Starship Troopers

• Cat.no: PLFEC 37251
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 124 minutes
• Sides: 3 (CLV/CAV/CLV)
• Year: 1997
• Pressing: 1998
• Chapters: 16 (7/3/6)
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• Price: £34.99
• Extras : None
  

  ---

  Director:

  Paul Verhoeven

Cast:

Casper Van Dien
Dina Meyer
Denise Richards
Jake Busey
Neil Patrick Harris
Patrick Muldoon
Michael Ironside
Clancy Brown

Buenos Aireshigh school graduate Van Dien follows object of desireRichards in signing on for the military – she scores high maths gradesand gets in as a pilot, he doesn’t and lands in the infantry where hegets a man killed under his command during basic training. Alien bugsnuking Buenos Aires provide his motivation and he ships out to the frontline where fellow infantrymen are being slaughtered in vast numbers.

Set in a global society where only by enlisting in the military mayCivilians who can’t vote become Citizens who can, this charts theprogress of a group of high school friends (three in particular) throughmilitary training (mobile infantryman Van Dien, spaceship pilotRichards, intelligence officer Harris) until war is declared, at whichpoint young men and women in their thousands go off to die in horribleand gruesome fashion fighting the enemy invader, hordes of giant insectsbrilliantly rendered by stop-frame wizard-turned-CGI facility boss PhilTippett (Robocop, Jurassic Park).

Satirising the internet much the same way that the same creative team’searlier Robocop did American television, this punctuates its proceedingswith wartime forties style propaganda net newscasts, Why We Fight promosand succinct ads for the armed forces universally concluding with theinvitational mouse-click tag line, “Would you like to know more?”An opening netcast live from the planet Klendathu provides a taste ofwhat’s to come when an enemy arachnid eats a TV journalist alivemid-broadcast on camera.

Happily, this hits us uncut by the British censor (with the rating uppedfrom the theatrical 15 to a video 18) in all its gory glory. It would beimpossible to put 129 minutes onto two LD sides, so Buena Vista andPioneer have done the next best thing and put it onto three with thesecond side in CAV. Side one has all the boot camp training and theattack on Buenos Aires, side two features the first major bug battle(Klendathu) – lots of bug and spaceship action here – and Van Dien’sdropping a grenade inside a giant beetle (and an incredible brief butamazing cut in which lasers repair a mutilated human limb in a watertank) while side three has, among other things, Van Dien’s sex scenewith Meyer, Richards’ gigantic spaceship (and her commanding officer)getting cut in half, hole-in-the-head human corpses with brains suckedout, flying bugs, the brain bug and all the little bugs in anunderground cavern – and much, much more.

Being one of those movies that would have benefited still further fromCAV throughout – side one’s boot camp contains both a fair amount ofsplatter and Richards’ first manoeuvring of the huge spaceship whereinshe avoids a collision by a mere three metres, while side three containsa bisected ship which is one of the single most impressive images tohave been rendered by contemporary special effects as well as numerousadditional battle scenes and bug details – the option of a moreexpensive, entirely CAV disc would have been nice (but hey, DVD’s justaround the corner and considerably cheaper, so perhaps this prospectwouldn’t be commercially viable in late 1998).

Chapter stops are sensible enough, but there’s too few of them: worstoffender is side one’s chapter 2 (between 1’s opening netcast and 3’sboot camp) which runs the best part of twenty minutes and sets up allthe protagonists. It’s surprising that Verhoeven, with his evidentattention to detail, didn’t ensure a greater number.

Film: 5/5
Picture: 5/5
Sound: 5/5