Starship Troopers

Like many (non-gaming) reviewers, I was underwhelmed by the acting, the one-dimensional characters, and the formulaic boot camp scenes. I was also confused by the recurring schizophrenia of the movie’s look and style. For example, on the one hand, everything is clean, modern, and pretty—the bases, the equipment, and the soldiers (especially the soldiers), but we are showered repeatedly with basketsful (and I do mean basketsful) of body parts--flying through the air, littering the ground, and hitting our otherwise clean and pretty soldier boys and girls. We also have the grim, special-effects laden, serious action scenes constantly interrupted with clever, funny, cute internet-style propaganda pieces. Each style was okay and I have nothing against a little comic relief, but I just didn’t get it—if this was satiric comment on the nature of war or government or something, it just didn’t work. I thought the same thing about the casting of the former star of Doogie Howser as a mysterious psychic intelligence officer clad in a Gestapo style coat and hat—maybe it’s supposed to be some cosmic commentary, but it mostly just looks stupid.

But what really bugged me as a gamer about this movie was how bad the war strategy and the hard science of the film were. The whole premise of the movie is that we are fighting these giant bugs on another star system way the heck across the galaxy (made clear by a cutesy "You Are Here" shot in one of the internet propaganda pieces). Of course, there is absolutely no evidence in the movie that the bugs are capable of interstellar flight. They don’t even have any technology whatsoever as far as we see—no weapons, no cities, nothing. What they do have, aside from a bunch of ground troops, are a few big bugs that can fart fire (I’m not kidding) up into near space. We are also led to believe that they concentrate this fart fire to propel asteroids at earth (they also use it to fire at our orbiting armada, which (a) does nothing to avoid getting hit by the slow movie fire farts and (b) groups its ships so close together that they are constantly ramming one another when one is disabled by the farts). Frankly, I do not see the evolutionary advantage that ever allowed the characteristic of farting fire into space to become selected as a genetic trait. Nor can I imagine how some planet-bound bugs can manage to plot and accurately trace a course through the billions of gravity wells that populate the cosmos to hit a planet on the other side of a galaxy. But most of all, I don’t care how many asteroids they may be trying to fart toward earth, when simple relativistic physics tell me that these asteroids will take hundreds and thousands and millions of years to reach earth because of the distances involved. The closest star to earth (other than the sun) is light years away—these bugs are on the other side of the galaxy. Yeah, yeah, I know that warp drive as we know it from Star Wars and Star Trek violates physics, too—but at least those movies realize the problem and create a pseudo-scientific explanation for it. Starship Troopers also has warp drive and advanced science, but denies them to the bugs, then fails to deal with the consequences.

It also partially denies future science to the earthlings. Sure, they can warp to the other side of the galaxy. And, sure, nukes are so plentiful that they give small ones to ground soldiers to use blowing up bug tunnels (not one of the soldiers is smart enough to use one as a mine or projectile to hinder the mass frontal assaults of the bugs). On the other hand, the earthlings are either not smart enough or equipped enough to take the classic advice from Aliens: "Nuke the whole planet from orbit; it’s the only way to be sure." Instead, the starship troopers trundle around a barren landscape, engaging masses of giant bugs with automatic weapons fire. Just to prove that the ground troops are even stupider than their commanders, the soldiers, firing a weapon which easily has a range of a mile (oops, this is the future; make that a range of several "klicks"), fire at bugs a mere thirty feet away, then constantly advance on the bugs while they are firing so as to bring one after another after another of the humans within range of the nasty, piercing legs of the bugs. Of course, the squadron commander has already shown himself to be not exactly bright—he joins the army because his high school honey is joining up, only to find out at enlistment that (duh!) they are being assigned to different types of units and different places and will probably (except for the conveniences of plot) never see each other again. Gamers will also appreciate the stupidity of the lead character setting off a fireball--I mean, nuke--in an underground cavern without calculating blast radius, then trying to outrun the blast to an exit (they manage it, in yet another blow to hard science—a running man vs. the speed of light; yeah, that should be a close race).

There are a few nice touches. Though a bit hokey in terms of realism, I enjoyed a brief scene where the lead character jumps on a giant, armored bug and concentrates his small arms fire on a single spot on the shell so that he can create a hole in the armor, then loose a grenade on the inside of the bug’s exoskeleton. Some of the internet propaganda scenes are pretty funny, including a censored scene where a bug takes on a cow. The massed attack scenes are well done visually (if you ignore the tactics of the situation), although I highly recommend renting Zulu (about a massed Zulu attack on a lightly defended British garrison) if you want a much more moving example of the same thing. You get much more caught up in Zulu because (a) those are humans doing the attacking and getting slaughtered, (b) the movie is based on a true battle, and (c) the tactics, including a vivid demonstration of the benefits of volley fire, are much better handled.