Starship Troopers
(TriStar Pictures, 1997)
Tonight’s movie is another one of those “Guy movies” I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Starship Troopers is one of those sci-fi movies that has just the right amount of humor, camp, boobage, satire, and gore. This is also going to be another shorter-sized HMM; my sinuses are all messed up and my forehead feels like it is going to asplode. At least, I hope it's only sinuses.
The movie starts out with a newsreel about enlisting to fight in the war against the bugs. The newsreel ends with some footage of a battle that goes well… for the bugs. We catch glimpses of soldiers dying, including one soldier getting impaled by a bug, and falling down in front of the camera man’s camera (which had fallen to the ground after he got killed) and screaming his fool head off.
From here, we jump to one year earlier where we meet the central characters to our story: Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanes, and Doogie Howser. The three are in their Senior year of High School. Johnny hearts Carmen, and Carl is into reading minds and all that. They all want to join the military and become citizens. Johnny joins because he wants to be with Carmen who is enlisting in Flight School, but his test scores were not good enough and he got sent to Mobile Infantry. Carl got sent to military intelligence. Johnny ends up joining against his parent’s wishes. While in Basic Training, Johnny gets promoted to Squad Leader. In the first training exercise under his command, a squad member is killed. Johnny gets relieved of command and whipped in front of everyone. As he is readying to quit, a bug-launched asteroid hits Buenos Aires, Johnny’s hometown.
Johnny decides to stay in the military, and shortly thereafter, war is declared on the bugs. The first attack? Why, the one that we saw go horribly wrong in the beginning of the movie! Oh, and the guy screaming into the camera? Yeah, that’s Johnny. From here we get more propaganda and warmongering.
From this point on, we get to see some creative and bloody deaths and maimings. It’s all pretty good looking stuff on the visual end of things too. This movie is dripping with satire, and I would expect no less from the guy behind RoboCop. And honestly, the best thing about this movie is the Federal Network. Would you like to know more?
I have to wrap this up, because not only does my head hurt, but there is a cat standing between me and the keyboard. It's very difficult to keep typing.