Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven and released in 1997, is a visually stunning and action-packed science fiction film based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein. Set in a distant future where Earth is at war with a race of giant insect-like aliens known as the Arachnids, the movie follows a group of young military recruits as they join the fight to protect humanity. Starship Troopers is still one of my favorite books. I enjoyed the movie too, even though the director Paul Verhoeven had his own take on the novel.
The film boasts impressive special effects, thrilling battle sequences, and an engaging futuristic setting. The visual effects are top-notch and decades later still hold up. The special effects team did an impressive job creating massive arachnids, and futuristic military technology brought to life in a way that captivates the audience from start to finish.
I never knew that the movie Flesh and Blood with Rutger Hauer was directed by Verhoeven. He also directed Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct. So many viewers simply did not get the sci-fi film’s self-aware satire. He did a great job directing Soldier of Orange, also filmed using actor Rutger Hauer. I’ll save my criticism of this movie for a future film review. Enjoy the trivia:
TRIVIA
In a 2016 interview, Casper Van Dien revealed a funny incident when he was picking up his two daughters from school, “I went by the line at school to pick up my kids. You know, you drive up to the school and when I get there and there are these six 10 and 8 year old boys hanging out with my daughters. I pull up in the line and the boys go, ‘Johnny Rico! Why didn’t you tell us your dad was Johnny Rico?’ And I said, ‘What are you boys doing watching STARSHIP TROOPERS?’ And they said, ‘Our dads made us watch it with them!’ Then my daughters get in the car and my 10-year-old says, ‘Dad, were you really naked in STARSHIP TROOPERS?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘How could you do that to me?!’ Then my 8-year-old says, ‘Wait, like naked naked?’ And I said “Yup,” and she said, ‘Oh my God, my life is ruined!’ That was the longest three-minute ride home I have had in my life.”
Director Paul Verhoeven and stars Dina Meyer and Casper Van Dien confirmed that Verhoeven and cinematographer Jost Vacano shot the co-ed shower scene in the nude themselves, on a dare from Meyer. On the day of the shoot, Verhoeven had asked the cast to do a little “fashion show without fashion” so that they could get comfortable being naked. When the cast was reluctant to disrobe, Verhoeven asked them what the big deal was, to which Meyer responded, “Paul, if it’s no big deal, why don’t you do it?” Quite unexpectedly, Verhoeven got undressed, as well as Vacano (who had been raised in a nudity camp). After an initial shock (Van Dien reportedly yelled “Oh God! Dina! Why!?”) and a good laugh from the cast, the scene was filmed without problems.
Michael Ironside was Casper Van Dien’s mentor on the film – as his character mentor and also in real life, behind the scenes and on set. “And I still hear his voice and everything, when I’m acting, to this day. The same goes with Clancy Brown. Both of them, they influenced me more than they know.”
A miniature Millennium Falcon can be seen on the backside of one of the starships’ bridges.
Several scenes were filmed following Carmen (Denise Richards) coming to grips with the supposed death of Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien), while starting a relationship with Zander (Patrick Muldoon). However, test audiences started to hate her character for hooking up with another man so soon after the death of her former lover, and were very vocal about it. The scenes were subsequently deleted, although a relationship between Carmen and Zander is still implied in the rest of the movie.
The year in the movie is 2197.
Director Paul Verhoeven’s favorite movie of his own.
In a 2014 interview with Empire Magazine, director Paul Verhoeven said of the shower scene, “Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven’t seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets.”
Neil Patrick Harris was often called “Doogie Himmler” whenever he wore the military intelligence uniform as it bore a resemblance to SS uniforms. The name is a joke after Harris’ TV series Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989) and a reference to SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
Most of the arachnids appearing on film are CGI but a few life-sized, robotic models were built. However, during the battle scenes, the actors wound up looking at director Paul Verhoeven himself who would stand in front of them and jump and scream at them even chasing them with a broom to elicit their reactions attempting to generate some of the fearsomeness of a 12-foot space ant Clancy Brown affectionately described the director as “a nutbag”, given to “jumping up and down with a bullhorn going, ‘I’m a big fucking bug! I’ll kill you!’ I loved him; he was so much fun.”
Body Count: 256
Casper Van Dien really punched Patrick Muldoon in the face giving him a bloody lip during the fight scene at Ticonderoga space station; Patrick Muldoon stated in an interview that Casper “hits hard”.
Director Paul Verhoeven admits to have never finished the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both bored and depressed, calling it “a very right-wing book” in Empire magazine. He then told screenwriter Edward Neumeier to tell him the rest. Verhoeven and Neumeier then decided that while both the novel and its author Robert A. Heinlein strongly supported a regime led by a military elite, they would turn the concept around and satirize it, making the film a hyperbole of contemporary American politics and culture. Diehard Heinlein fans declare that the filmmakers have completely misinterpreted Heinlein’s nature and intentions. They say he was a libertarian who opposed conscription and militarism. He depicted the oligarchy-by-ex-military-citizenry government in the book because it was an example of something that has never been done in real life. He was not advocating it, but was merely speculating that such a system could exist without collapsing.
In a 2014 interview on The Adam Carolla Show (2013), Michael Ironside, who read the book as a youth, said he asked director Paul Verhoeven, who grew up in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, “Why are you doing a right-wing fascist movie?” Verhoeven replied, “If I tell the world that a right-wing fascist way of doing things doesn’t work then no one will listen to me, so I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everyone is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing fucking bugs!”
During filming Jake Busey (Ace) suffered heat stroke after working all day in 120 degrees desert sun, this stopped production for a week, when he recovered several large holes were cut into his uniform so he could cool off, many other cast members suits had this modification as well in order to prevent further cases on average there were 25 people per day being treated for heatstroke during filming.
To avoid an NC-17 rating, 4 seconds had to be trimmed from a decapitation during the last battle at the Whiskey Outpost base. However the four seconds can be seen in the version on the FX network.
In the director commentary on the Blu-ray DVD Paul Verhoeven stated showing the mutilated bodies on FedNet was to encourage more people to join the Federation, the cow being censored was due to PETA animal supporters, and the experiments on the Brain Bug were censored as it was classified information.
More ammunition was used in this film than in any previous movie. According to veteran weapons coordinator Robert “Rock” Galotti, the crew expended over 300,000 blank rounds during the course of filming — a personal record at the time.
FedNet was created to help establish the satire in a way similar to RoboCop (1987), another Paul Verhoeven film.
The DVD audio commentary by director Paul Verhoeven was one of the first to be accompanied by a disclaimer stating that the opinions in the commentary belong to the speaker and not necessarily reflect the opinion of the movie studio. Such disclaimers became commonplace in the following years.
Dale Dye was the movie’s Military Adviser, reportedly putting the main actors through a one-week-long intense boot camp, just like all of his other films.
Casper Van Dien gets stopped and asked about his role in the film all the time, “I get tweeted about it. I just did a funny show called Crunch Time that’s going to come out, and the whole thing is, basically I was playing the perfect version of myself, but a lot of the quotes that I was doing were from Starship Troopers. I’ve also done a Noobz where I played a version of me, with quotes from Starship Troopers again, and there’s been a lot of movies where I’ve done quotes from Starship Troopers over and over again, because this movie just–it’s a part of who I am. My daughter sent me a meme recently where it’s like, ‘Desire to know more.’ It’s a headshot of me from Starship Troopers and I put that up as my [profile image] and everybody said, ‘Hey, I’m glad you’re embracing your meme.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know what that means, but I’m doing it.'” [Laughs]
Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Edward Neumeier had unprecedented freedom in making the movie because management at Sony kept changing all the time. By the time that studio executives finally saw footage, Verhoeven had already compiled a rough cut of the movie.
The battle gear was later reused in Power Rangers Lost Galaxy (1999) and the show Firefly (2002) in the episode “The Train Job”.
Casper Van Dien was thrilled that Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier–the director and writer-producer of the film–and Alan Marshall all wanted him, exclaiming, “I was super impressed that that was the case. And I get on the set, and Captain Deladier, who was the Marine who was training all of us, we had done a boot camp and everything, the entire film all he would do is go, “Rico!” I don’t know if he knew who I really was, but he’d go, “Rico! Make sure the troops have all the water!” So I’d, as Johnny Rico, I’d have to go around to my two battalion commanders, and then I’d have to go down to each squad leader and then platoon leader and then each person and ask how they were doing on the water, so you know, sometimes we had 1,400 extras and I’d go and talk to every single one of them. So it was amazing.”
Edward Neumeier started writing an original script called “Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine”. When similarities with the Robert A. Heinlein novel were pointed out, the novel was optioned and the name licensed.
Although they play high school graduates, Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, and Patrick Muldoon were all 29 when they made the film.
Involved with the project since 1990, Phil Tippett witnessed the screenplay go through many changes. While the script was evolving, the world of visual effects evolved, too, as did the techniques planned to create the alien bugs. Tippett said, “The whole story was completely different in the early ’90s… we started thinking about it back then, and mind you this was back in the pre-digital, pre-Jurassic Park (1993) days. We considered using traditional model photography, either stop motion or puppetry, and then of course everything changed in 1993 with JURASSIC PARK.” It was directly after his involvement with JURASSIC PARK that Tippett Studio art director Craig Hayes, Paul Verhoeven, Alan Davidson, Edward Neumeier, and Tippett got together and started thinking about what the bugs would look like. “After JURASSIC, we generally decided that we could go digital with the bugs.”
The “Bug planet” scenes (Klendathu, Tango Urilla, Planet P) were filmed in the Badlands of Hell’s Half Acre in Natrona county Wyoming. During filming in the park, it was nearly a 110 degrees which prompted the production crew to let the actors and extras to wear only their black t-shirts under the armor, because the neck wrap and the jacket is made out of thick rubber wetsuit /clothing which is very hot to wear.
In an interview with ComingSoon, Casper Van Dien spilled the beans on how a newspaper helped underage audiences see a violent R-rated movie. “The New York Times did a piece where they gave 1000 13- and 14-year-old boys tickets to Bean (1997) to see if they could sneak into ‘Starship Troopers’ because people were doing that a lot at multiplexes then. After that they had to put the kibosh on it. They think we would have doubled our income so instead of 25 million it would have been 50 if it had been a PG-13 film.”
The Arkelian sand beetle dissection scene was director Paul Verhoeven’s favorite scene filmed.
In the DVD commentary, director Paul Verhoeven states his intentions clearly – the film’s message is that “War makes fascists of us all.” He evoked Nazi Germany’s fashion, iconography, and propaganda because he saw it as a natural evolution of the post-WWII United States: “I’ve heard this film nicknamed ‘All Quiet on the Final Frontier’,” he said. Screenwriter Edward Neumeier broadly concurs, although he sees the film as a satire on human history rather than solely on the U.S.
Some critics in the Netherlands, Paul Verhoeven’s native country, jokingly referred to the movie as ‘Soldier of Orange in Space’, referring to Soldier of Orange (1977), one of Verhoeven’s earlier Dutch movies. Both movies are about a group of friends who each go their separate ways when war is declared. Some end up working together, while others find themselves at odds with each other.
An actual Bug from the movie was exhibited in the entry of the main gallery at the 1997 World Science Fiction Convention held in San Antonio, Texas over Labor Day Weekend.
17 gallons of fake blood were used throughout the movie.
Mark Wahlberg turned down the role of Johnny Rico.
Some of the walls were reused from Total Recall (1990) (another film directed by Paul Verhoeven).
The use of Nazi imagery for the film’s American heroes occasioned comment at the time of the film’s theatrical release; the filmmakers did not explain their reasons for this choice with the result that some viewers interpreted it as satire, while others read it as a celebration of Fascism. Ironically, Robert A. Heinlein, a very independent leaning man, wrote the novel as a satire of a military regime he disapproved of, but filmmakers Paul Verhoeven and Edward Neumeier described him in interviews as a right wing militarist.
Lieutenant Willy is played by Steven Ford, the son of former U.S. President Gerald Ford.
Casper Van Dien revealed in an interview that this is the movie and role that he’s most known for. Fans at conventions refer to him by his character’s name of Johnny Rico which he greatly admires.
The film features the first co-ed shower scene in a mainstream American movie. One had been scripted for Aliens (1986), but the actresses involved weren’t too enthusiastic about it, and the scene was not deemed important enough. Director Paul Verhoeven had intended to show one in RoboCop (1987), but timing and pacing issues prevented this. He finally succeeded in getting one on the screen ten years later.
In the commentary track on the DVD or Blu-ray release, director Paul Verhoeven remarks that he had hoped to cast actors whose age closely matched that of the characters and indeed of real-world soldiers, but the producers felt such actors would look too young, the teacher and the lieutenant of the Roughnecks in the novel are combined into one role played by Michael Ironside.
Lighting the bugs was an interesting challenge, as well, due to the varying conditions in which the bugs were to exist – both in harsh daylight and simulated moonlight situations. Lead technical director Larry Weiss supervised the lighting designs, among other duties. “In lighting the bugs in the daylight shots, we tried to recreate the lighting that an actual sky would produce, using a combination of lights acting as aerials, and a group of lights aiming up from the ground, in addition to the key (the sun), whose position was based on positioning data from the set.” Using reference footage taken on location, including photographing a grey sphere and scale maquettes of the bugs, “we determined the color and intensity of each of those lights. It was a very accurate way of making the bugs appear as if they actually exist in the background plate.”
Phil Tippett added, “Much of the way the bugs moved was dictated by Craig’s designs… we did a lot of animatics, and assigned the bugs weights and the extent of its movements to come up with an animation design, to see how realistically these beings could move and run and attack. We also did months and months of research, including watching lots of documentary books and videos on various insects and bugs.”
Casper Van Dien’s favorite of his movies and his favorite role being Johnny Rico.
Critical reaction to the film at the time tended toward the negative. Especially the Washington Post savaged the film for its perceived glorification of Nazi symbolism and totalitarian regimes. Analysts noted that after a strong $22 million opening weekend, the poor critical reception was most likely responsible for a 50% drop in revenue during the film’s first week in cinemas. However, the first signs of critical re-appraisal came in 2001, when parallels were noted between the War on Terror in Afghanistan and the film’s patrolling marines on the bug planets. In 2012, Slant Magazine ranked the film #20 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 1990s. In 2017, The Guardian claimed that “this is no longer science fiction, it has become reality”, and in 2020, David Roth of The New Yorker even praised the film as visionary, as it had eerily predicted “the past decades of decadence, decay, rising institutional violence and unrestricted bad taste”.
The combat helmets were repainted again and used by the SWAT team at the end of Planet of the Apes (2001), whose star Mark Wahlberg who was considered for the role of Johnny Rico.
Among the movie’s famous fans are directors Martin Scorsese, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, and Oliver Stone, as well as former President of the USA Bill Clinton.
The film won Saturn Awards for Best Costumes and Best Visual Effects at the 1998 Academy of Science Fiction, fantasy and horror films, USA Awards.
The design of the bugs are slightly revised from an unused monster design for Tremors II: Aftershocks (1996). During the making of Tremors 2, they developed two monster designs for ‘shriekers’ in that movie. One was used for Tremors 2, and the other was slightly revised and used for Starship Troopers. Both film’s special effects were supplied by Phil Tippett, who had been working on the two films at the same time. If you look closely, the bug warriors share the mandibles as the graboids from Tremors (1990).
The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Visual Effects along with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and Titanic (1997). The film lost to Titanic (1997).
Clancy Brown believes that the movie, is Paul Verhoeven’s warning to America. “It really exposes a lot of who he is, and how he thinks about the world, and especially us. He was saying, ‘Be careful – this mindset is going to get you in trouble.’ I think that warning still stands.”
The band at the graduation party plays a David Bowie song called “I Have Not Been to Oxford Town.” The lyrics are reworked a bit to refer to the 22nd century rather than the 20th.
There were over 1,400 extras in the film.
James Cameron was attached to direct at one point.
SOURCE
IMDB
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