Featured Creature: The one where a giant bug becomes a religion

 

Title: Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

What Year?: 2008

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: It's Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’ve had this feature live for 2 months without getting to the movies I really had in mind when I thought of it. I also find I’m already getting into a habit of turning to it when any other plans simply fall through (see Galaxy Quest). This time around, I have several movies I have viewed or considered, but the only one I find I feel ready to take on is otherwise outside what I would usually consider. The one thing that puts it on the board is that it is part of a 1990s sci fi franchise, indeed one that viewers could easily overlook as a franchise, and it is definitely odd enough to meet my usual standards. With that, I present Starship Troopers 3, a movie that puts religion into the original film’s ideological blender, which in itself is a good indication how weird this will get.

Our story begins with a quick reintroduction to the universe of Starship Troopers, where military service is a requirement of Federation citizenship and the resulting military juggernaut is still in a full-tilt war with an alien species known simply as the Bugs, now with opposition from a quasi-religious pacifist faction. In short order, we catch up with Jonny Rico, now a colonel, his friend Dix, their possibly mutual love interest Lola, and a new psychic sky marshal who has penned the new Federation anthem, literally “It’s A Good Day To Die!” When an outpost falls to the Bugs, Rico is accused of treason and sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Lola is trapped behind enemy lines with the sky marshal, who wins over their crewmates with a religious vision that he has been sent to make peace with the Bugs. With a little help from Dix, Rico gets a chance at redemption with a rescue mission to save the stranded crew, or at least make sure nothing they know falls into enemy hands. But when the planetoid they are on proves to be a gigantic brain bug and the sky marshal’s new deity, will anyone get out alive?

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder was a direct-to-video sequel to the 1997 film, following a 2004 movie subtitled Hero of the Federation made for cable TV. The film was directed by Edward Neumeier, the screenwriter of Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop as well as the first film, and saw the return of Casper Van Dien as Rico, after the actor and character were left out of the preceding sequel. Other, arguably more prominent cast included German actor Boris Kodjoe as Dix, Jolene Blalock of Star Trek Enterprise as Lola, Stephen Hogan as Sky Marshal Enoke, and Marnette Patterson as Holly. The movie was the first in the series to feature exoskeletons/ mech suits of the kind portrayed in the original Heinlein novel. The film was regarded by fans as an improvement on the previous sequel, but not otherwise well-received. Subsequent installments in the franchise have all been animated.

For my personal experiences, my earliest and strongest recollection at all related to this movie is reading the novel about the time the original movie came out. I have long since debated with myself and others if the novel should be considered a provocative thought experiment or a sign that the author was already losing his mind. At face value, it’s an outrageous rightwing fantasy, yet there are too many nuanced details to dismiss it as simply reactionary, including what are still impressively positive depictions of women in combat. The movie, by an outspoken liberal, mostly sidestepped any argument about the politics in favor of sheer nihilistic spectacle, albeit one in which the young and idealistic space Nazis drop straight into a meat grinder. With that strange backdrop, a follow-up made a good deal of sense, and the direct-to-video format offered more freedom than anyone was going to get from the studio system after Verhoeven’s uneven reception. I personally knew of the ongoing franchise but never cared enough to look into it until I ordered this one, I suppose in part for the startlingly late date. I watched it with few expectations, while I was unpacking junk, and was pleasantly surprised… for a while.

What stands out from the start is that this is a smart expansion of the franchise universe. We get a sense of the homefront politics behind the war machine, and the infighting and factions that would presumably exist. It’s most intriguing to see a specified stance on religion, a subject Heinlein was more open about than other “Golden Age” writers, which we find has been marginalized but not overtly suppressed by the Federation. The issues are condensed to a microcosm once Lola is dropped on the rogue planetoid with the pious Holly and the increasingly erratic sky marshal.  The core problem is that by the time the central story arc gets in gear, this is feeling like what other films, including both the first movie and Robocop, have done better. We see that the Federation’s leaders are corrupt and treacherous as well as probably incompetent, but that doesn’t make up for uneven pacing and too many characters who are neither likable nor interesting. It doesn’t help that even Rico starts to feel like a side character in his own movie, to the point that it’s tempting to re-envision the movie following Lola all the way.

Of course, we can’t leave out the Bugs themselves. The drones are as good as ever, though by now the attacking hordes seem like imitations rather than the breakthrough they really were when the first movie came out. Things get more interesting as the focus shifts to the castaways, in large part because the Bugs adopt surprisingly cautious tactics, and there’s an effective interlude as we meet the captive Brain from the first movie. Then the story reaches inspired insanity with the gradual reveal of the giant Brain Bug, which looks and feels more like something out of the Cthulhu Mythos than a hard sci-fi franchise. What’s genuinely intriguing is that it really does approach god-like status in its evident power, at least over the other Bugs. It begs the question whether the revelations given to those in its thrall are just an act or grasping for the closest human analogy to its place in the Bugs’ hierarchy. Unfortunately, like many things, this doesn’t get developed much further. There is at least further amusement in watching the faceoff with the mech suit troopers, which are generic in design and clearly subpar in the quality of effects but still as effective visually as they are militarily.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m having a bit of trouble because I’m writing this review a lot longer after the viewing than usual and well after sending back the disc I used for it. The real difficulty, however, was checking the details of the scene I quickly had in mind and making sure it wasn’t really several scenes split up. With help from a sketchy online video, I found what I was looking for a little past the hour mark. It starts with a quarrel between Lola and one of the crew, ending with a slap in the face for the complaining ship’s cook. He announces his intent to return to the lifepod, and the crew pauses as he starts to wander off. Of course, the Bugs quickly appear, but uncharacteristically, they scurry out of site when Lola shouts a warning to the loner. For a few moments, he disbelieves the others, until the Bugs reappear. At least three come after them, but only one stays on his trail as he runs for a group of strange structures Lola has previously examined, which look more like termite mounds than anything else. He actually makes it to safety, and the Bug backs away after failing to find a big enough gap. Lola promptly warns him to come back, saying, “Those aren’t rocks!” Holly then declares they should all use the limited shelter, when the sky marshal simply says, “It belongs to God.” What happens next isn’t much of a surprise but done well enough to be better seen than described, a clever moment in what has so far remained a clever movie.

In closing, I find myself coming back to the first movie, which I had very seriously considered for this feature, and finally held up this review long enough to watch again. The original movie wasn’t quite like anything made before, and that in itself was credit enough to the book. It was inevitable that the sequels would lose that sense of novelty, if only because other movies outside the franchise inevitably followed its lead. The present movie should serve as a reminder what a “good” sequel should be, even where its actual quality is unquestionably poorer. It asks questions that the first movie didn’t answer, and questions the answers the original already gave, which is enough to put it ahead of any number of flashier sequels and reboots. It’s good enough for a direct-to-video sequel, and that’s enough for me to give it a pass.