“Starship Troopers 3: Marauder” Review

This review is about a month late. “Starship Troopers 3: Marauder” — a DTV effort, like movie two in the franchise — hit DVD the first week of August. I came this close to buying it, being a ginormous fan of the original “Starship Troopers” and all. But “Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation” is so unrepentantly awful, rumor has it that John McCain considered it as his running mate. At any rate, I instead added it to my Netflix queue. Last night, it finally came in the mail.

Well…”Marauder” isn’t as bad as “Starship Troopers 2.” It’s still pretty cheap-looking, plodding and heavy-handed. Casper Van Dien, the vacant square-jawed star of the original “Starship Troopers,” returns as Johnny Rico, now a Colonel in the Mobile Infantry — the boots on the ground in a seemingly endless, propaganda-fueled war against giant bugs in the far-flung, fascistic future.

Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” was about 5 years ahead of its time. Were it to have been released in ‘02 or ‘03 rather than 1997, its impact would’ve been like that of an atomic bomb. It’s a two-hour propaganda film, a full-throated endorsement of arachnid genocide. When it was released, people just didn’t get it. I loved it, being a gorehound and all. But the satire was sort of lost on me at the time. America in the late-’90s wasn’t quite the jingoistic war machine we are today.

I’m not sure that’s what Robert Heinlein was getting at when he wrote the book in the ’50s. I read it a few months after the first film came out. It’s very pro-military, if a little listless. Rico’s in training for the bulk of the story. Then he gets bonked on the head at the climax on Planet P and wakes up and the war’s been won. I prefer the film.

All that being said, I’ve spent the previous two paragraphs not talking about “Starship Troopers 3: Marauder,” giving you some idea of how much I enjoyed this movie. This film is set some seven or so years after the first. Rico’s stationed on some rock in outer space that’s besieged by bugs. A former flame, Capt. Lola Beck (Jolene Blalock, a poor woman’s Angelina Jolie) and her new beau Gen. Dix Hauser (Boris Kodjoe, who’s approximately 12 feet tall) set down on the planet for gobs of exposition. Rico punches out Hauser for some reason and is court-martialed and sentenced to hang. But Beck’s transport ship crashes on another bug planet, OM-1, while en route to a Star Trek convention or something. Hauser grants Rico a very last minute reprieve and sends him to rescue Beck with the help of a half-dozen interchangeable troopers. They all inexplicably get naked before piling into exo-suits called “Marauders.” The Marauder exo-suits don’t really do a whole helluva lot. Sigourney Weaver’s mash-up with the Queen Xenomorph at the climax of “Aliens” is way more thrilling than watching these shambling garbage heaps fight creepy crawlies. Oh, and OM-1 has an extremely Freudian bug living in it that the all-singing, all-dancing Sky Marshall in Beck’s group thinks is God.

It’s clunky, this film. Boris Kodjoe is a remarkably tall man. Casper Van Dien is not. The filmmakers apparently blew most of the budget on the effects, not apple boxes. Over-the-shoulder shots are unintentional comedy, as our Hobbit of a hero cranes his neck to make eye-contact with a guy who dwarfs Voltron. I’d forgive the dodgy production values if the movie had some of the wit and the gusto of the first film. It needs someone like Michael Ironside’s Lt. Rasczak in the original. Everyone in the movie is just too soft, considering that they live in a era that defines itself by war. Also, why is it that every television show now looks like a movie, but every DTV movie still looks like a DTV movie?

I’m disappointed that this film was just another half-assed bit of junk like all of Sony’s sequels that go straight-to-DVD. The filmmakers could’ve made a very suberversive Iraq War metaphor here. In the decade since the first film came and went, the world changed in such a way that “Starship Troopers” is now more relevant than ever. Unfortunately, the two follow-ups just bug me.

-Brad Lohan

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