Starship Troopers 3: Marauder
Year: | 2008 |
Studio: | Sony Pictures Entertainment |
Director: | Edward Neumeier |
Writer: | Edward Neumeier |
Cast: | Casper Van Dien |
It's eight years after the original bug war and everyone's still trying to forget the tragic box office response to Starship Troopers 2 by simply ignoring it.
Rico (van Dien) has been called back into service to lead a daring rescue. The new Sky Marshall - a devout Christian despite the ban on religion - and a small band of survivors have crash landed on a bug-infested planet, and after taking the fall for a disastrous assault on a remote outpost by the bugs, Rico is rescued from the hangman's noose by a former friend and current high ranking bureaucrat to conduct the rescue mission.
It starts out badly. In the opening battle scenes, the special effects seem to have been done by a small group of eight year olds with crayons and silly putty. Surprisingly things improve, the story moving along at a fairly cracking pace and the effects coming into their own (at least to straight to DVD standards).
The social commentary that made Paul Verhoeven's 1997 original such a subversive classic is also there, but it's less adeptly handled in Neumeier's hands, who does the little asides about the fascist Federation a little too cack-handedly to hit their targets as satire.
But it ends up a fairly rollicking romp that fans of the original should get something out of, if they can forgive the series after the steaming crap that was Starship Troopers 2.