WATCH: Oliver retro-reviews Starship Troopers

March 24th, 2013 by Irwin Fletcher Comments

Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us, he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Starship Troopers… we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…

Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…

The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.

“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…”

Starship Troopers

Based on the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers arrived in late 1997 produced on a huge budget of $100 million and only made back $120 million! Many believed it was successful but its budget was just too high to recoup much of a profit. However, when it hit video it made enough back to warrant two direct-to-dvd sequels.

This was the second team up of the guys behind Robocop, so you get a similar vibe with this movie, using a heavy use of satire. Where the novel was taking itself very seriously, this goes in the other direction and makes fun of the subject matter with its tongue firmly in its cheek. Casting many young actors with little experience or just bit parts in TV shows, their performances come across as really cheesy and it’s done on purpose which did upset the fans of the book and takes away any serious tone that the film has remaining. This is one of the rare cases where the visual effects have not dated one bit. There are loads of flicks from the 90s that abused CGI and clearly looked dated today but Starship Troopers doesn’t suffer from that problem. Truly ahead of its time.

Starship Troopers still has a huge fan base and people still have a lot of affection for it, but I find it less rewatchable than Paul Verhoeven’s other sci-fi features , Robocop and Total Recall. Let’s find out why!

OLIVER’S REVIEW:

ORIGINAL TRAILER:

I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.