STARSHIP TROOPERS: UHD 4K Blu-ray (TriStar, 1997) Sony Home Entertainment
It has been
twenty years since director, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) hit theater screens with all its blood and
bug splatter. Those suffering from entomo- or acaro-phobia would do best to
steer clear of this grotesque and salaciously dark-humored probe into the
farthest reaches of navel-gazing outer space. Verhoeven’s métier appears to be
of the ‘T’ and ‘A’ slasher ilk; tossing nearly all of his taut young stars and
other supporting players into the scissor-legged gristmill of gigantic insects,
possessing the wherewithal and venom to launch a full scale attack on mankind
from their distant netherworld of Klendathu. Disembowelment and decapitation
are the norm here – also, a little bit of zombie-esque brain suckage. Suffice
it to say, Starship Troopers is not
for the faint-hearted or easily grossed out. Would you like to know more? Verhoeven’s intergalactic saga gets
distilled into a really simplistic blood feud between the Arachnids (bugs) and
a bunch of war-mongering yahoos. The ending is as inarticulate as it is inane;
the military debunking the bug’s central intelligence employing a primitive bit
of mind-reading conducted by Col. Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris as a Doogie
Howser-ish clairvoyant). Harris looks rather idiotically adolescent in faux
fascistic garb. As one probee of the mobile infantry points out earlier, “Okay, so they grow ‘em big and dumb…”
and not just on the farm! Would you like
to know more?
Personally, I
would not want to place my finger anywhere near the public’s integrity when
rating great movie art these days for fear of contracting a communicable lack
of discernment, surely to infect and cripple my intellect. Starship Troopers is a fairly moronic tale at best. That said, it
is also colorful, glossy, slickly put together and thoroughly mindless: a
sci-fi actioner designed to anesthetize the senses with its mind-numbing array
of special effects. Verhoeven tosses every last bit of loose-stooled barbarism
at the screen, mostly to see what will cling, then flush virtually all good
taste and common sense out the porthole into deep space. Interrupting his
action with rudimentary bits of dialogue and surreptitious, if wholly fictional
ads promoting a totalitarian dictatorship, where military service guarantees
citizenship, Starship Troopers plays
like one big commercial for recruitment into the Armed Forces, herein populated
by clean-cut youth, traded their Hitlerian brown shirts for a little finer
weave of SS Nazi grey. Would you like to
know more? It’s the terminally repeated query Verhoeven proposes, but never
entirely answers; instead, content to force-feed the audience a steady diet of
claustrophobia and carnage as the bug colony gains the upper hand, stabbing,
severing and slicing into fresh and juicy human flesh with sadomasochistic
aplomb.
If you haven’t
already guessed it, my regard for Starship
Troopers borders on flushing disgust. Well no one can deny the picture is
skillful assembled, its total disregard for nudity and numb skulls is about on
par with Verhoeven’s convoluted retread on the tired ole cliché, ‘War is Hell.’ The only good bug is a
dead bug…so we are told. This message gets hammered home with zero subtlety as
we witness a bunch of gleeful moppets stamping the guts of roaches into the hot
summer cement while their ebullient mother looks on with giddy admiration: the
omnipotent announcer suggesting, “Everyone
is doing their part” to eradicate ‘bug culture’ from the earth and its neighboring
galaxies. It would be so easy – too easy, in fact – to condemn Starship Troopers as an outright waste
of time, despite its immediate popularity and enduring cult status, spawning a
minor cottage industry in straight-to-video sequels with diminishing returns. But Verhoeven has endeavored to give us too
much to think about here; reflections on a world gone nuts and a society
teetering on the verge of another self-inflicting gag. Starship Troopers is not a movie you will want to revisit again and
again, and yet it remains a picture that lingers in contemplation inside the
memory long after the house lights have come up – mostly, for its deeply disturbing,
rather than just plain ‘deep’ story elements. Verhoeven presents us with an
embattled human civilization whose greatest threat from beyond ought to be
dealt a gigantic nuclear bomb blast of Raid. Alas, it is mankind’s navel-gazing
patriotism that is the real threat at large; our ability to buy into the
state-sanctioned Kool-Aid with little to no regard for the ramifications later
to taint and corrupt this ‘perfect world’.
Written by
Edward Neumeier, the premise for Starship
Troopers originally derived from a totally unrelated script, ‘Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine’. At some point
the executive decision was made to license the name Starship Troopers from the novel by Robert A. Heinlein; Verhoeven
tossing out the book’s entire premise as being ‘boring’ and ‘too right-wing’.
As the resultant movie has nothing to do with Heinlein’s book, the story taking
shape under Neumeier’s creative nincompoopery follows a comely soldier named
Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his assorted misadventures in the Mobile Infantry.
Rico’s soldierly vocation is not without its stumbling blocks. For starters,
his affluent mum (Lenore Kasdorf) and dad (Christopher Curry) do not support
him in this endeavor. But what do they know? Their son is in love with the
waspish, Lt./Capt. Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards). She, alas quickly recognizes the studly Rico
is neither of her class nor intellectual equal (snobby bitch!), having made pilot
and already set her cap for the dashing and cocky Lt. Zander Barcalow (Patrick
Muldoon). So Rico has joined the army for nothing. Disheartened, he takes
comfort in progressing from new recruit to non-commissioned officer; his rank
momentarily stripped after his direct command during a routine training
exercise results in an unexpected fatality. Whoops! Don’t forget to wear your helmet.
Would you like to know more? Rico’s
classmate, Col. Carl Jenkins is too self-involved in his telepathic muddles to
care. But his superior, Lt. Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside) is forced to bust
Rico’s rank and then his balls in order to get the disheartened lad back on
track and into shape for the latest interstellar assault on the insectoid species.
The rest of Starship Troopers is mostly an
equilibrium-offsetting/stomach churning exercise in crude black humor and
projectile vomit inducing special effects (yes, we even get to witness one of
our protagonists barf into the camera – yummy!). It all leaves very little to
the imagination. I mean, human heads, arms and legs are cleaved from their
torsos with anesthetizing repetition; brains syphoned through furry and
slime-covered feeding tubes pierced through the skull. I do not know how much #9
Red Dye there is in Hollywood. But Verhoeven must have depleted a good deal of
its reserves in 1997 to make this picture; the butchery and bloodshed
throughout Starship Troopers
reaching levels to make even the most homicidal among us strive for clemency.
It all goes well beyond proving a point – if, indeed, there is any point beyond
the obvious to be made. In hindsight, it’s not surprising Starship Troopers received generally negative reviews from the
critics twenty years ago; most, since having lost their minds with retracted
praise for the picture.
Shot mostly
against a green screen and the badlands of Hell's Half Acre in Natrona County,
Wyoming Starship Troopers is, at
times, visually arresting; its rather pristine and completely in-focus battle
sequences colorfully purposed (blood red against tan pulverized rock formations
photographs so well) and expertly executed by Verhoeven with a former U.S.
Marine, Dale Dye acting as technical military advisor. After both Mark Wahlberg
and James Marsden turned down the part of Johnny Rico, Verhoeven cast Casper
Van Dien as his star. Van Dien’s career, already prolific in minor supporting
roles scattered throughout television, movies and video games, has never achieved
the notoriety afforded other ‘stars’ of his generation, despite possessing an
unbearably rugged handsomeness married to an impossibly chiseled square jaw:
the hallmarks of a true action star in the post-Arnold Schwarzenegger era. Now
age 48, it seems highly unlikely Van Dien will ever rise like cream to the top
of his profession. Starship Troopers
is not his finest effort anyway. In fact, Van Dien herein toggles between blunt
adolescence and fairly pedestrian reaction shots; his cringe-worthy declaration
to his parents, “Don’t talk about Carmen
that way!” when they clearly recognize the girl is a tease, wholly responsible
for blind-siding their boy into joining the army, is supposed to be Van Dien’s “nobody puts Baby in a corner” moment.
It might have played out better with a Patrick Swayze at the helm. Yet, Van
Dien lends this moment neither the ballast of true conviction in the words he
speaks nor on any level of authoritative male machismo he disquietingly lacks.
Verhoeven’s
passion for the project stems from his basic desire to debunk the novel’s more
zealous support of a militarist state. Starship
Troopers is, in fact, Verhoeven’s satire of this notion; the director
relishing in over-the-top nationalism, and grandiloquence for ‘the perfect’ fascist state – clean,
shiny and full of blindly obeying sheep, intensely xenophobic and
motivated by state-sanctioned propaganda.
Indeed, Starship Trooper’s
opening - a ‘commercial’ for the
Mobile Infantry – is practically a shot-for-shot recreation of a scene from
Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
(1935). References to Nazism are everywhere, from the German-esque liveries and
crests worn by field marshals to the Albert Speer-styled architecture that
permeates Allan Cameron’s production design and Bruce Robert Hill/Steven Wolff’s
art direction. Verhoeven has also deleted all references to the powered armor
technology described in Heinlein’s novel. Instead, the protective equipment worn
by the mobile infantry in Starship
Troopers is slavishly devoted to those time-honored precepts of
hand-to-hand combat; modified Uzis in place of intergalactic cruisers; the
latter, large, lumbering and rather unceremoniously annihilated from afar by
the bugs without actually firing a single shot in retaliation as their ships
split apart and take their nosedives into outer space.
Verhoeven directed
the nude co-ed shower scene ‘au naturel’ at the quid pro quo behest of his
cast. He also took to heart reactions from a test audience, tweaking scenes
implying Carmen was genuinely torn in her love for Rico and Zander. But
Verhoeven dug in his heels regarding Carmen’s betrayal of Rico. Commercially,
this may have hurt the movie, as female audiences in particular then, and many
more today still believe Carmen ought to have died instead of Pvt. Isabelle
‘Dizzy’ Flores (Dina Meyer’s faithful as a bird dog love interest for Rico, unceremoniously
cut down in her prime during a penultimate bug assault). Upon its release, Starship Troopers was readily panned by
the sacred cows of film review; Janet Maslin, Jeff Vice and Roger Ebert among
the pundits justifiably adverse to its ‘wooden
acting’ and ‘excessive’ and
seemingly mindless ‘gore’. And yet,
despite its deficiencies, and taken with more than a few granules of the
proverbial ‘salt’, Starship Troopers
is an above average ‘entertainment’; despite Verhoeven’s warped sense of humor
and smite against the military/industrial complex, American foreign policy
jingoism, and blunt force arrogance to cast the decidedly Caucasian ‘Casper’ as
his Rico (in Heinlein’s novel, a Filipino).
Starship Troopers is set in the 23rd
century; humanity, a space-faring civilization embattled in its farthest
regions by an insectoid species owing far more to those radioactive creatures
from the fifties ilk in sci-fi classics than, say, Ridley Scott’s Alien. The ‘bug’ threat derives from a
distant world, Klendathu. Meanwhile, on earth Johnny Rico is reluctantly
preparing to enlist in the army. He’s hardly a model student, with
under-performing math skills that pretty much guarantee he will enter service
as nothing more established than a foot soldier. Rico’s gal/pal, Carmen Ibanez
is not about to let a little thing like grade point average interfere in their
platonic romance; that is, until her smarts land her a lucrative post as flight
commander, opposite cocky hotshot pilot, Zander Barcalow. Blinded by his naïve love
for Carmen, Rico cannot see his fellow student, Isabelle ‘Diz’ Flores carrying
the proverbial torch for him. Indeed, she wants Rico – bad. Meanwhile, fellow
classmate, Carl Jenkins is seconded to military intelligence for his psychic
abilities. Pretty boy Rico ought to have enrolled in Harvard. Instead, he walks
out on his affluent lifestyle to become a grunt in the army where he befriends
fellow enlistees, Ace Levy (Jake Busey), Sugar Watkins (Seth Gilliam) and Breckinridge
(Eric Bruskotter). Forthright and tough as nails, Diz pursues Rico on her
terms, eventually wearing him down – and possibly out – for a little badinage
in the barracks.
The training
camp’s officer, Career Sgt. Zim (Clancy Brown) admires Rico’s initiative.
Appointed squad leader after showing guts above and beyond the average recruit,
Rico fumbles this promotion when, during a live-fire training exercise his
inspection of Breckinridge’s helmet causes the new recruit his life. Redeemed
from a court martial by Zim, Rico is nevertheless stripped of his rank and
publicly flogged as punishment. Alas, fate steps in; Rico’s resignation and
desire to return home is thwarted by an asteroid attack on Buenos Aires; his
parents – along with millions more – obliterated in a moment’s notice. With
nothing left to him but honor, Rico redoubles his efforts to prove his merit as
a good soldier as the mobile infantry is deployed to Klendathu for all-out war.
Due to a lack of reconnaissance, the mission proves a total disaster. Rico is
severely wounded but mistakenly classified KIA. Upon his recovery, Rico, along
with Ace and Diz, is reassigned to the Roughnecks, an elite unit commanded by
Lt. Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside). As Rasczak, Rico’s former high-school
teacher, always had an affinity for the boy’s amazing skills as a footballer,
Rico is eventually promoted to Corporal after destroying one of the tanker bugs
during a subsequent assault mission.
Responding to
a distress call from a remote outpost, the Roughnecks are intercepted by the Arachnids.
Rasczak is killed and Rico, now Acting Sergeant, orders the evacuation of all
surviving personnel. Regrettably, Diz is mortally wounded in this exodus and
dies in Rico’s arms a short while later. Carl, now a high-ranking intelligence
officer, reveals to the surviving members of the battalion he believes a ‘brain
bug’ is responsible for the Arachnid’s gaining insight into their battle
strategies. The Roughnecks embark upon their final mission, to capture this
elusive ‘bug’ nobody has ever seen. Hovering over the planetoid, Carmen and Zander’s
star cruiser is decimated, forcing the pair to use one of the ship’s escape
pods and crash land to relative safety on the ground far below. The couple are
intercepted by the Arachnids and detained until the brain bug’s arrival. The
massive slug uses its proboscis to pierce Zander's skull and eat his brain. Attempting
to do as much to Carmen, she instead uses a serrated knife to slice off its
antenna. Rico and his men arrive, threatening the bugs with a nuclear device.
In the ensuing escape fellow roughneck, Watkins sacrifices his life, detonating
the bomb and sealing off the tunnel, thus allowing Rico and Carmen their
escape. A short while later, the brain bug is captured and Carl, placing his
hand on its face, deduces the Arachnid threat has been neutralized for the time
being because the brain bug is ‘scared’.
Starship Troopers concludes
with a commercial, Carmen, Ace, and Rico all promoting the Federation’s Armed Forces
to the next generation of new recruits. Would
you like to know more?
Frankly, no! I
have had enough of Starship Troopers
to last me a lifetime. But for those who wish to know more, as with everything
Sony does, this new UHD 4K Blu-ray release looks and sounds colossal. Virtually every aspect of this visual/aural
presentation benefits: eye-popping colors, superb image stability and minute definition
exposed to the nth degree. Wow and thank you, Mr. Grover Crisp. I had worried at
least some of these visual effects might have either dated or revealed their ‘green
screen’ origins under the scrutiny of a vastly higher image resolution. Not so.
This is a wonderful effort with impressive grain looking indigenous to its
source. A few shots appear slightly more
softly focused. Otherwise, fine detail is astonishing: right down to fine hairs
follicles and a noticeable scar on Casper Van Dien’s chin. The HDR graded color
is exceptional. Flesh tones are realistic and outer space sequences benefit
from inky black levels. The new Dolby
Atmos 7.1 audio features directionalized SFX ricocheting all over the sound
field, capturing the chaos of battle and riveting rifle fire in all its
resplendent cacophony of nuanced noise. Starship
Troopers audio is, in fact, one of the more impressive renderings of a ‘vintage’
catalog release.
Two bonuses are
included on the 4K disc – a pair of audio commentaries: the first with Paul
Verhoeven and the cast; the second featuring Verhoeven and Ed Neumeier. The
package also includes the movie on standard 1080p Blu-ray. As such, we also get
the plethora of goodies previously released from Sony’s 2-disc deluxe DVD
presentation. A couple of noted absences: no isolated score and no galleries
devoted to concept art. As recompense, we get an interactive Recruitment Test trivia
challenge, a picture-in-picture viewing mode, a Blu-Wizard and custom play
option; plus, behind the scenes featurettes covering virtually every aspect of
the movie’s production from top to bottom. Bottom line: Starship Troopers is fairly silly and made with a rank disregard
for either the niceties or subtleties in film-making. What was dumb, idiotic,
repulsive, and, occasionally, frightening is still dumb, idiotic, repulsive and
occasionally frightening. Verhoeven’s gross out efforts are fairly crude. But
he makes his point about the futility of living in a society where the moral
good is judged on a yahoo’s ability to throw caution to the wind with nihilism
propped up to fear life more than death. Bottom line: this is a highly
recommended 4K reference quality disc from Sony of a movie otherwise unworthy
of such luxury. Now, can we please get Sony to give us 4K releases of movies
like The Mirror Has Two Faces, The
Prince of Tides, Tootsie, Places in the Heart, Steel Magnolias, The Guns of
Navarone, The Caine Mutiny, Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons, St. Elmo’s
Fire, Peggy Sue Got Married, Against All Odds, Narrow Margin, Bugsy, Legends of
the Fall, A League of Their Own, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Seven Years in
Tibet, The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility.
There is certainly no shortage of takers here.
MOVIE RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
3
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
5
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