I’ve been sort of looking forward to this new STARSHIP TROOPERS, and if you got a problem with that too bad because I’ve gotten enough “are you gonna review Starship Troopers 3?” emails to know that we can take you. Ed Neumeier takes over as director this time, which means the satirical tone remains since this is the guy who wrote all three STARSHIP TROOPERS as well as ROBOCOP. And, uh, ANACONDAS: THE HUNT FOR THE BLOOD ORCHID. I didn’t know that, I just found that out on IMDB. Hmmm. I had not considered watching that one. This changes everything. This could be the big one.
If you saw STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION you may or may not remember that it was pretty different from the first one. They scaled it down for DTV, making it into mostly a one-location siege kind of story and incorporating smaller bugs that implant themselves in people’s brains or something. The good part is it was directed by the effects legend Phil Tippett so it ended up having the best effects I’ve seen in a DTV movie.
For part 3 they got somebody else doing the effects (pretty crappy) but the story is much more in line with the first one. It expands on the mythology and themes of the STARSHIP TROOPERS universe in a somewhat charmingly cheap-ass DTV sort of way. A lightly grizzled Casper Van Dien returns as Johnny Rico “the hero of Planet P,” now a colonel and still following orders to bravely kill the shit out of swarms of giant alien bugs who threaten freedom and liberty and all that. The war goes on and has escalated a little bit because there is a new piece of bug technology, a sort of bug grenade that’s like a huge pill bug that gets tossed into your trench, opens up and shoots out electricity. I like that. Not that much of a threat to the humans though, at least compared to their new Q-Bomb, which can crack a planet in half. (more…)
