Starship Troopers

Alien bloodfest or military critique? Starship Troopers shoots both ways.

by Cindy Fuchs

Directed by Paul Verhoeven
A TriStar Release

recommended

"Whoo-hoo!" If you've heard the Blur song (called "Song 2") used in the promotional trailer for Starship Troopers, you've already got a sense of the film's lunatic, infectious energy. Much like the Blur music video for the song—which shows band members literally bouncing off walls—the trailer delivers carefully orchestrated mayhem: fiery explosions, flying corpses, large discharging weapons, all on beat. This marketing ploy has a certain cynical, I-dare-you charm. So what if the movie soundtrack doesn't actually include "Song 2"? The trailer invites you to relish a minute or so of fierce delirium, to revel in carnage, crisis and multiple climaxes. "Whoo-hoo!" Boom! "Whoo-hoo!" Boomboom!

The movie itself is equally turbo-charged and superficially reckless. There's a straight-up trite story (a crew of exceptionally white, beautiful, just-out-of-high-school earthlings defend the planet against insectish aliens) and the execution is suitably berserk (Jurassic Park's T-Rex creator Phil Tippett has designed a slew of huge oozing bugs). And, like most U.S.-made alien invasion movies, from Them! and the three versions of The Body Snatchers to Independence Day, the Alien series, and Men In Black, this one presents a range of national (and nationalistic) worries—getting payback, policing borders, getting off on sex and violence, dominating the universe, claiming moral high ground. In the words of the troopers' hardass lieutenant (Michael Ironside, outfitted with a demonic-looking cybernetic hand) before they head off to battle with the all-bad, all-ugly enemy:

"Shoot anything with more than two legs."

This nuke-'em attitude is exhilarating for about 30 seconds, after which most of the kids are shredded and penetrated six ways from Sunday by those multi-razor-limbed creatures. It's not as if you're particularly invested in the characters, most of whom appear only briefly, anonymous in helmets and uniforms, ironically huzzahing as they head off to certain, grisly death. It's more like you're watching a giant video game, anticipating the brutality but sometimes cringing at its excessiveness. That is to say, for all the film's rah-rah exuberance, it's also an odious representation of war-as-cartoon, with lots of yucky blood and body parts.

Based on a novel by classic, conservative SF writer Robert Heinlein and directed by Paul Verhoeven (you'll recall that he made Showgirls, another apocalyptic vision), Starship Troopers is something of a paradox, an exercise in and examination of mindlessness. I mean, it's not rocket science, but its cynicism is simultaneously smarmy and smart, exacting a cost for any pleasure you may take in its nasty-ass violence. In this respect it's not unlike Verhoeven's remarkable Robocop (1987), which was good gory fun as well as an astute look at Reaganomics, '80s corporate politics, privatization and the uncomfortable legacy of the Hollywood Western. The new film is less weighed down by major iconography (the robosuited Peter Weller seeking his identity had its heavy-handed moments), more relaxed and self-reflexive. For example, it lifts those "commercial spots" directly from Robocop: here these comedic insertions—appearing as if on television, commenting ironically on the progressively brutal action—make the point that the military's recruitment campaign is perpetual, that war is business, that bugs and recruits are similarly expendable.

It's not a little funny that Verhoeven calls it his most "romantic" film, noting that a character says "I love you" and means it, but the fact that the cast is (relatively) fresh meat lifted quite literally from Aaron Spelling's TV-soap-land, suggests that the director is either messing with his interviewer or seeing romance as one big cliché. Either way or both ways, the film does do a number on those romantic clichés that constitute traditional war imagery.

Starship Troopers offers an array of particularly clean-cut humans as bug-bait. Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) is a nice, dull, Ken-doll kind of boy, eager to enter the military academy for two reasons: to impress his starship pilot girlfriend Carmen (Denise Richards, from Melrose Place) and to attain citizen status (in this fascistic future, to become a citizen with rights [read: privileges], one must join the Federal Service). Johnny isn't quite the officer material that Carmen is, so he ends up in the dangerous mobile infantry. He survives the horrors of boot camp with the help of plucky and loyal-to-the-max Dizzy Flores (90210's Dina Meyer) and gung-ho jarhead Ace Levy (Jake Busey). (And where is Demi Moore when you need her?)

Because all these folks are almost painfully pretty, my favorite bit of casting in the film stands way out. Johnny's best friend Carl Jenkins is played by Neil Patrick Harris, a.k.a. Doogie Howser (and he looks exactly the same, maybe slightly lankier). Carl's a boy genius whose amazing test scores land him in "games and theory" (military intelligence) and, eventually, a pair of Nazi-style trenchcoat and jackboots. Assigned to devise the high-tech weaponry that will decimate the bugs and secure earth's victory, Carl misses out on the main action sequences, but returns just in time to let everyone know that the bugs have a leader, and that leader has developed a brain (due to its ability to suck the gray matter—bloodied, of course—out of human skulls: perhaps needless to say, this is a particularly ooky process to watch).

The humans win, no surprise, though the precise plot and character turns that allow their success are less obvious and more absurd than you might guess. Clichés happen, of course: the Black Guy, here named Watkins (Seth Gilliam), does indeed sacrifice himself in order to save his white compatriots. It's hard to know how to take this: is it a restaging of Joe Morton's world-saving suicide in T2, and thus, a reminder that in the mainstream imagination, characters of color not played by Will Smith are still required to be noble and dedicated to the white order at all costs, even to the point of death (the clearest and most annoying indication of devotion and nobility)? Or is it a hyperbolic riff on precisely this extremely tired racist convention?

I raise this question because it applies to the film's generally ambiguous tone. Starship Troopers may be less overt about its politics than Robocop, but any movie that turns Doogie Howser into a fascist has some serious cultural analysis going on. Its glib depictions of dismemberment, decapitation and horrendous evisceration can be alarming, but they can also be understood as the film's (rather visceral) assessment of—for instance—the current U.S. drive toward escalating militarization, incorporation and globalization. This picture is not pretty. "Whoo-hoo!"