By Chris Jackson
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 18, 1997

Troopers, stupors and sci-fi bloopers

Photo courtesy Tippett Studios Arizona Daily Wildcat Go, go, Power Rangers ... er, Starship Troopers! Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and pals brace for a bug attack.

Many, many years ago a little movie called "Star Wars" came out and made a lot of money.

Hollywood, where the phrase "original thought is dead" came from, decided to make a lot of movies like "Star Wars" in order to make a lot of money.

The latest one of these films, "Starship Troopers," follows the recent trend of sci-fi action films like "Independence Day" and "Men In Black." Basically, it's all special effects and there's no depth to the story.

It's almost as if the filmmakers figure that if they're going to spend a lot of money, they're either going to do it in hiring good actors and using a good script, or they're going to just blow it all on the visual effects.

Directed by Paul Verhoeven, who's responsible for some of the most gratuitously violent ("Robocop," "Total Recall") and lewd ("Basic Instinct," "Showgirls") movies of recent years, "Starship Troopers" starts off with a brief, gory battle sequence and then goes back and tells the audience how this whole battle started.

The first part of the film is set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where everyone now speaks English and is Anglo-Saxon in appearance. OK, so white people conquered the world.

The lead characters are a bunch of teen-agers who look like they belong in a Noxema commercial.

Casper Van Dien plays Johnny Rico (you have to love the name) who goes off and joins the military to impress his arrogant girlfriend, Carmen (Denise Richards). Soon after joining, Johnny finds out that Buenos Aires has been wiped off the map by giant bugs from the planet Klendathu.

The other characters of importance are Johnny's friends, Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), Ace Levy (Jake Busey) and Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris, of "Doogie Howser M.D." fame), plus Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown) and Lieutenant Rasczak (Michael Ironside).

Screenwriter Ed Neumeier presents "Starship Troopers" in a very serious manner. How in God's name can you be serious in a movie about people fighting giant bugs?

The bugs are the best thing about this movie, yet they only serve the purpose of getting shot by the stars, and to occasionally dismember one of the less important characters.

No effort is ever made to understand the bugs, to figure out what they want, or even to find newer and better ways to kill them than with machine guns.

Get a phaser, you idiots. It's the future, after all.

The world that Verhoeven creates is somewhere between 1984 and "Star Trek." It's a kind of military dictatorship, but a nice one, see, where everyone still dresses like it's the 1990s and bad music is still popular. Arena football is the super popular future sport (that's a nightmare unto itself) and some people are psychic now.

Sure, all the military characters dress like they're in the Nazi SS, and there's a very Nazi-like symbol evident in the corner of every newscast in the film, but there's no need to worry. Everyone's happy and living the good life watching arena football.

The film is extremely violent and gory, and not for the squeamish.

After a while, though, one grows numb toward the gore. Everyone in the movie gets impaled, gored or even dismembered by the bugs at some point.

It becomes impossible to keep track of the characters as they start dying off every five minutes.

Some survive, some don't. It's not really important which ones do and which ones don't.

In fact, this movie just isn't that important.

It's a mindless way to blow $7.25.

If you must, turn off your brain, sit back and watch the body parts fly.