After Action Report: Starship Troopers (December 27, 2024)

[Bandit LOAF]

Greetings WingNuts,

It's safe to say that everyone in attendance loved Starship Troopers; we're probably all just about the right age for it. It holds up as both a giant fun action movie and a not-too-difficult to decode satire… you can't ask much more from a film! We talked about how the movie compares to other adaptations and mostly just had a great time.

As we discussed in the intro post, Starship Troopers was the 800 pound gorilla in the room when the Wing Commander movie was germinating. The fact that Sony greenlit a $100 million sci fi war blockbuster without any a-list stars created the financing environment that let Chris Roberts sell Wing Commander in the first place… and it meant that his more modest project would be compared to Verhnoeven's masterpiece every step of the way. And when Starship Troopers bombed at the box office, Wing Commander's investors got cold feet and the deal had to be reworked (ultimately giving FOX worldwide distribution rights).





Starship Troopers star Casper Van Dien (Johnny Rico) had a cameo as Confed Redshirt #3 in Wing Commander IV.

But AD found some interesting proof that Starship Troopers loomed large over Wing Commander creatively as well as financially: Basil Poledouris's SST score was used extensively when temp tracking Wing Commander. Temp tracks are existing music used when a film is being edited to indicate the overall feel that the director wants for the scene. Wing Commander used five tracks from Starship Troopers a total of about two dozen times! You can find AD's complete temp track spreadsheet here.

Klendathu Drop: Pegasus Attack, Flight Deck (Blair Arives), Maniac and Rosie showing off, Rescue by Deveraux's wing, Briefing, Drones offline, All Batteries fire

Brainbug: Diligent Arrives at the Claw, Brown Dwarf, Out of the crater, Concordia Battle Group, Blair meets Tolwyn

Punishment / Asteroid Gazing: Blair Meets Gerald and Sansky, Tiger Claw ambush/scramble, rescue by Deveraux's wing, Angel pulls a gun on Maniac, Prepping the Diligent

Destruction of Roger Young: Reconnoiter, Attacking the Comcon, Skipper Missile, Fish in a Barrel, Angel Contemplates ending it / Paladin is going to look for Angel

They Will Win!: Broadside success

It's nothing super specific but there is a general 'Wing Commander IV' feeling to a lot of Starship Troopers' aesthetic. Obviously a hundred million dollar blockbuster looks better than an eight million dollar video game but the set designers and prop makers sure feel like they're coming from the same place. Just compare Starship Trooper's shuttle to the one from Wing Commander IV. Both sets are incredibly similar in construction and how they're shot!









We also talked a lot about how Starship Troopers compared to the book. There were a lot of hardcore fans of the book that weren't happy at all about the movie for all sorts of reasons… but the one that really materialized in the discourse was not its message but that it didn't have the power suits. And that is absolutely true! Heinlein grabs his readers immediately with descriptions of the futuristic combat suits and then proceeds to start giving them civics lessons. Here it's the relatable, somewhat campy world that brings you in. We also referenced the 1988 Starship Troopers OVA which was once held up as an example of a great adaptation of the book. Unfortunately it turns out all that means is that it had cool robot suits; the actual story is a lot closer to the movie and/or just a general anime. If it weren't named Starship Troopers, no one would have thought of it in recent memory.

That said, there is someone that does borrow from the book very literally… Dr. William Forstchen when writing the Wing Commander novels. Fleet Action in particular has at least two very obvious steals. One is the scene where Juan is lectured about the USS Chesapeake which Forstchen borrows in Fleet Action to explain why Bear is monitoring Admiral Tolwyn's classified communications:

What Jason was confessing was somewhat outside the regulations but it showed careful planning and foresight on his part. If something had indeed happened to Concordia the young officer before him might very well have to take full responsibility for everything that transpired.

There was an ancient cautionary tale told in the service academies, the incident dating back to a war once fought between England and America. In an encounter between an American and British ship the commanding officer of the American vessel was mortally wounded, and the junior officer took him down below deck to the surgeon. In the short interval that followed all the other officers were hit and, without his even being aware of it, the junior officer was now in command. By the time he returned to the deck his ship had already been battered into submission and forced to surrender after barely putting up a fight. The junior officer was held responsible, court-martialed, and found guilty of dereliction of duty, a duty he was not even aware had suddenly come to rest upon his shoulders. The lesson was part of the tradition and backbone of the fleet—there is no excuse for defeat.

And then later in the book, he takes Starship Troopers' earring scene, meant to show how those not in the service can't understand those that are. Instead of earrings indicating a combat drop, he has gilded mugs that represent dying in your plane:

"Say, I like these mugs up here," the woman who had been talking to Jason announced, going up to the wall and taking one down. The bar went silent.

"Especially the ones with the gold handle. How can I get one?"

"You get killed in action, that's how. Gallagher gilds the handle of the mug when he hears that the owner bought a permanent piece of space," Jason said quietly, and the woman looked at him wide eyed and then turned pale.

Well, great artists steal!





Sully is glad the movie version didn't have any of those neodogs.

--
Original update published on December 27, 2024

 

[Bob McDob]

It's weird to think that Starship Troopers just barely broke even when it released. The film is so beloved now it's hard to believe that it didn't perform well, even if I can remember how unpopular it was on release. I remember Verhoeven and Neumeier saying years later that the film's biggest problem was that the audience wasn't old enough to see it, with Neumeier talking about how it was popular with his kid's elementary school friends and Verhoeven mentioning how kids snuck into theaters to see it. He also described it as a "100 million dollar art film" due to how lax Sony was with oversight... The real wonder is that Chris Roberts was able to spend a third of that on his film.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

Chris Roberts' true genius has always been his ability to convince people to give him large sums of money for projects. It's what made him such a good movie producer!

 

[Worf]

The problem with Starship Troopers are the fans wanted what the film didn't have - the movie didn't have the budget for the book's well known mech suits. So most adult fans were simply turned away by that. The kids, they didn't know better (and likely haven't read the book) so on its own, it's actually a really good movie.

Verhoeven applied his usual social commentary to the film, which still resonates strongly today in line with his other films.

 

[ChrisReid]

Verhoeven mentioning how kids snuck into theaters to see it.

Happy to say I was one of those underage people who say it in the theater (with a ticket, of course).

 

[Bandit LOAF]

The making of Starship Troopers has become so mythologized that it's hard to figure exactly, but I suspect a lot of the post-release protestations weren't quite true. With a $100 million budget in 1997 you could've found a way to do mech suits... if you wanted that. Which I suspect they didn't at all, since it undercuts the idea that the clearly desired idea that troopers are just cannon fodder.

 

[Bob McDob]

The making of Starship Troopers has become so mythologized that it's hard to figure exactly, but I suspect a lot of the post-release protestations weren't quite true. With a $100 million budget in 1997 you could've found a way to do mech suits... if you wanted that. Which I suspect they didn't at all, since it undercuts the idea that the clearly desired idea that troopers are just cannon fodder.

Verhoeven's worry was in his famous words that it would look like a "flea circus", which I can understand because that CGI film I bullied you into watching came off a bit like that, and that was 15 years later. Besides that Verhoeven has an appreciation for practical effects and I imagine that would've been hard to merge with live actors. Star Wars was only able to do it by going full CGI, and two years later, with slightly cartoonish aliens and mechanical robots instead of humans, and $15 million more budget. It wouldn't be until 2002 that Lucas would try to add humans, and even then they didn't take their helmets off. CGI troopers would've completely dictated how the film was shot, and Verhoeven's daughter worked in VFX so I imagine he had an understanding of the challenges. Given his previous near-disasters in Hollywood he and the producers were probably being cautious.

Happy to say I was one of those underage people who say it in the theater (with a ticket, of course).

Ha, did they not check your ID? In any case I imagine they were more worried about 8-year olds like the ones the New York Times paid off.

 

[Pedro]

Happy to say I was one of those underage people who say it in the theater (with a ticket, of course).

It was the second movie I saw underage (at a cinema anyway), the first being earlier on the same day.
Or maybe the third, I was thinking the first was the Full Monty but the dates don't quite work - but definitely saw two movies the day we saw Troopers, and it was the first 18 I would have seen.

 

[Bandit LOAF]

I guess it must've been a regional thing; growing up I never encountered any actual system for preventing you from seeing an age-inappropriate movie.