# Starship Troopers (1997)

### reviewed by
Eugene Xia

            Retrospective: Starship Troopers (1997)

                    By Eugene Z. Xia

One can enjoy this film if one is in the right mood. The film gives exactly the kind of respect the original story deserves--a juvenile sci-fi action flick with some pseudo-philosophy thrown in. Or as Scott Renshaw put it: "For one thing, you sense that the film-makers are aware of the pulp nonsense they have as source material".

Those who criticize the film for its technical and military "plot holes" probably should observe how an 8 year old boy play war games--they are more interested in imagining shooting automatic rifles than pushing buttons to launch missiles they cannot see. Once one realizes this aspect, one sees the frame of mind the director is in when he made the film:

An eight year old boy keeps nagging his dad (the director) to play space alien with him. He was of course not very interested, but the boy is after all his son. So he comes up with this brilliant idea. At 8, the boy has a lot of absurd but charming ideas, so he will play along but exaggerate the absurdity. The 8 year old will be seriously disappointed if the dad says that all he has to do is push a few buttons to launch a few nuke and the game is over, so he gave him a machine gun (the reason it is a machine gun rather than a 90's high tech ray-gun is probably a legacy of the 50's and also due the sense of humor on the part of the director). In the end, the boy satisfies his innate desire for simulated combat and the dad gets a big laugh and the satisfaction for being so clever. Both had a great time.

There is a scene in the film where a soldier was decapitated by a flying bug. Ordinarily if this scene were set in a serious film or anything with a darker under tone such as Alien, I would be horrified and probably feel nauseated, but in this comic circus like atmosphere, I bursted out into a spontaneous laughter--the way I did when the huge guy exploded in a French restaurant in Monty Python's Meaning of Life (warning this scene is pretty gross too)--The absurdity of it all.

Beyond its entertainment value, the film did manage to convey a serious and subtle message to the adults. This kind of game is fun to play with the kids, but one has to recognize it for what it is and make sure that boys grow up to be adults. And a warning that adults should never play this game with other adults--look at the uniforms. In the end, the Doogie Hauser character in his black jacket and his boyish charm, said something like, "This is not a game any more. We are doing it for real now". One can't fail to recognize the menacing and sinister under tone of what he said.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews