STARSHIP TROOPERS 3 (2008)

 

STARSHIP TROOPERS 3, in comparison to the second film in the series, is something of a return to form.  In the DVD commentary for the first sequel, Neumeier references John Ford's 1934 film THE LOST PATROL, which concerned a group of British soldiers lost in the Mesopotamian desert during WWI, menaced by Arab enemies and an "enemy within," a soldier who becomes lost in religious fanaticism.  Neumeier, wearing both writer and director hats this time, again isolates a detachment of soldiers from air support on a bug-world, but this time the heroes spend most of their time in the desert, and the "religious fanatic" is Marshal Anoke (Stephen Hogan), a prominent officer in Earth's Psychic Corps.  Neumeier develops a plotline seen at the end of the first film, in which Earth-forces captured a "brain bug" from the enemy forces.  It turns out that this bug is a plant, who essentially brainwashes Anoke to believe that God is really an even bigger "brain bug" on the very world where Anoke and the others become stranded.  (I really don't think I'm giving anything away here; Anoke's peculiar attitude and actions mark him as some sort of changeling-type early on.)

Though again the plotline is nothing unique, Neumeier returns the franchise to a more ironic stance.  For the first time there's a significant portrait of organized religion on the TROOPERS version of Earth.  But though it's briefly seen as a possible threat to the ruling powers, Neumeier quickly ironizes the social function of faith as much as that of military power, and by film's end the military has co-opted the power of religious imagery for their fascist agenda.  Perhaps the most inspired example of Neumeier's many satirical moments in the film is his deft rewriting of a line from the Verhoeven film, when the slogan "It's a good day to die"  is altered to "It's a good day to BUY."  In this line Neumeier captures the manipulativeness of the Iraq War years, during which President George W. Bush exhorted U.S. citizens to continue buying to stimulate the country's economy, and thus to indirectly support the continued military efforts in Iraq.

Incidentally, Johnny Rico, again essayed by Casper Van Dien, returns to this TROOPERS franchise here, but he's essentially unchanged and is used largely as "the cavalry" that comes to rescue the few humans that survive Anoke's betrayal, including former Vulcan Jolene Blalock.  And though it took three films to do so, the third in this franchise finally does adapt the one aspect of the Heinlein book that fans griped most about missing from the first adaptation-- the powered "mobile suits."  Given the budget of TROOPERS 3, the suits aren't exactly prepossessing, but I liked seeing them anyway.  But the real star of TROOPERS 3 is the return to irony, in which humans and bugs alike are seen as no damn good whatsoever.