled something from the novel would happen on screen but it was like the screenwriter had only heard about it third hand from someone who hated the book.

Was there anything I liked about it?

A few things.

The special effects have held up over time.  This was probably the last time real models were used instead of CGI.  The limitations of technology made for a better film so  I was even able to forgive it for not having Powered Armor.  Which was the coolest thing in the book.

The supporting cast was rock solid.  In fact Clancy Brown being cast as Zim was the only reason I gave this movie a chance in the first place.  The Kurgan delivered his character to the screen even if no one else did.

Michael Ironside did a good enough job with the composite character of “JeanRasczak“.  The character was a bit cardboard but he didn’t need to be anything else.  And combining Dubois and Rasczak made sense in a screen adaptation.

I’ll also give Dina Meyer credit.  She did a good job as Dizzy.  She was probably the best-developed character in the movie.  Dizzy was status-conscious, Carmen was higher on the high school totem pole than she was and Dizzy clearly felt insecure about it.  Worse so in that she wanted Rico desperately and Carmen just didn’t.  She wanted Carmen’s cast off, and the cast-off didn’t want her.  Finally Rico falls for her because she was meant to be his True Love.  So when she dies it’s effecting.

And that was about the only on-screen death that was effecting.  I laughed out loud when Carmen’s True Love, Whatshisname died by alien brain vacuuming.  At the end of the movie you are left with the impression that Rico and Carmen will hook up but only because they have no one else left.  Their relationship has all the driving passion of an arranged marriage.

The big reason this picture failed was because of the vision of its director.  Verhoeven couldn’t figure out if he was trying to make a war movie, a teen romance, or a gory comedic satire. This movie was so bad it became a cult classic.

The novel was none of those things.

Ultimately the problem with Verhoeven’s vision was that he was presented with a pro-military story and in his standard-issue Lefty fever dream that is inextricably tied to fascism.

UPDATE:

“How do you explain to your actors when you are casting them, that you are essentially casting them as a joke?”

Bob called my attention to Red Letter Media’s Re-Vue of Starship Troopers.  Now, these guys are solid Lefties but they aren’t SJWs otherwise they wouldn’t have said that Feminist Ghostbusters was a complete heap of shit.

Clearly and obviously, neither of them ever read the book.  That gives them a viewpoint that I just don’t have.  Starship Troopers was a book that influenced a very important decision in my life.  Maybe I would have joined the Marine Corps if I hadn’t read it anyway, maybe I wouldn’t have gone near the military.  I’ll never know because I can’t picture how my mind would have developed without reading this book. What I do know is that it gave me a philosophical basis for life in the military and a moral framework for what I had to do there..

I should say that with the fullness of time I have come to find fault with Heinlein’s book.  In the ST universe that he created, there was a global military that functioned at American standards.  This is impossible.  Soldiers are the end result of the society that produces them.  You can’t change that by wishing real hard.  An Arab officer will steal from his troops as instinctively as a beaver builds a dam.  The Chinese won’t think twice about burning soldiers like joss sticks. And your average trooper from the third world will drop his rifle and run the first time he gets shot at.  The Starship Troopers federation was a globalist one where everyone spoke different languages but were basically still Americans.

So it’s interesting to me to see these guys examining a movie without the intellectual baggage that I have. They neither read the book or were ever in the military. They can judge it, solely as a film in and of itself.  Which I can’t do.

Both of them claim the movie is one of their favorites.  They both liked it and as you know I did not.  I should point out that I did love the first Robocop, so I’m not being that guy here.

One thing that Mike came up with is that Starship Troopers is the mirror darkly version of the Star Trek episode titled: Arena (AKA the Gorn episode).  Now I do find that an interesting juxtaposition because Arena was written by Gene L. Coon who had been a Marine in WWII and saw some of the toughest fighting in the Pacific. Whereas Verhoeven’s military service was in the Netherlands Navy shooting documentaries and instructional films.

Mike, points out that at the end of the Gorn episode Kirk has come to understand his enemy and refuses to kill him, thus becomes more evolved. In Starship Troopers there is never any effort to reach an understanding with the Bugs.

Of course being good liberals they are making the assumption that the Bugs would have something to say other than, “well you see the reason we are killing all of you is that, we want you all to die.  We have no desire to share a universe with you whatsoever.”