Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

[dvandom]

Short form: not horrible, but still nowhere near as good as the Roughneck Chronicles cartoon. I mean, yeah, the mecha do show up for about five minutes at the end, but they're not all that impressive. The plot is pretty transparent, even making allowances for...well, for being Starship Troopers 3. Oh, and there's a shoehorned in nude scene as the pilots get scanned for their interface suits.

For the most part, it tries to be as sarcastic and satirical as the first movie, but it tries too hard and goes over the top in bad ways. The movie is just too earnest about the things the filmmakers seem to care about, trying too hard to do a sort of "reverse strawman" by setting up good things as strawmen for the supporters of bad things. Or something like that. And sometimes it's like the movie makers couldn't decide what they were satirizing...for instance, is religion good or something to mock? In some scenes it's one way, in others it's the other way.

I get the impression that different writers had different goals in mind, and the editors didn't worry too much about making sense of it all. So we get a movie that's trying to be deep, but in several different and sometimes mutually contradictory directions, resulting in a schizoid mess that undermines even the "cheese entertainment" level that the movie would otherwise have achieved.

On the effects end...it's okay. The warrior bugs look a little better, but the ballyhooed scorpion bug is pretty weak. Both it and the Uber Brain Bug look like bad 80s live action effects. And they couldn't even spring for updates of some of the CG models made by Roughneck Chronicles. The hand-grenade bug was okay.

All in all, when I think back to people saying when this came out that it was better than Starship Troopers 2...I shudder to think how badly 2 must've sucked.

Comments

[loki-liesmith.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen 3 yet, but what I saw of 2 was HORRIBLE. Not even direct-to-dvd, I saw (part of) it on the Action Encore channel a week before it was released on disc. The plain simple fact that Johnny Rico is back automatically makes it better than 2. Which is a shame, because I freaking love the first one.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

In the making-of featurettes, they talk about 1 a lot, but never mention 2. :)