Naked coed showers!

reviewed Sat, 27 Jan 2001

I finally broke down and rented Starship Troopers not because of my father's insistence that it is "a groundbreaking film" (because of a coed shower scene), but because Entertainment Weekly's review of the DVD noted that director Paul Verhoeven makes it clear that it's meant to be a parody of the propagandistic WWII films.  And with that in mind, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.  Most of the time the parody is fairly obvious, but occasionally it crosses the line into creepy.  I don't care how spoofy it's meant to be, it's still profoundly unsettling to see fresh-faced young actors wearing Gestapo-like uniforms (although it does afford a certain twisted pleasure to see that, as the DVD put it, they turned Doogie Howser into a fascist).

Overall, it's a well-done sci-fi action film that keeps up a consistently fast pace, though after a while all the battle scenes start to seem the same.  The blandly pretty TV actors are insipid and practically indistinguishable (especially when their helmets are on), but you can see why Verhoeven would have wanted bland, distinctly unnoticeable actors.  It's a bit bizarre, though, that all of the main characters are putatively from Buenos Aires, yet not a one of them looks the slightest bit Latino.  My father's point, I think, is a good one, even if he chooses the most obnoxious way of phrasing it -- men and women are treated as absolute equals in this movie, an unusual occurrence in a movie of this type and one that the typical action-movie audience should see more often.

The problem I have with Starship Troopers is that the audience that would appreciate or even recognize the parody is not the audience at which it is aimed.  Your average teenage boy is going to see the glorification of war, the countless explosions, the blind vilification of "the other" (okay, in this case giant space bugs that fart killer asteroids), and think it's all really cool.  But what the hell, right?  The youth of America is going down the tubes anyway; this ain't gonna grease the skids too much.

Weirdly, this is the second movie I've seen in the past week that has a ferret in it.

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