"Starship Troopers" Blu-ray Review

Picked up a used Blu-ray of this for six bucks and decided to give it a spin to see if time has been kinder to my memory of it being a mixed bag of action and silliness. It hasn't.

I read Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers back in high school and barely remembered much of it in 1997 when Paul Verhoeven's goofy film version came out. Verhoeven was returning to the sci-fi genre of his prior films Robocop and Total Recall after a detour into Joe Eszterhasville with the tag team of Basic Instinct and Showgirls.

The brightly-lit cheesiness of ST with big-teethed stars Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards along with a closer-to-Doogie Howser-than-Dr. Horrible bugged me (no pun) back then and it hasn't gotten better with time. The core problem I've always had with the movie is the utter stupidity of the military tactics: When you're fighting a monster foe on a barren planet with no cities or resources to preserve, what's the smart part of the idea that instead of just nuking the place from orbit (it's the only way to be sure) you should send legions of foot soldiers down there to shoot it out with a fast-moving, swarming, armored enemy that requires a clip of ammo to be emptied into their bodies to bring them down? Less cinematic, to be sure, but hella more sensible.

My comment about Richards when I saw the film in 1997 was, "We're supposed to believe she's this awesome starship pilot when she looks like she couldn't get the family's LeBaron station wagon out of a mall parking lot without denting the fake wood paneling." Put it this way: She makes Jessica Alba look like Helen Mirren in the acting department. Watching it now it confirms that her best performance was in Wild Things because all she had to do was be dumb and look good naked.

The Blu-ray is pretty good with a clean transfer and suitably booming sound. What's interesting to see in the clarity of high-def is how cheap the sets look. I watched Galaxy Quest a week later and what was supposedly a comic spoof had better production values. The bug special effects haven't aged that well, but are still pretty good by contemporary standards - it's just that the bar has been raised so high by films like Avatar and Transformers.

Score: 6/10. Buy it if you're a fan of the film, otherwise rent.

Note: The extras were done for a 2002 Special Edition DVD and really play up the liberal cast's take that the fascism they thought the film portrayed was being whipped up by the government post-9/11. I only started watching them, so if there's more to be gleaned, I'll update this section.