STARSHIP TROOPERS (film)

STARSHIP TROOPERS. Paul Verhoeven, dir. Jon Davison and Alan Marshall, prod. ("A Jon Davison Production"), 1997. Ed Neumeier, script, "Based on the book by Robert A. Heinlein." Casper Van Dien (playing Johnny Rico), Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris, Clancy Brown, Seth Gilliam, Patrick Muldoon, Michael Ironside, featured players. **+Does not use the fighting suits of the novel; the Mobile Infantry wear helmets that show only their faces, plus body armor in the Vietnam or SWAT-team sense, covering only the torso (allowing the Bugs to pierce and otherwise destroy arms and legs). The film is significant here for the mise-en-scène, with its allusions to World War II images generally, and what we might call Nazi-Modern in particular. "As STAR WARS used WW-II movie dog fights for inspiration, STARSHIP TROOPERS consciously evokes the look of a slow-moving naval armada" (25), with a flotilla of rather po-mo giant spacecraft indeed looking like a WWII convoy. While the Bugs are entirely biological, with no technology we see, human-built machines and mechanized environments range from high modern (e.g., desert outpost) to po-mo (e.g., desert outpost after Bugs have trashed it, troopers after Bugs have trashed them). Note also possibility of mechanization of humans to fit the figurative mechanism of a fascistic human future—but without racism or sexism—set against the biology ("Nature") of the Bugs. In this case, it makes sense to show some sort of high-modern death chair for civilian (?) executions when we're told late in the film that the military still hangs; and the high-tech. whipping post remains ludicrous in terms of the narrative but highly suggestive symbolism: yet another instance of the literal superimposition of the mechanical upon the human. Cover story by Dan Persons in Cinefantastique 29.8 (Dec. 1997), which we quote above.