Review of Starship Troopers (1997) by Ola G — 13 Feb 2016

In the 23rd century, Earth has become a space-faring federation. While colonizing new planets, humans have encountered an insectoid species known as Arachnids or "Bugs", with their home being the distant world Klendathu. The bugs appear to be little more than killing machines, though there are suggestions that they were provoked by the intrusion of humans into their habitats. In the federation, citizenship is a privilege earned by serving through such activities as military service, granting them opportunities prohibited to basic civilians. John "Johnny" Rico (Casper Van Dien), his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) and best friend Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) attend high school in Buenos Aires. Fellow student Isabel "Dizzy" Flores (Dina Meyer) is in love with Rico, but he does not reciprocate. They enlist in the Federal Service after graduation. Carmen becomes a spaceship pilot assigned to the Rodger Young, while psychically gifted Carl joins Military Intelligence. Rico enlists in the Mobile Infantry expecting to be with Carmen, but is surprised to find Dizzy, who wanted to be near him. At Mobile Infantry training, brutal Career Sgt. Zim (Clancy Brown) leads the recruits. Rico is promoted to squad leader and befriends Ace Levy (Jake Busey). He later receives a Dear John letter from Carmen, as she desires a career with the fleet and serves under Rico's high school sports rival, Zander Barcalow (Patrick Muldoon). After a live-fire training incident that kills one of Rico's squad, he is demoted and flogged. He resigns and calls his parents, but the call is cut off when an asteroid, launched by the Arachnids, obliterates Buenos Aires, killing his family and millions more. Rico rescinds his resignation and remains with the Infantry as an invasion force is deployed to Klendathu...

Roger Ebert, who had praised the "pointed social satire" of Verhoeven's Robocop, found the film "one-dimensional," a trivial nothing "pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans." I personally didn´t like "Starship Troopers" when it came out and now when I gave it another chance my opinion hasn´t changed. The problem here is that Paul Verhoeven doesn´t manage to make this work satire wise, production wise nor value wise. It´s such a b-movie with mediocre acting, bad green screen set ups, bad CGI and classic over the top Verhoeven goriness and I am not sure if that was the main point in Verhoeven´s head, but to me that is as failure as the script has interesting anti right-wing militarism and anti-violence angles, however everything falls to pieces as Verhoeven has put mediocre actors and actresses in the main roles and the so called satire only becomes cheesy and bad compared to "Robocop" and the interesting main plot ends up in the background due to the bad handling of the material. I simply don´t like the result and I believe it could´ve been so much better.