What happened with Starship Troopers?
August 18, 2005So I was flipping thru the cable TV last night and two channels near each other had competing movies based on books. Spike (Channel 41) was showing The Hunt for Red October, while TNT (42) was showing Starship Troopers.
What exactly went wrong with Starship Troopers? Like Red October it’s based on a good solid book so it can’t be the source material. And like that other book-based movie it was directed by somebody with more than a passing familiarty with the action/adventure genre, Paul Verhoeven. Robocop remains one of the best sci-fi/satires ever and he was clearly aiming for the same tone with Troopers but missed badly. So he shares some of the blame.
Can we blame the rest of Trooper’s failure on the cast? C’mon, any movie with Doogie Howser has something going for it. But boy was that Casper Van Dien an awful horrible actor. Though he did somehow manage to work steadily after the Troopers disaster, mostly direct-to-video stuff but hey it’s a living.
Strangely I own both these movies on DVD, and even more strange was that I spent time last night watching both on cable instead. But of the two, only Red October made me want to go re-read the original book. Which I think I just may do during my vacation next week.
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