STARSHIP TROOPERS 2 (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Though the Campbellian function remains the same in these two sequels to the 1997 original, the underlying myth-narratives change quite a bit from film to film.

In my review of STARSHIP TROOPERS. I categorized it as an irony because:

In an irony, even if the main characters seem to triumph in the end, there's always a subtle downside to their apparent victory.

TROOPERS was consistent throughout in terms of ironizing the struggle of young hot-looking human beings against squirmy, squishy bugs. TROOPERS 2 keeps the original's writer Ed Neumeier but takes on as director Phil Tippett, who executed visual effects on the first film as well as many other FX-films going back to STAR WARS.  As Tippett and Neumeier comment on the DVD track, TROOPERS 2, being far less well-funded than the original, pursued the course of many low-budget direct-to-video efforts: it follows the narrative of the horror film.

I've commented on my other blog that works in the horror genre most often imitate the Fryean mythos of the drama.  In that mythos, tragedy and defeat are strongly possible-- or at least more possible than they are in most adventure and comedy mythoi-- though not inevitable.  Though the characters of TROOPERS 2 are not much more well-rounded than those of Verhoeven's original, they are a trifle more sympathetic by virtue of the type of horror narrative used here-- which Neumeier calls "the haunted castle."

There's only a hint of the heavy FX-action toward the beginning of the film.  Then the story takes on the aspect of what television shows call a "bottle episode," in which all the action takes place on one principal set.  A detachment of Earth soldiers, cut off from air support on a bug-infested planet, takes refuge in an abandoned outpost.  There they find one man left behind in the brig: Captain Dax (Richard Burgi), arrested for having killed his superior officer.  With Dax's help, the co-ed infantry repulses another bug attack, and then tries to settle in until help can arrive.  However, they take in a few other soldiers that apparently survived encounters with the enemy, only to learn that they aren't what they seem.  Think ALIEN meets "wolf in sheep's clothing."

The assorted conflicts and tensions within the pressure-cooker environment are fairly pedestrian.  By default Dax emerges as the strongest protagonist, as heroine Pvt. Sahara (Colleen Porch) learns that he no longer considers himself a "hero of the federation" (the film's subtitle) because he's realized what a fucked-up mess the ruling Earth-government is.  Dax makes explicit all the anti-fascist criticisms that the 1997 film left implicit, thus dispersing the ironic impact. Neumeier's script still include a few ironic touches, but Dax's superior point-of-view allows for much more dramatic identification-- though to be sure, the captain still gives up his life fighting alien bugs.  His legacy at the film's end is that Sahara is allowed to see the federation's duplicity; a feat impossible for Johnny Rico, viewpoint character for the Verhoeven work.  TROOPERS 2 is watchable but nothing special.

ADDENDUM 3-18-19: For reasons stated in this essay, I've altered some of the determinations made in this review, one being that I've decided that TROOPERS 2 does align with the mythos of irony rather than that of drama.