Upholding my promise to Pearce, I watched this for the first time since ’97 the other day. I did my best to approach it with an open mind and to set previous feelings aside. Sorry, dude, but my opinions are essentially unchanged. Some of this stuff brings serious deja vu from BBS discussions in ’97.
\nIt still doesn’t work for me as satire. It’s a big, tongue-in-cheek over-the-top war movie and the subversive elements (the media guy who suggests the bugs are only attacking because we’re colonising their territory, the Nazi costume designs of the Military Intelligence dudes, the way all the characters come to believe in the transcendent power of warmaking, the celebration at the bugs’ fear) just don’t add up to much. You have to do far too much joining-the-dots in order to find an anti-war movie in SS Troopers; it’s much easier to find a (tongue-in-cheek) pro-war movie in there, the kind of ‘gentle mockery’ that actually reinforces the legitimacy of its target.
\nI was, at least, thoroughly entertained by the first half of the film – the kids in school, the boot camp sequences, even Carmen’s training – all of that was gripping. Once the film actually goes to war, though, it seems to run out of ideas, substituting ‘new bug threat’ for any meaningful character crises. Even the action sequences left me pretty cold. It goes through four (I think) iterations of Carmen\/Rico thinking the other is dead; it has about eight instances of important secondary characters dying in Carmen’s\/Rico’s arms imparting final words of wisdom. It’s par for the OTT course, but it didn’t keep me interested.
\nThe effects are still amazing. The bugs hold up incredibly well, with the sole exception the big fire-spitting dudes, who look a bit too CGI – otherwise, the mix of CG and physical effects is astounding.
\nAnd Dizzy is still waaay hotter than Carmen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Upholding my promise to Pearce, I watched this for the first time since ’97 the other day. I did my best to approach it with an open mind and to set previous feelings aside. Sorry, dude, but my opinions are essentially unchanged. Some of this stuff brings serious deja vu from BBS discussions in ’97. … Continue reading BBS Revisited: Starship Troopers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-7a","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}