Bullet Points: Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars
The biggest problem with the Starship Troopers franchise has been that the first film is so damned good and the rest are not the first one. Every single movie since then has essentially lived off of the scraps of that first movie and many of the good lines, characters, and story lines are based on the original picture by Paul Verhoeven. The original movie was 100% Verhoeven. It had his usual wit, love for violence and gore, and bare-breasted women for me to enjoy. But every movie in the Starship Troopers franchise since then has ignored that Verhoeven satirical quality that made the film work so well and instead given us straight-up action movies with humans facing off against giant bugs. I’ll never be the type of person to hate a movie for delivering mindless action so let’s dive into this new Starship Troopers film with all the stupid hope that we can muster.
Synopsis: Colonel Johnny Rico is training fresh troops from the colony on Mars when the planet comes under attack from a hidden force of bugs. They find that they’re trapped on the planet with no help from the Federation, and it just might be that the Federation had planned the entire thing from the beginning. The only chance for Rico and his bloodless troops is to fight their way out.
- Would You Like to Know More: There isn’t much to know going into this movie. If you’re watching this movie then you must have some sort of connection with the franchise or at least the original movie. If that’s the case then you’ll know that Johnny Rico was the star and hero of the first film and now he’s a grizzled Colonel who somehow got stuck training a bunch of lazy Martians. Some bugs attack and the movie just kind of takes off.
- Martian Millennials: There is nothing worse than a bunch of millennials….except for when they’re born and raised on Mars! These guys and gals that Rico is forced to train are some of the worst soldiers in the Federation, no doubt, but they also complain about having to train every day. Like it’s some crazy notion that infantry would train multiple times a week! Rico tries to whip them into shape but he barely gets them out of the diaper stage before the bugs attack and they start dying off.
- Number Don’t Lie: FedNet says that 73% of Martian would rather drink beer than fight bugs. I would have expected that to be much higher. I love a good fight but everyone knows that beer makes everything better.
- Returning, Sort of: Animated versions of Carmen Ibanez and Carl Jenkins show up sans Denise Richards and Neil Patrick Harris. Would it have played better with the two actors voices? Sure. But it really did feel like they were shoving two characters into a movie where they really had no reason being in the first place. They play Carl off as a super weirdo and Carmen doesn’t do anything that she didn’t do in the first film.
- Dizzy: What Traitor of Mars does do that hasn’t been done before it bring back Dina Meyer as Dizzy Flores. Yeah, Dizzy died in the first movie but she isn’t a reanimated corpse or anything. Dizzy’s character also felt a little forced but it was very cool to hear her back and forth with Casper’s Johnny Rico. I would love for the release of this film to do well so we could potentially get more adventures of Rico, each time giving us new interactions with the Dizzy character along the way.
- Bugs are Bugs are Bugs: This film doesn’t even try to mix up the formula of the arachnids. They are the same old bugs from the first movie. We don’t see any new species of bug, no new underground submarine bugs or anything, and it was probably for the best. Movies like this aren’t making their money from introducing new types of arachnids if it doesn’t have to do with the plot in a big way. The bugs continue to die in massive numbers, run headlong into machine gun fire, and bite people in half.
- The Action: It’s no secret that it’s easier to film massive fights using CGI than to film it with actors and actual locations. This movie has plenty of bug killing action. It has Rico and his troopers fighting on an alien world (which has been terraformed) killing the same nameless, faceless bugs that we’ve seen in the past. There is no diplomacy between man and bugs and Traitor of Mars understands that a movie like that needs to have a different kind of villain. That villain turns out to be a little stupid, in my opinion. No matter how many times you try to tell me someone is the smartest person alive I’m not going to believe it if they’re constantly doing stupid shit. Either way, the action works for the type of movie that it is but it would have been so amazing to see some real people shooting bugs again. For old times sake…
Get suited up for these Bonus Bullet Points:
- What happened to Dizzy’s hair and how long do I have to wait to see her CGI naked body?
- Surprise attacks should never show up on social media before they’re launched.
- We need a television show called “Who should we blame this time”. It feels like it would be highly successful.
- Kamikaze Martians!
- If Colonel Rico really likes something you say, he might get it tattooed on his ass.
The Verdict: Traitor of Mars is an enjoyable enough movie, it’s just not the movie that I wanted. If it had starred the real life versions of all the actors with a $100 million budget then I would have be ecstatic but I understand that those things don’t grow on trees and this might be the best way to keep the Starship Troopers franchise alive for the time being. It’s great to hear Casper Van Dien voice the character that launched his career and it was cool for Dina Meyer to reprise her role as well. It’s always much harder to connect with the characters when they’re CGI than if they’re living flesh but it doesn’t make Traitor of Mars any less fun. The finale was a bit of a letdown but it’ll definitely hold us over until we can finally get that proper sequel where CVD is grizzled and badass, barking orders out to his men while mowing down aliens with a shoulder-mounted mini-gun.
