Yet they didn’t give Starship Troopers the benefit of the doubt. These were all people who’d seen RoboCop and Verhoeven’s other works.
STARSHIP TROOPERS THE GAME TV TROPES HOW TO
Unfortunately, most audiences don’t know how to do anything but take their movies straight up, and that gives an elitist stench to Verhoeven’s little in-joke.” – Ty Burr, Entertainment Weekly “What the hell is Starship Troopers? Is it a mindlessly violent slab of future jingoism:Melrose Place goes to war in space? Or is it a sly bit of leg pulling on the part of director Paul Verhoeven? Here’s what I think:Starship Troopers is exactly what Star Warswould have looked like if Germany had won World War II. But how can you fight the success of ‘ironic’ stupidity?” – David Denby, New York Magazine Are children supposed to enjoy this literal-minded, grisly bloodbath? As you watch the endless carnage, you become sure that Hollywood has gone completely, utterly mad.
Human bodies are gutted and eviscerated, the limbs pulled off, the heads drilled. “Starship Troopers is fatally lacking in lightness, play, invention. “There’s nothing wrong with good satire - but it’s self-defeatingly stupid to inject it into any story that expects us to care what happens to the characters.” – Scott Rosenberg, Salon Ebert praises the one as cleverly satirical and pans the other in spite of its satire.Īnd he wasn’t the only critic at the time to do so. So we have two grotesquely violent sci-fi action films by the same director, made a decade apart.
STARSHIP TROOPERS THE GAME TV TROPES MOVIE
This is like the squarest but most technically advanced sci-fi movie of the 1950s, a film in which the sets and costumes look like a cross between Buck Rogers and the Archie comic books, and the characters look like they stepped out of Pepsodent ads. The one redeeming merit for director Paul Verhoeven’s film is that by remaining faithful to Heinlein’s material and period, it adds an element of sly satire. Heinlein intended his story for young boys, but wrote it more or less seriously. I have improved since then, but the story has not. I read it to the point of memorization when I was in grade school. It’s based on a novel for juveniles by Robert A.
I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters and values are pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans. “Starship Troopers” is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. There is a certain amount of philosophy, centering on the question, What is a man? And there is pointed social satire, too, as the robocop takes on some of the attributes and some of the popular following of a Bernhard Goetz.īy way of comparison, here’s his review of Starship Troopers, a decade later: There is comedy in this movie, even slapstick comedy. The director is Paul Verhoeven, the gifted Dutch filmmaker whose earlier credits include “Soldier of Orange” and “The Fourth Man.” His movies are not easily categorized.
The broad outline of the plot develops along more or less standard thriller lines. We’re no longer quite sure where “RoboCop” is going, and that’s one of the movie’s best qualities. Looking back at a collection of his reviews is like looking into the history of film criticism at the end of the 20th Century.Ĭonsider, for instance, his review of RoboCop:īecause the scene surprises us in a movie that seemed to be developing into a serious thriller, it puts us off guard. He’s been reviewing major releases for nearly thirty years. Not because of his particular genius (he gave Garfield: The Movie three stars), but because of his longevity. Roger Ebert is an institution of the film industry.
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