Latest / All The Right Movies / Starship Troopers (1997) | Ep. 40 - Part 1

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Starship Troopers (1997) | Ep. 40 - Part 1 · All The Right Movies

• 0:04
  All the old movies, they came to our planet, they destroyed our
• 0:12
  cities. But on November 7th, they'll
• 0:17
  learn they messed with the wrong species.
• 0:32
  Starship Troopers opens everywhere Friday.
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  Starship Troopers opened in 1997 to a mixed response.
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  It's a typical science fiction story of interstellar warfare.
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  The film completed director Paul Verhoeven's Dutch trilogy and
• 0:46
  his growing reputation to sit among his most beloved films.
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  My name is John and the guys doing their part with me are
• 0:53
  Westy. They sucked his brains out.
• 0:57
  And Matt, the enemy cannot push a button.
• 1:00
  If you disable his. Hand all the right movies are in
• 1:04
  the 23rd century to talk brain sucking bugs and bloodthirsty
• 1:07
  bigots. So come on you apes, you want to
• 1:11
  live forever? Hello and welcome to all the
• 1:33
  right Movies, Roughnecks, Death From Above, and the podcast on
• 1:38
  Classic and Ted Films. Absolutely.
• 1:40
  This week we're back with the Dutch master.
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  Yes, yes, the Dutch master. I love that.
• 1:47
  We're with Paul Verhoeven in Bug City as we get into Starship
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  Troopers. Yes.
• 1:51
  Is that insane enough for you? Not yet.
• 1:53
  It'll get there. It will be.
• 1:55
  It will be. Before we begin the book hunt, a
• 1:58
  quick word about Patreon wouldn't go amiss.
• 1:59
  Why not? So if you're a regular listener
• 2:02
  to our ATRM Classic podcast, you can help support what we do by
• 2:05
  becoming an ATRM patron. Patrons get access to our bonus
• 2:09
  podcast episode called Double Feature and access to our whole
• 2:12
  podcast archive full of bonus episodes and archived ATRM
• 2:16
  Classic episodes. There's hundreds of hours worth
• 2:19
  of content in there now, including the other two entries
• 2:22
  in the Dutch trilogy, RoboCop and Total Recall.
• 2:24
  Yeah, or if a bunch of space soldiers blasting in Sectoid
• 2:29
  monsters is your thing, Aliens is there too.
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  Yes, it is. As well as a few episodes where
• 2:34
  Wesley mentions Warhammer 40,000.
• 2:36
  Yeah, of course. It might be on this as well.
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  You never can tell. Lots of non science fiction as
• 2:41
  well, so join up now by visiting patreon.com/all the right movies
• 2:46
  or you can subscribe directly on Apple Podcast or our hosting
• 2:49
  platform Pod Bean. Whichever you choose, service
• 2:52
  guarantee citizenship. Oh, absolutely.
• 2:54
  I don't need to know more. For the time being, though,
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  we're talking Starship Troopers. Yeah, your choice, wasn't it
• 3:02
  Westie? It was.
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  So why do you pull it up? Can I just say Starship Troopers
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  is the best film ever made? A masterpiece according to you,
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  isn't it? I'm not even.
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  Joking. What a fucking joy this is.
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  It's just one of the most misunderstood films of all time,
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  which makes it even more fun. Cultural fascism at its very
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  best. The satire at its very best.
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  Americanism, colonialism, periodism, militarism.
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  It's all in there and it's all just a feast on, but it's so
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  much fun at the same time. Never ever takes itself
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  seriously. I mean, I remember seeing this
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  in the cinema and I don't even remember how many times I went
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  to see it. It was just I wasn't doing
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  anything. I'll go to the cinema, wasn't
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  everything. I just walk up Starship.
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  It was on again. I'll just go and see that again
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  because it was just so much fun. Just take every single box for
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  me at the age that was at. It's razor sharp.
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  It's really funny and it's really, really, really fucking
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  intelligent. And it knows it is and it plays
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  on that and this is just going to be so much fun to talk about.
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  There's so many things to dive into.
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  I've got about 19 Westy theories on this, so there's lots to get
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  into here and I'm very, very excited to talk about.
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  I think it's going to be lots of fun.
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  Yeah, I saw this when I was a teenager as well.
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  Rented it from my local video store.
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  Didn't go to the Cinema Zodiac Video.
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  Did you not go to the cinema? Oh, you missed out.
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  But I loved it. I mean space travel set in the
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  future, a bit like Aliens and Denise Richards.
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  There we are. Everything a teenage may wanted.
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  Yep. Absolutely.
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  In fact, the following week I went back to Zodiac and rented
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  Wild Things and had my mind blown all over again.
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  In a totally different way though.
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  But Starship Troopers loved it at the time.
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  So much so that I then read the book by Robert Heinlein, which
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  is very different. Yeah.
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  And mostly, I was stunned to revisit the film a few years
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  later and see all this, like, political commentary and satire
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  that I was totally oblivious to the first time around.
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  Yeah. Yeah, same, yeah.
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  There's so much to get into. We'll talk about that subtext,
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  we'll talk about the book and like any Verhoven production,
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  they are some crazy and outrageous behind the scenes
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  stories. Really are?
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  So would you like to know more? Surely you would.
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  Absolutely. Let's click that next button.
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  I'm not. Are you doing your part?
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  I'm always doing my part, you know that.
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  That is true enough, yeah. Starship Troopers.
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  This is one of those films where I've done a real 180 on a dwarf
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  the Earth because I don't mind a bit and did not get it at all
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  when I saw this at the cinema. Oh really?
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  Really. It really went over my head and
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  I became that annoying guy whenever this film got brought
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  up. I'd like Starship Troopers.
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  More like Star Shit Troopers. Am I right?
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  That's quite good for you, man. I mean, some people say I've not
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  improved since then. What?
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  Happened to that sport like a bit.
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  I hit the pinnacle in 96. Yeah, that was me.
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  And I can't quite remember when or why, but I did watch it again
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  years later and it just clicked. Yeah, and I got it.
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  Because yeah, there is this surface layer to it that is
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  quite distracting in a lot of ways, and if you get hung up on
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  that surface layer you'll never get it.
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  But once you get past it, you realise what Verhoeven is doing
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  and it's just a wonderful joys thing.
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  Yeah, I mean, I didn't get it either when I first watched it,
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  but I still loved it. Yeah, exactly.
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  Me too. It was just so much fun, Yeah.
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  Because the nice riches is in there.
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  What's one of the reasons, yeah. Yeah, these are the reasons.
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  So Starship Troopers was produced by Tristar Pictures and
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  touched on pictures distributed by Tristar and released on
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  November the 7th, 1997. Filmed on location in
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  California, South Dakota and Wyoming.
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  It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, written by Edward
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  Neumeyer, adapted from Robert Heinlein's novel of the same
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  name, and stars Casper Van Dean as Johnny Rico, Denise Richards
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  as Carmen Ibanez, Neil Pat for Carlos as Carl Jenkins, and
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  Deena Maya at Dizzy Flores. What a cast.
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  Amazing. Let's go then, should we?
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  Let's. Do it.
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  We're joining the United Citizens Federation in the
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  beginning of Starship Groupers. Starship Cooper has opened with
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  a Federal network communication asking for sign ups for the
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  Mobile Infantry. We'll talk about the Fed net ads
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  later as we're starting with our character introductions.
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  Yeah, the craziness of boot camp is coming, but we're starting
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  before that at high school. We are.
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  So Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 23rd century.
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  We're at the education centre and don't hang about in meeting
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  almost every main character. Rico Carmen call and days are
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  all here as these scenes bring us teacher John Radcheck and his
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  questionable politics, should we say as well as a brutal game of
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  jump ball and the gang, is prom night party?
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  Yeah. So Wesley, what are your
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  thoughts? Well, I could never have gone to
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  school here. Everyone's just beautiful on
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  there. Everyone just looks amazing,
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  even if they're like crap at maths.
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  It doesn't really matter. But like, Ratchet is just so
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  full and I Inside is having so much fun here.
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  Yeah, it's absolutely wonderful to see him just, yeah, fire on
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  all these cylinders. Everything he says is just so
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  thick with just meaning and periodicism, and it's like
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  something given has no value. It's like, it must be great at
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  Christmas, you know what I mean? He just keeps reinforcing how
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  good violence is. Force is violence, Violence is
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  good. That's how you get through
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  things. He brings up Hiroshima, for fuck
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  sake. I know, like.
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  Wow, Jesus, How on the nose does this need to be?
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  And people And still now missing the point with all of this
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  because then it's overshadowed with these beautiful people and
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  there's back and forth romance. This kind of horrible teeny
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  bopper romance gets cocked by some bubble gum, you know what I
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  mean? It's just one of the moments
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  where you just think this is just ludicrous, but at the same
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  time it's got, it's really got something to say from the very
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  start. And it's just a classroom scene,
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  so the oven's not scared to just lay it on thick, lay it on fast,
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  lay it story in your face. And he does it so well.
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  And Ironside is so good at doing that here.
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  Yeah, I like all the school scenes, sets up the far right
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  opinions that people generally have in the film.
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  Yeah, I mean, like you say, Radcheck, talking about
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  Hiroshima like it was a great historical event is mental.
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  It's either far right or far left though, isn't it?
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  It's just it's both at the same time.
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  It's just like these extremes. Yeah, I mean, it does hit hard
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  nowadays. I think, 'cause I talking about
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  how our social scientists brought the world to the brink
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  of chaos, which Radcheck says. That kind of rhetoric sounds
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  really familiar nowadays. Yeah, fashion hasn't changed
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  much either, as is it's 2297. But apart from the Nazi
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  uniforms, everyone. Like it's 1994. 20 Beverly Hills
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  902 What? It wasn't it.
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  I was waiting for someone to show up in one of those T-shirts
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  to change color. When you breathe on them,
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  remember that. Global hypercolor.
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  Yeah, I remember that. But I do want to talk a bit
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  about the jump ball sequence, the sport that was saying we go
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  play. Yes, which looks insane.
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  Do you remember Speedball, the video game from the 90s?
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  Yesterday. Yeah, I had it for my Commodore
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  64 and it was basically jump ball, a bunch of lunatics with a
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  ball kicking the shit out of each other.
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  The jumps and the flips are crazy, but I love it.
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  It's kind of like roller ball, isn't it?
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  Well, with con. Yeah, I think it's influenced by
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  that most. Very much, yeah.
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  I think the whole feel of it with the action shot really
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  close up in the kind of booming noise of the crowd, really
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  intense. I think it's a good action
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  scene. Something that gets set up here
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  that doesn't change for me is that I instantly can't stand
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  Xander Rico's nemesis. Not supposed to, are you?
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  He's so smarmy. He's horrible.
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  Yes, Patrick Muldoon plays him really well, but yeah, he's so
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  smug. He wastes no time with Carmen.
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  He ends up in the crowd. She asked him if he's alright.
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  He doesn't know her at all and just goes I am now what you
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  doing after the game straighted. Absolutely sweating as well.
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  Yeah, really sweaty. He's like the first person to go
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  on the Wikipedia to change it to walls when someone dies.
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  But I think it's a good way to show speaker was competitive
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  side and Xander and is helps us buy it more easily when they all
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  turn into killers later on. Yeah, I don't know.
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  The Dina Mayo plays this. She improvised, hitting Rico on
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  the head to get attention in the huddle.
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  Yeah. Oh, nice.
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  That's a massive hit as well out though.
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  Yeah, he's really pissed off when he turns around, yeah.
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  Well, someone's got a slot from his sense into him.
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  Well, could I take a fucking sledge?
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  Am I aware? So the moment where Rico scores
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  a touchdown, he does a somersault over a couple of
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  players, which is fantastic. That was performed by a stuntman
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  called Joey Box. He did a flip from a ladder and
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  they cut it at the right time and the ladder was removed
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  digitally imposed. Oh, wow.
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  Yeah, it looks good. Just looks really good.
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  Yeah, Joey Boxes work on some Star Trek stuff as well as
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  stuntman, which is maybe why they got him in there.
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  Yeah, we'll go similar kind of thing.
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  That's. All good thought was going to be
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  peppered throughout. That, I mean, that's all I've
• 11:54
  got for. That all right?
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  OK, just for the sequence. But I mean, the stunts make no
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  sense. Why are the old superheroes
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  jumping like 20 feet in the air? But I think overall it does
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  work. Well, it sets up like, not
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  totally serious tone roving once and the kind of killer be
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  killed. Actually, that's drummed in the
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  young people at school, yeah. Yeah, I'm going to talk about
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  the graduation party after this because this scene is so funny.
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  It subverts every cliche you expect with it.
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  Like everyone's glam dressed up to the nines.
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  Carmen's father isn't home, so Rico's going to get some when
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  they go back later. But then yeah, call.
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  This. Horrible guy waving his hand in
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  between week and Carmen's faces just like you.
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  Absolute creep. Leave them alone.
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  And I hear that slow, like finger snapping dancing that
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  he's doing with tears. So disgusting.
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  Makes my skin crawl. I would have punched him in the
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  face if I'd seen him do that. Certainly not for the first
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  time. This only need to punch.
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  Yeah, so it does feel like it's going to be this stereotypical
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  teen drama graduation scene. You know, she likes him, but
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  he's with another girl. There's tension between these
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  two. So there's this whole love
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  triangle thing going on. And then Xander shows up dressed
• 13:03
  like a Nazi. I mean, it's not the last.
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  Almost overtime someone will dress like a Nazi, but it's
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  hilarious because that's not even the reason you're not
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  supposed to like him. You're not supposed to like him
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  because he's cracking on the Carmen.
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  So this seems to me it's it's this classic Starship Troopers.
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  It looks like one thing on the surface, but there's something
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  else to it entirely. I think we've coined a new
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  phrase there that is classic Starship Troopers.
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  Yeah, they're not backwards and going forward, these Brenners
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  aren't. This is all over, we go.
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  Even when he's with Carmen. Yeah, and Xander's still in
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  there, trying his luck. I know that the school scenes
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  were all filmed at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in
• 13:39
  California, which I think looks really good is the setting.
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  It's got like a futuristic kind of feel to it.
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  Yeah, looks great. And the scene where they all go
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  to get the math test results, that opening shots really good.
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  There's a kind of Metropolis style tilt down from the tower
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  to Carmen Enrico in the foreground.
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  Yeah, goes from like a digital background to the set.
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  Looks really good. And Rico's results, I'm
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  surprised he even got 35% to be honest.
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  Thick as Men's must have been an easy math test.
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  Yeah, but I mean, imagine all of your results on a massive screen
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  in front of everybody. Oh wow, that would be horrible.
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  Dreadful bit after this I really like is the dissection scene,
• 14:11
  because I really love those practical models of the smaller
• 14:14
  bugs. Really.
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  Gloopy. Yeah, the grid.
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  And as soon as you see them being dissected, you know it's
• 14:18
  not going to go down well with Carmen.
• 14:19
  And when she vomits after Rico gives her the bugs organs,
• 14:22
  that's Richard's. Just spit our mashed up bananas
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  there. Right.
• 14:26
  Yeah, it's a real looking vomit that I buy it.
• 14:29
  Really is. And that book, that practical
• 14:31
  effect, It looks brilliant. Do you recognize the teacher
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  here as well? Is she from Golden Girl?
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  She is, yeah. It's Blanche, isn't.
• 14:37
  It's a Blanche. Blanche it is that's.
• 14:39
  Right. Yeah.
• 14:39
  Rue McClanahan is the actress Blanche and The Golden Girls.
• 14:42
  I mean, she's blind and she's got scars all over her face.
• 14:45
  Branch checks only got one arm. All the adults here are, like,
• 14:47
  massively wounded. Yeah.
• 14:49
  And nobody ever thinks maybe this life of war isn't so great
• 14:52
  after all, yeah. Yeah.
• 14:53
  In the book, the teacher is called Jean Dubois and Rat Check
• 14:56
  is the commander of the Roughnecks division.
• 14:58
  So for the film, they've combined into one character
• 15:01
  called Gene Rosnick. Right.
• 15:03
  Yeah, that's a good change. I think it's for when he comes
• 15:05
  back. Works really well.
• 15:06
  Brilliant. When he comes back, yeah.
• 15:08
  It's like saying your uncle or something.
• 15:09
  It's so comfortable. It's like, yes.
• 15:11
  All right. Yeah.
• 15:13
  Well, apparently Verhoven considered casting Michael
• 15:15
  Douglas, says Radcheck, after working with him on Basic
• 15:17
  Instincts, right? Would.
• 15:19
  Have been a lot more sex talk. Yeah, he wouldn't give them 20
• 15:21
  minutes of the tent, would he? No.
• 15:23
  He'd have been in there with them, yeah. 20 minutes I'm
• 15:25
  coming in. And that's our introduction.
• 15:29
  We've met our main characters taken in a spot of Jump ball and
• 15:32
  the Rico Carmen's and Ideas Love Square has effectively been set
• 15:36
  up. That's indeed.
• 15:40
  Following graduation, Rico Carmen call and is signing for
• 15:43
  the Terran Federation military. We end up at the Arthur Curry
• 15:46
  camp in Canada, where we also meet Jake Boosie's ace levy and
• 15:50
  drill instructor, Sergeant Zim, played by Clancy Brown.
• 15:53
  Yes, yeah. Don't know about you and Mark,
• 15:55
  but I would happily take a straw down washout lane rather than
• 15:58
  knock about with this lot. Bunch of apes.
• 16:00
  That's all they are. I love this training scene
• 16:03
  because when is Clancy Brown turning up in the film?
• 16:06
  Never a good thing. Never.
• 16:07
  Ever. Never.
• 16:08
  And you talk about roles being tailor made for someone him is a
• 16:12
  drill Sergeant is absolutely perfect.
• 16:14
  Like Shawshank is a couple of years before this.
• 16:17
  So you know, he can do intimidating and he can be
• 16:19
  brutal, but this lets him be really funny as well.
• 16:23
  Like what can people with the baton because they don't have
• 16:25
  the guts sucked in or the feet on together or the knee to put
• 16:27
  the chin up When that one trooper starts laughing at him
• 16:30
  and who wouldn't, let's be honest.
• 16:31
  And he just starts whipping him Run, run, run.
• 16:34
  It's hilarious. Then he goes keep pace.
• 16:38
  The guy looks just as scared. And I just think, like that role
• 16:42
  of a drill instructor, it must be an absolute gift to any actor
• 16:45
  because they usually get the best dialogue that can go or TT
• 16:49
  and you can't actually go too far with a character like this.
• 16:52
  And Clancy Brown is just wonderful.
• 16:54
  And when he asks if like one of them things that can take him
• 16:56
  down and that poor guy steps up, but he doesn't really
• 16:59
  respectfully, he's not being a Dick.
• 17:01
  Like really cocky. He's like, oh Sir, I'll try,
• 17:03
  I'll try because he thinks he's going to get in good with him
• 17:06
  and Zim just knocks him to the ground and snaps his arm.
• 17:09
  You're right, son. I mean, obviously not.
• 17:11
  You know you've just snapped his arm into.
• 17:13
  Yes. So Rico signs up because Carmen
• 17:15
  does. And then this signs up because
• 17:16
  Rico does. Yeah.
• 17:17
  What's with all these people making life or death decisions
• 17:20
  based on who the fancy? Isn't that what everyone does?
• 17:25
  I mean, Rico signs up the recruiting officers like Mobile
• 17:28
  Infantry made me the man I am today.
• 17:30
  One arm and no legs. I'm all right.
• 17:32
  Thanks. Yeah, yeah, Cheers mate.
• 17:34
  Yeah, but. The boot camp sequences are all
• 17:36
  great. There's a clear influence from
• 17:37
  Full Metal Jacket, I think. Unbelievable.
• 17:40
  Yeah, definitely. Lots of humor mixed in with the
• 17:42
  kind of brutal treatment the recruits get.
• 17:44
  It seems like an even more ludicrous version of Drill
• 17:46
  Sergeant Hartman. And also there's that moment you
• 17:48
  mentioned Mark, where Smith can't stop laughing like Private
• 17:51
  Pile. And this is to Rico, what's your
• 17:53
  malfunction? Or taken from Full metal
• 17:55
  jackets, No Johnny Doughnuts, which would be a nice inclusion,
• 17:58
  but unfortunately not it would have been.
• 18:00
  And then we get the scene where Zim throws a knife into aces
• 18:02
  hand. So good.
• 18:04
  Classic Starship Troopers. Put your hand on it.
• 18:08
  And I don't know what he's thinking asking him questions.
• 18:11
  Don't question this guy. He's absolutely insane.
• 18:14
  It's almost like he's leaning against the wall, just with a
• 18:16
  tab, just being like Iris. What's all this about?
• 18:21
  But you're right, my Clancy Brown is always great and I
• 18:24
  think the effects looks really good as well.
• 18:25
  It's obviously a prosthetic arm attached to J Boosie.
• 18:28
  Yeah, I mean, well, who knows with the oven, but I assume it's
• 18:30
  a prosthetic, obviously. Probably his real hand Fucking.
• 18:33
  By the way, it looks really good.
• 18:35
  I'm really painful right in the palm of his hand.
• 18:37
  Yeah, I think he sounds like behind the great, isn't that?
• 18:40
  You can see his arms kind of put behind the great.
• 18:42
  It must be, yeah. It looks good though.
• 18:43
  And I think The thing is, well, Clancy Brown's performance is
• 18:45
  that you completely forget about him.
• 18:47
  In short redemption, because you would go, oh, that's the guy at
• 18:50
  short redemption. But you don't get it at all.
• 18:52
  He just makes it so much more fun that you forget that's the
• 18:55
  same guy. Put your hand on that wall.
• 19:00
  And then, I mean, things just get even better from there.
• 19:03
  Don't know. I mean, there's Quasar going on.
• 19:05
  Are we do this little bit of Quasar, Right.
• 19:06
  But you actually get the electric shock, which is great.
• 19:09
  But this also, this sequence leads in to a theory that why
• 19:14
  are they using human targets when they should be training
• 19:16
  against, you know, the bugs and understanding them and figuring
• 19:19
  out what's going on with them? Yeah.
• 19:20
  So you see the human targets and they're like big green figures
• 19:24
  that used to play with when you were a kid.
• 19:25
  You know, it's like Toy Story. So it's almost like training
• 19:28
  children how to kill things. Then the reality kicks in and
• 19:31
  Breckbridge gets his in the way and he takes it off.
• 19:33
  Those come big and dumb, and that moment is so funny, but at
• 19:38
  the same time so shocking. When that gun goes off, she
• 19:41
  falls back and it's completely accidental.
• 19:44
  And she's the one who wants to get into politics.
• 19:46
  She wants to fight with words. She doesn't want to fight
• 19:48
  physically, and because she's for physically, she gets kicked
• 19:50
  out. She's not ready for it.
• 19:52
  Violence is what we'll need. But when he gets shot and his
• 19:54
  face changes and there's that crash, zoom into Rico's face and
• 19:58
  he shouts medic. And you know, for a fuck this
• 20:00
  guy's had his head blown off. It's so funny.
• 20:03
  Medic. What the fuck's a medic?
• 20:05
  And he just woke up and be like, yeah, he's dead.
• 20:08
  There's no mention of the bugs here.
• 20:10
  Violence is the answer. Let's go straight to
• 20:13
  administrative punishment. Let's lashes back.
• 20:16
  So it's just so medieval in its punishments.
• 20:19
  There's nothing progressive about this whole society.
• 20:22
  But then again. I'm watching this and I'm like,
• 20:24
  if I look like that dude and everyone's standing looking at
• 20:26
  us, I will be alright getting whipped 10 times just being like
• 20:30
  I look amazing. A lovely bit from Zim as well.
• 20:33
  He's like bite down on this. It helps I know.
• 20:35
  Yeah, yeah, he's gone through the same and it's all just this
• 20:38
  cycle that keeps repeating itself.
• 20:40
  But what I really hate about the flogging sequence, it's
• 20:42
  mentioned by his dad. His dad says I'd rather take 10
• 20:45
  lashes in the public square to foreshadowing from that.
• 20:48
  The whole thing is promotional film for the Mobile Infantry.
• 20:53
  It's a film within a film, and this is just one of them major
• 20:56
  steps where you go. Are we watching a promotional
• 20:58
  video within that universe where you just go, cannot even trust
• 21:02
  this film? What am I watching?
• 21:04
  Can I really get into it or am I just being sucked in?
• 21:06
  And I think this is the perfect moment where for women starts
• 21:09
  that. Yeah, all the training
• 21:10
  exercises. I think it's quite a good way of
• 21:12
  showing the teenagers being, like, turned by the system into
• 21:15
  killers. And after Breckenridge is
• 21:18
  killed, Jonad, who is the one who accidentally shoots him,
• 21:20
  yeah, is dismissed. I mean, surely it's Rico's fault
• 21:23
  more than hers. So maybe you're right.
• 21:25
  W Maybe there's something else going on behind why she gets
• 21:27
  kicked out. But the race?
• 21:28
  Yeah, like this. These real political undertones
• 21:30
  are fantastic. Yeah, all these moments are
• 21:32
  really brutal. But most brutal of all is Regal
• 21:35
  getting dumped by Carmen on a zoom call in front of all his
• 21:37
  mates. Man never getting over that.
• 21:40
  Yeah. Terrific in John Art and
• 21:42
  Breckenridge. They were played by Tommy Adrian
• 21:44
  George and Eric Bruce Cotter and they met on the shooting.
• 21:47
  Afterwards, they got married and had children.
• 21:49
  What did they serve first? And Beholden was best man.
• 21:55
  Oh wow. That.
• 21:56
  Speech would have been fucking amazing.
• 21:59
  You asked him to be your best man.
• 22:00
  Speech is 3 hours long and two or nine coming in shooting
• 22:04
  everybody. But like we're talking about
• 22:07
  there there's Rico is whipped by Corporal Bronski played by TO
• 22:10
  Smoot and he was taught how to use the bull whip by one of the
• 22:13
  stuntman, the one and only Victoria Armstrong who learned
• 22:16
  how to use it on Raiders of the Lost Ark.
• 22:17
  Very nice. You know whether I film it
• 22:19
  smooth. Kept moving forward and getting
• 22:21
  too close to Van Dean. The whole been shouted at him
• 22:24
  but it made no difference. So they had to put sandbags on
• 22:26
  his feet to stop. And moving, I mean, however, he
• 22:29
  needs to get really precise. Just move back a little bit.
• 22:32
  It makes no difference, yeah. Well, that's why he's mostly
• 22:35
  shot from the waist up to hide the sandbags.
• 22:37
  Right, Okay. It's really well shot, that
• 22:38
  scene as well. It's really well lit, looks
• 22:40
  really good. Yeah, it looks great.
• 22:42
  And then a bit after this you get the shower scene, because
• 22:44
  obviously wouldn't be a Verhoven film if he wasn't getting some
• 22:47
  tits and ass in there. I mean, first fellow, it's all
• 22:50
  about the equality. It's men and women naked here.
• 22:53
  Finally, thank God. And also, to be fair, it doesn't
• 22:56
  feel rude or sleazy, which is quite something coming from Phil
• 22:59
  Oven. It doesn't.
• 23:00
  But didn't he strip off with everybody else just to make them
• 23:04
  feel comfortable? Yeah, Any excuse.
• 23:06
  Well, it wasn't just him, it was the TP just for Kano as well,
• 23:09
  because of the actors were worried about the scene.
• 23:12
  For Hoven was saying, no, it's no big deal and it was Dinah
• 23:14
  Mayor who responded, Will you do with them?
• 23:15
  So he did. And for Keno, he'd apparently
• 23:18
  been born in a new discount, according for Hoven.
• 23:20
  So he just got naked as well. And for Hoven said, You know
• 23:23
  what? It really helped.
• 23:25
  More of a problem for him to get dressed.
• 23:26
  Just turn up on set naked every day.
• 23:29
  And then you just come actually a lot.
• 23:32
  Really does. That would be a Springsteen
• 23:33
  song, wouldn't it? I mean, yeah, they're all in the
• 23:37
  same shower. They're all threat the same, but
• 23:39
  not in a good way. I don't think they're not all
• 23:41
  threat equally. Well, these people, they're all
• 23:43
  threat equally. Shit, It's like everyone's
• 23:44
  identity stripped away from them.
• 23:46
  Yeah. I think again, the way Smith's
• 23:47
  interviewing the recruits, he sees that he's a writer.
• 23:50
  Reminds me of full metal jackets where private joke as a writer.
• 23:52
  Yeah. The Hogan said he was shocked at
• 23:55
  the reaction the scene got and said Americans get more upset
• 23:58
  about nudity than ultra violence.
• 24:00
  I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything
• 24:03
  other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult
• 24:06
  to get through the senses than a body riddled with bullets, and
• 24:09
  he's absolutely right. Yeah, he's got fun.
• 24:12
  For open likes both and his films.
• 24:14
  Oh, absolutely, yeah. Another thing about this scene
• 24:16
  as well. It's really interesting how
• 24:18
  they're all framed and there's just these like nooses around
• 24:21
  the heads to turn the shower out of these big circles.
• 24:23
  Everyone's looking through them as if they're all kind of facing
• 24:26
  the death anyway, which I think is really interesting.
• 24:29
  Well, there's also a Coed shower scene in RoboCop as well if you
• 24:32
  remember. Yeah, yeah.
• 24:33
  The whole locker room is exactly the same, yeah.
• 24:35
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 24:36
  I saw an interview with Verhoven where he said in RoboCop nobody
• 24:38
  noticed. So I thought in Starship
• 24:40
  Troopers, I'll make sure how they do.
• 24:42
  We definitely do, yeah. To make the boot camp in
• 24:45
  military seems realistic. Verhoven Hiredale die as
• 24:48
  military advisor because he's a Vietnam War veteran and he'd
• 24:51
  been consulted on platoon born on the 4th of July, casualties
• 24:54
  of war and he put the actors through a one week boot camp and
• 24:57
  that's where they learned how to work weapons and how to work as
• 25:00
  part of a platoon. Was this before Saving Private
• 25:02
  Ryan? After.
• 25:03
  This is before. Yeah, he has it.
• 25:05
  Come here as well. Deal.
• 25:05
  Die if you noticed. Yeah, he's right at the end,
• 25:08
  isn't he, with the brain bug? Yeah, that's right.
• 25:10
  Yeah, He's the guy who says, what's it thinking, Colonel?
• 25:11
  Yeah, yeah. To call.
• 25:13
  Yeah, I think it shows as well. Seriously, they were taking the
• 25:15
  battle scenes when they get someone like that in.
• 25:17
  Yeah, because like you say, Wesley, the next film he worked
• 25:19
  on was Saving Private Ryan. She's not messing about.
• 25:21
  Yeah, imagine him talking to Spielberg about this.
• 25:27
  That wraps things up on the beginning of Starship Troopers.
• 25:30
  There's already been enough crazy to fill three regular
• 25:32
  films, but so far, pretty entertaining, isn't it?
• 25:35
  Oh. Yeah, it just started the
• 25:41
  director. The director of Starship
• 25:45
  Troopers, as we've already mentioned how can you not, was
• 25:50
  Paul Verhoeven? This was his sixth American
• 25:52
  feature film, his 12th overall, and as we said, it completed a
• 25:56
  satirical science fiction trilogy after RoboCop and Total
• 25:59
  Recall, the Dutch trilogy. Yeah.
• 26:02
  So what can we say about Paul Verhoeven?
• 26:05
  Quite a lot, I'd imagine. Matt I.
• 26:07
  Mean when do we stop talking about Paul Verhoeven?
• 26:09
  Once you start on this one. I mean, internally we did total
• 26:13
  recall not that long ago and like my main take away from that
• 26:16
  film was like, he's just having a laugh.
• 26:18
  Like the whole thing was so tongue in cheek, but there
• 26:21
  wasn't a point to it which bothered me.
• 26:23
  This is also tongue in cheek, But the difference is there's a
• 26:26
  point and you get to the end and it's like he stood waiting for
• 26:29
  you going, did you get it? Do you understand why I have the
• 26:32
  actors in a certain way, in the dialogue in a certain way.
• 26:35
  And to get to that point, he's got to really hold his nerve
• 26:39
  about the tone of the film. It has to be so bombastic
• 26:42
  because if he decides he needs to explain to the audience that
• 26:45
  he doesn't really mean it, the whole film will just feel
• 26:48
  completely patronizing. So to make some of these scenes
• 26:51
  as naff as they are, and they are naff, that takes real talent
• 26:55
  to make them feel like that on 1st watch.
• 26:57
  But then you come back and you think, no, it feels totally
• 27:00
  different. Now.
• 27:00
  They don't know what's going on and it's funny, but it's
• 27:03
  horrifying at the same time. It's a very tricky thing to do
• 27:06
  but I think he's pulled off such an incredible balance and act
• 27:09
  here. He has.
• 27:10
  He's like a magician. He's got such an ulterior
• 27:12
  motive, but he's masked it. So, well, he does.
• 27:14
  Really does, yeah. I agree.
• 27:16
  I think he wears his influences on his sleeve as well.
• 27:18
  I think he's influenced by just about every classic science
• 27:21
  fiction film. I mean, Aliens is obvious.
• 27:24
  It's all over, isn't it? Yeah.
• 27:25
  Yeah. Also the establishing exterior
• 27:27
  shots of the ships of every 2001, I think.
• 27:29
  Yeah, interior shots on the ships all remind me of Star Trek
• 27:33
  shot in a very similar way. And Rico in the medical tank is
• 27:35
  basically Lou Skywalker in the medical tank in The Empire
• 27:38
  Strikes Back. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:39
  None of it feels like a rip off though because we're hoping is
• 27:41
  unique as a filmmaker. Yeah, it's a typical sci-fi is
• 27:44
  his thing, to the point where here it feels like he's making
• 27:46
  two films in one. It's part science fiction,
• 27:49
  action film part and the establishment satire.
• 27:52
  Yeah, he's done that kind of thing before and done it well.
• 27:55
  But here, what makes it work for me, even better than RoboCop and
• 27:58
  certainly better than Total Recall.
• 28:00
  Yeah, is that when you break it down, those two parts I think
• 28:03
  are really clearly defined and tonally really consistent.
• 28:06
  Yeah. The action film has very good
• 28:08
  set pieces, great design work, great effects.
• 28:10
  It's exciting. It's spectacular.
• 28:12
  The good guys are like heroes. Quite classic stuff, yeah.
• 28:15
  To make an anti establishment satire based on that could have
• 28:17
  been confusing because on one hand, Rico days, Carmen and the
• 28:21
  rest are brave and on the other the fascists.
• 28:24
  Yeah, at some point Verhoven's made that decision.
• 28:26
  They are brave and they do care about each other, but they also
• 28:29
  have some terrible beliefs. I think once you wrap your head
• 28:31
  around that point, he's making that even terrible people aren't
• 28:34
  100% terrible. That's what makes them so
• 28:36
  dangerous as an ideology. You realize this isn't just a
• 28:39
  gung ho? Shoot him up at times it is.
• 28:41
  But I think managing those two different tones in the way that
• 28:43
  he does is a lot more difficult than Verhoven actually makes it
• 28:46
  look. Starship People does not even
• 28:48
  better than RoboCop for me. And this is probably my favorite
• 28:51
  Verhoven film. I mean, I've not seen Speders,
• 28:54
  to be honest, but I feel like I'm safe ruling that one out.
• 28:57
  Yeah, I think so. You'll be fine.
• 28:58
  I mean, yeah, I think it's just so good because it's all very
• 29:01
  intentional. I don't think there's anything
• 29:03
  here that's been put on there by mistake.
• 29:05
  Every single beat of this, every camera move, everything
• 29:09
  visually, every performance is very intentional.
• 29:12
  You feel totally in control of this, I think where he's in
• 29:14
  Total Recall, maybe not quite too much, definitely.
• 29:17
  Exactly. And you know that what he wants
• 29:19
  to do visually, I mean there's some amazing blocking in this
• 29:21
  film. There's some stuff that's going
• 29:23
  on here from a filmmaking point of view that you will miss
• 29:27
  because he's hiding satire in plain sight and he's doing it
• 29:30
  with every single camera move. There's a great moment where
• 29:34
  they're just coming out of the classroom where they've had the
• 29:35
  results in the making, the whole pack, you know, let's always be
• 29:38
  friends. Regal puts his arm around calm
• 29:41
  and it spins round again and then and it's just one flow and
• 29:43
  camera move and everything just feels like it's like a computer
• 29:46
  game and say the the camera is just about like 4 inches by 4
• 29:50
  inches big. The whole visual feeling of this
• 29:53
  film is really light. You fly through the film and you
• 29:56
  don't think about the camera at all.
• 29:58
  We breaks a fourth wall on a news broadcast.
• 30:01
  That's the first thing you see in this film is something that's
• 30:03
  supposed to be real and then you see it again in real life.
• 30:07
  That's the way that you build it.
• 30:08
  And the main thing, the take away from the direction of this
• 30:11
  film is just the energy of it and you can turn around and go.
• 30:15
  I think Starship Troopers is a pile of shit and pull the home
• 30:18
  and he'll sit there with his arms folded and he'll just
• 30:21
  smile. If you think it's shit, you're
• 30:24
  the idiot. That is just such a wonderful
• 30:26
  thing to do because what he's saying is so confident and so
• 30:29
  true and so right and so well executed it's impossible to
• 30:33
  argue with. Well, the reason Paul Verhoeven
• 30:36
  became involved in making Starship Troopers does go back
• 30:39
  to RoboCop. Yeah, the guy who came up with
• 30:41
  the idea for the film was the writer and new Maya he would
• 30:43
  call written RoboCop. He took it to John Davidson, a
• 30:46
  producer on RoboCop, and there was only one guy they were ever
• 30:49
  asking to direct. Oh, definitely the Dutch master
• 30:52
  who. Else could have done this.
• 30:54
  Not like this. Nobody.
• 30:56
  He's perfect for it. Yeah.
• 30:56
  Yeah. Perfect.
• 30:57
  Yeah. Well, there were actually
• 30:59
  rumours that the studio went to James Cameron first, before
• 31:01
  Verhoven, but he was already busy prepping Titanic.
• 31:05
  So when Verhoven was hired, he did over 4000 storyboards before
• 31:08
  filming. Like me.
• 31:09
  And when you see interviews with the cast and crew about working
• 31:12
  with Verhoven, Ed Newmeyer said you leave meetings with Paul
• 31:15
  Phelan. Exhausted, I bet.
• 31:18
  Well, I mean, Clancy, Brown said when they were filming battle
• 31:21
  scenes. He'd played the part of a bug
• 31:22
  for the actors and in Browns words, he'd be jumping up and
• 31:25
  down with the bullhorn going, I'm a big fucking bug.
• 31:28
  I'll kill you. There's great behind the scenes
• 31:32
  footage where they're filming the scene in The Cave at the end
• 31:34
  when the bulls attack Carmen and Xander filming those kind of
• 31:38
  made tracking shot to Denise Richards.
• 31:39
  Yeah. Morven standing behind the
• 31:41
  camera holding a broom in the air, screaming his head off.
• 31:44
  Yeah. He's like crawling across the
• 31:46
  floors and then just like dives out and does this big, like,
• 31:49
  clutch thing with his hands. It's.
• 31:51
  Brilliant. And I mean, you can see that in
• 31:52
  the film. Well, not the broom, thankfully,
• 31:54
  but that passion. It's all there on the screen.
• 31:56
  Yeah, it's this energy that's there.
• 31:58
  It's so palpable that you just dive into it.
• 32:01
  Yeah, exactly. So once you came in as director,
• 32:04
  the first thing Behoven did was read the novel by Robert
• 32:06
  Heinlein. He couldn't get past the first
• 32:08
  two chapters though, and said it's a very right wing book and
• 32:12
  then just got Ed Newman. I tell him the rest of the
• 32:13
  story. He's like, it's just really
• 32:15
  boring. Yeah, I know that Verhoven said
• 32:19
  that he was constantly fighting with the book because all that
• 32:21
  satire and the kind of anti fascist comment we were talking
• 32:24
  about, that's not really in the book, right?
• 32:26
  We'll talk more about how that came about when we get talking
• 32:28
  about the writing, yeah. But in terms of putting it all
• 32:30
  on the screen as a director, Verhoven does it brilliantly for
• 32:33
  me. Fantastic.
• 32:34
  Yeah. Well, when Michael Einstein
• 32:36
  first read the script he said to Verhoven, Why are you doing a
• 32:39
  right wing fascist movie involved and replied, Well if I
• 32:43
  say a right wing fascist way of doing things doesn't work, no
• 32:46
  one will listen to me, so I'm going to make a perfect fascist
• 32:48
  world. Everyone is beautiful,
• 32:50
  everything shiny, but it's only good for killing fucking bugs.
• 32:54
  Potty mouth today, you Matt. I know.
• 32:58
  Doing my best. What's interesting as well as I
• 33:00
  saw talking with Verhoeven and Casper Van Dean from I think
• 33:03
  fairly recently, where Van Dean said a film with this message
• 33:06
  probably wouldn't get made now and Oven said the only reason it
• 33:09
  got made then is because Sony he won't.
• 33:11
  Tristar kept sucking Tristar chairman.
• 33:14
  He said that five studio heads came and went in the time that
• 33:16
  he was making the film and by the time the studio took any
• 33:19
  notice of what he was doing, you already had an assembly cup put
• 33:21
  together. So too late.
• 33:23
  I love that. Just doing what he wants.
• 33:26
  This is such a great fact. The production of Starship
• 33:28
  Troopers used more ammunition than any other movie.
• 33:34
  The weapons coordinator was rock a lot.
• 33:36
  He and he said the fired over 300,000 blank rounds during
• 33:41
  filming and 17 gallons of fake blood were used throughout the
• 33:44
  movie. 300,000 blank. Now it sounds like if a whole
• 33:50
  win movie. Yeah.
• 33:53
  Well, I mean, nowadays films would usually use CGI rather
• 33:56
  than blank, so that record will probably stand forever, I would
• 33:58
  think. Yeah.
• 33:59
  Yeah, no Oscar nomination for both.
• 34:01
  Hoven for Starship Troopers. Not a massive surprise, I don't
• 34:04
  think. Obviously not.
• 34:06
  But for us in effectively combining high octane action
• 34:08
  with thought provoking political commentary, we think he did a
• 34:11
  very good job on the film. Oh.
• 34:13
  It's wonderful what he does, yeah.
• 34:15
  It really is the cast. The cast of Starship Troopers is
• 34:23
  a mix of newcomers to the industry and some more
• 34:25
  experienced heads, and we're going to go into some detail now
• 34:28
  on the newer and main cast members.
• 34:31
  Most of the young cast of Starship Troopers had already
• 34:34
  appeared in teen dramas on TV. Four had been in Beverly Hills,
• 34:37
  90210, and the writer at Neumeyer called the cast Melrose
• 34:41
  Space. Very nice.
• 34:45
  We're going to talk about Denise Richards as Carmen Barnes and
• 34:48
  Neil Patrick Harris as Carl Jenkins, but we're starting with
• 34:50
  the guy we spend most time with. We are.
• 34:53
  So Casper Van Dean stars as Johnny Rico and he has quite the
• 34:57
  character arc, starting the film as a nice but dim fella who just
• 35:00
  wants to make out with his girlfriend.
• 35:02
  We follow Johnny as he signs up for the Mobile Infantry, loses
• 35:05
  his parents in the war and claims the military ladder,
• 35:07
  becoming a full on fascist in the process.
• 35:10
  I'm fascist. Said that he wanted to cast
• 35:13
  people who look like proto fascists, so an Intel
• 35:16
  straightaway. Wesley, how's Casper Van Dean as
• 35:19
  Johnny Rico? I think he's, I mean, look, you
• 35:23
  can you can go all day and say it's Casper van Dean, OK?
• 35:26
  When we know that and we know that the performance is hammy
• 35:29
  and we know that, but I think he's really great in this role.
• 35:32
  He should be unwatchable. It should be so annoying that
• 35:36
  you want to turn it off, but it's just quite Moorish for me
• 35:40
  in how he's just really, really buying into the stereotype and
• 35:44
  how he really understands the assignment.
• 35:46
  Everyone's left the Regal at the door and the ego does get
• 35:49
  reinforced, but it's through comedy that it gets reinforced.
• 35:53
  It's not through like an amazing film.
• 35:55
  So it's not like Die Hard. Do you know what I mean?
• 35:57
  Where he's going away from that being like your fucking
• 35:59
  incredible action star. Yeah, he knows for a fact the
• 36:02
  ripping the piss out of him. And I think if this performance
• 36:05
  was any less hammy and he tried to make it a bit more serious,
• 36:08
  it would feel it was any more humming and he tried to make it
• 36:11
  funny, it would fail and it just lands right in the middle for
• 36:14
  me. And there's some line deliveries
• 36:16
  in this that are just atrocious, but the need to be atrocious
• 36:20
  because it's at the right time when he's like, yeah, I hope you
• 36:23
  find a crazy pilot. That's probably his worst line,
• 36:26
  I think, yeah. That line you get just sticks
• 36:28
  out like a sore thumb and he's like, he's just got a little bit
• 36:30
  mad, Sir. He's just a little bit mad.
• 36:32
  What? And he has like one joke in the
• 36:34
  film where he's like, you got a bug problem, man.
• 36:36
  But he's happy with it. So I am.
• 36:39
  I'm happy to watch him in it. I'm, I'm, I won't watch him in
• 36:42
  anything else. Obviously I'm not going to be
• 36:44
  like our Castro needs in this, but to have him as the face and
• 36:48
  the message of this propaganda film, which is what it is, it's
• 36:51
  fucking perfect. Yeah, I think it was a bit of a
• 36:53
  double edged sword for Casper Van Dean.
• 36:55
  This role, I mean it was a massive break for him into the
• 36:57
  industry, but also it became kind of accepted that he's as
• 37:00
  wooden as a pairing born floor as Rico.
• 37:03
  And I mean watching it today, is he a great actor?
• 37:06
  No, no he's not. But I think as a presence to
• 37:09
  lead the film, he does it quite well.
• 37:12
  So yeah, I agree. I think Casper Van Dean's all
• 37:14
  right. In Starship Troopers, obviously
• 37:17
  he looks the part. Blonde hair, blue eyes, fair
• 37:19
  skin. Lenny, we finished our with a
• 37:20
  custom in a heartbeat and that's why Verhoven did.
• 37:23
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 37:24
  Argentinians are known for their Aryan features, but I assume the
• 37:27
  idea is that Rico, Carmen and Karl are meant to be like
• 37:30
  descendants from 3rd right members who fled South America
• 37:32
  after the war. Maybe yes, that's a nice idea.
• 37:35
  If it is so yeah, I think he's well written to.
• 37:37
  Rico has a huge arc. He holds five different ranks in
• 37:40
  the film and he keeps getting promoted.
• 37:42
  And why this career like soars. His personality and his values
• 37:46
  plummet into supporting this fascist ideology.
• 37:48
  I know that, Verhoeven said. The theme of the film is that
• 37:50
  war makes fascists of us all and Rico is the personification of
• 37:53
  that. The first time we see him in the
• 37:55
  film, in the classroom scene that we talked about, he's
• 37:57
  disagreeing with the point the Radcheck makes, but then falls
• 38:00
  directly in his footsteps. Yeah, Radcheck's roughnecks
• 38:02
  become Rico's roughnecks. And the last time we see him,
• 38:05
  he's quoting Radcheck when he shouts, Do you want to live
• 38:07
  forever? Yeah.
• 38:08
  And we don't see what happens to Rico.
• 38:09
  Bath in the film tells us he's walking the exact same path as
• 38:12
  Rajik and is probably destined to be killed, probably by a
• 38:16
  book. Definitely, yeah.
• 38:17
  And for what? For fascism?
• 38:19
  I think there's some really good writing there.
• 38:20
  And I think Casper Van Dean does pretty much everything the film
• 38:23
  us from and does it pretty well. It's delivery of that final
• 38:26
  line. I think it's perfect.
• 38:28
  Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, really good.
• 38:30
  It's really like John Wayne, isn't it?
• 38:32
  It's got that huge kind of, yeah, old school Hollywood kind
• 38:36
  of performance to it. It's really good, but it's what
• 38:38
  Ratchet says to him in the classrooms.
• 38:40
  Like, do you believe it? It's the exact words of the
• 38:42
  text. Do you understand it?
• 38:43
  Do you believe it? Yeah.
• 38:45
  And he's just basically putting them onto the text and making
• 38:47
  them believe it. Now he's just reading the text
• 38:49
  and believes it. I mean, you might never get
• 38:51
  mentioned with you, Michael Corleone to your Travis Pickles,
• 38:54
  but I think Johnny Rico is a really strong example of a good
• 38:57
  Aunt Hero and CVD. He does do his part for me.
• 39:01
  He does, definitely. Yeah, absolutely the same.
• 39:03
  You've just got to realise what Verhoven is doing with the cast
• 39:05
  in here because Dean absolutely looks the part.
• 39:08
  Truly magnificent chin. Yeah, he can fold towels without
• 39:13
  his hands. Exactly.
• 39:17
  But you look at him and you think he looks like the poster
• 39:20
  boy for something, which is what he is, even if he doesn't
• 39:23
  realise it and used to write it. It's kind of hard to talk about
• 39:26
  his performance of being, like, overly disrespectful.
• 39:28
  But it's fair to say he's not a method actor.
• 39:30
  He doesn't bring a lot of depth or pathos to the role.
• 39:33
  You know, the death of his parents barely registers, but
• 39:36
  that's because Verhofen doesn't want that.
• 39:38
  He wants somebody who's going to look good on the poster, and I
• 39:40
  think any actor who tries to overthink this role isn't going
• 39:43
  to work. No.
• 39:45
  Yeah, well, at the time he was cast, Casper Van Dean was mostly
• 39:47
  known for a few recurring roles in some TV series, like we
• 39:50
  mentioned, and there were some bigger names considered to play
• 39:53
  Johnny before he was cast. Right.
• 39:56
  Right, so James Morrison, yes, Keanu Reeves and Jason Priestley
• 40:00
  were apparently considered to play Rico, right?
• 40:02
  Just all the cast of Nine O 2 was.
• 40:04
  Gonna see all those make sense to be fair.
• 40:06
  Everyone, yeah. And Mark Wahlberg reportedly
• 40:09
  turned the role down. I've.
• 40:11
  Heard that? Yeah, right.
• 40:12
  Honestly, I wouldn't say I'm desperate to change it.
• 40:15
  No, not at all. Totally works, Verhoven said.
• 40:18
  He didn't intentionally cast actors who were good looking but
• 40:21
  inexperienced. He was going more for the look
• 40:23
  that you'd see in like Nazi propaganda film.
• 40:26
  Van Dean did have a military background.
• 40:28
  His granddad was a Marine during World War 2 and he knew how to
• 40:31
  handle a gun, which impressed Verhoeven during his audition.
• 40:34
  Yeah, actually, I said. I wouldn't change it, but if
• 40:38
  Arnold had been 20 years younger at the.
• 40:39
  Time. He would have been perfect as we
• 40:43
  go. Yeah, he would have been.
• 40:44
  He would be, yeah. They Terminator age, yeah.
• 40:48
  Yeah, it would have been unbelievable.
• 40:50
  It would have been unbelievable. Kills them all.
• 40:53
  Do you want to live forever? You want to play that part?
• 40:59
  If AI is good for anything, it's good for Starship Troopers with
• 41:02
  Arnold from that year. And Van Dean said that Michael
• 41:07
  Einteid was mentor on the on the film as well as in the film, and
• 41:11
  Einteid gave him advice on how to deliver a line, how to
• 41:13
  interact with crew members. And apparently he also took on
• 41:16
  the role of a private on set, so he would go around each person
• 41:20
  making sure they have enough water.
• 41:23
  All right. The Water Boy, yeah.
• 41:25
  He said that they sometimes had 1400 extras on the set and it
• 41:28
  would take a couple of hours to go around everybody.
• 41:31
  Right, hope you have some help. Helpful man, Yeah.
• 41:34
  Set that bit in Zulu, yeah, he said.
• 41:39
  One day when he went to pick up his daughters from school, there
• 41:41
  was a group of 10 year old boys waiting for him and they were
• 41:43
  all shouting like, hey Johnny Rico.
• 41:47
  His daughters hadn't seen the film as they were too young when
• 41:50
  they got in the car. They said, Dad, those boys said
• 41:52
  they've seen you naked. You've ruined me life.
• 41:57
  Yeah, so an interview with Casper Van Dean where he said
• 41:59
  that since the film came out, not one week's gone by where
• 42:02
  someone doesn't shout at him. Johnny Rico.
• 42:05
  Amazing. He's a good guy when you see him
• 42:07
  in interviews. Nothing like Johnny Rico,
• 42:09
  thankfully. Yeah.
• 42:10
  Before we wrap up on Casper Van Dean, we have our first question
• 42:13
  from our patrons. So if you sign up as an ATRM
• 42:16
  patron, as well as the benefit we mentioned at the start, you
• 42:19
  can also ask questions for us to answer on the show.
• 42:22
  Yeah, we have the first one now and it mentions Casper Van Dean
• 42:25
  does. So.
• 42:26
  Richard Hooley. Hello, Richard.
• 42:28
  Hello, Richard. Hello.
• 42:29
  Richard has asked Casper. Van Dean was pretty awful in
• 42:32
  this movie. Who else ranks as a terrible
• 42:34
  lead in a decent movie? He disagree for those obviously
• 42:39
  does. Richard Yeah, he does.
• 42:41
  So what do you think about? I'm going for Orlando Bloom and
• 42:45
  Kingdom of Heaven with the director's Got.
• 42:48
  The director's Got a Kingdom of Heaven is such an improvement on
• 42:51
  the theatrical. Value.
• 42:52
  So much better if. You've never seen it.
• 42:54
  Track it down. To a different film.
• 42:55
  It's completely different film. It makes sense it.
• 42:58
  Makes sense? It does.
• 43:00
  Like it would be in a conversation, Ridley Scott's
• 43:03
  best film if it didn't have Orlando Bloom stinking up the
• 43:06
  joint. No, it's not his best film.
• 43:09
  Come on. Well, it'd be in the
• 43:10
  conversation for top five, maybe even top.
• 43:12
  Three. Yeah.
• 43:13
  Top five. I agree with that.
• 43:15
  But Orlando Bloom, he's supposed to be this brood and hero, but
• 43:18
  every time he tries to look brood and he just looks
• 43:20
  confused. And at the end when he's trying
• 43:22
  to give the big speech before the big battle rise up, come on,
• 43:27
  he's like a dad who's been drafted into coaches, like sons
• 43:29
  under 11 football team and he's trying to give him a big half
• 43:32
  time pep talk. So yeah, that's my choice.
• 43:35
  Is Orlando Bloom good in anything?
• 43:38
  He's OK in Lord of the Rings, isn't he?
• 43:39
  Yeah, because he doesn't fucking do much.
• 43:41
  Yeah. They're taking the hobbits to
• 43:43
  eyes on God, all right? Yeah, that's a good one, Matt.
• 43:49
  As for others, I mean Keanu Reeves has a reputation for not
• 43:52
  being a great actor and he leads The Matrix, which is a
• 43:55
  borderline masterpiece in my eyes.
• 43:57
  But again, I wouldn't change Keanu.
• 43:58
  He was a Neo but one film, which I do like where I would change
• 44:02
  the lead actor if I could, is Masters of the Universe
• 44:06
  starring. How?
• 44:08
  Fucking dare you, Arnold, obviously, is it?
• 44:12
  Got a great film, obviously. William Shatner.
• 44:14
  Fuck knows. But it seems like all the acting
• 44:18
  shops have been stolen by Frank Langella.
• 44:20
  He's brilliant, the Skeletor. He's amazing, the Skeletor.
• 44:23
  But Dolph Lundgren can't even believably speak as he might,
• 44:26
  which is a problem. So that's mine.
• 44:28
  Right. Yeah, I've got like 4.
• 44:30
  Corner. Yeah, no, I'm not doing them
• 44:32
  all. But I mean, I've got Keanu
• 44:33
  Reeves is like Jonathan Harker and Bram Stoker's Dracula.
• 44:36
  He's dreadful. But is that feeling bad because
• 44:40
  of him or is that film just bad? I don't know, because Gary
• 44:43
  Oldman's fucking magic in this. Yes, the Winona right is magic
• 44:46
  in that as well. So it's not let down bad, and I
• 44:49
  can't quite decide on that. But the one that really sticks
• 44:51
  out, it's not necessarily a lead, but the one that sticks
• 44:53
  out for me in a film that I really enjoyed, that I'm let
• 44:55
  down by the performance, is Cameron Diaz and Gangs New York.
• 44:58
  Yeah, yeah. I hate doing this type of thing
• 45:01
  where I'm getting it, people, because, I mean, that's such a
• 45:03
  massive opportunity for her to shine and I just don't think she
• 45:07
  found it. No, I like Cameron Diaz as well.
• 45:09
  Yeah, and I love Cameron Diaz. Yeah, I think she's fucking
• 45:11
  fantastic. I mean, a lifeless, Ordinary by
• 45:14
  Danny Boyle, which is where you McGregor and her are both great.
• 45:16
  Mm hmm. And Russell Crowe and Les
• 45:19
  Miserables. Shit.
• 45:21
  He's great. He's.
• 45:22
  Shit in that. Big, booming voice.
• 45:25
  It's great. Crap.
• 45:27
  But then I gotta hit the film. Everyone's crapping that.
• 45:30
  Well, no major award recognition for his performance as Rico, but
• 45:33
  Casper van Dean maybe gets a bit of a bad rap for us.
• 45:37
  He does. I love him.
• 45:38
  That's a hill I'm going to die on.
• 45:39
  I think he's great. He.
• 45:40
  Works for the film. Totally does.
• 45:41
  Definitely. Our secondly is Carmen Barnes,
• 45:46
  played by Denise Richards, Rico's first love interest in
• 45:49
  the film. We watch as Carmen heads to
• 45:51
  flight school to become a star pilot before breaking up with
• 45:54
  Johnny, perhaps becoming involved with copilot Xander
• 45:57
  Barcelor and ending the film as captain of her own vessel.
• 46:01
  They have a crazy pilot, Matt. What do we think of Carmen and
• 46:04
  Denise Richards? I think it's an ATRM first,
• 46:08
  isn't it? Asking about it.
• 46:09
  Denise Richards Performance. And the last.
• 46:11
  Likely to be the last as well. Almost.
• 46:13
  Certainly Very much what I feel about Van Dean.
• 46:15
  When Verhoeven wants a bit of quality in the performances, he
• 46:18
  turns to Clancy Brown on a Michael hindsight.
• 46:21
  The casting of Richards and Van Deane, it's all to make a point.
• 46:24
  It's all to subvert the image that they bring.
• 46:26
  And what Denise Richards brings is this wholesome, all American
• 46:30
  cheerleader vibe. So patriotic, wants to do with
• 46:34
  duty and do with duty with a big beam and smile on her face.
• 46:38
  Only thing is, she's doing a duty for fascist regime.
• 46:41
  And that's exactly the point of her and Van Deane's performance.
• 46:43
  You know, Is it an amazing performance?
• 46:45
  No, not the slightest does it, Neil.
• 46:47
  Every single aspect that Verhoeven wanted to it
• 46:50
  absolutely does. She can't really follow what she
• 46:53
  portrays on screen. How much that is down to what
• 46:56
  Verhoeven is doing with her performance, or how much of that
• 46:58
  is her bringing it herself, I don't know.
• 47:00
  But again, I can't really criticize his performance, even
• 47:03
  though on the surface I should. Yeah, I'm similar.
• 47:06
  I think like Casper Van Dean, Denise Richard's acting skills
• 47:09
  have been questioned quite a lot.
• 47:11
  But when I revisit this film, I think she's OK As Carmen, yeah.
• 47:15
  And as characters. I mean, Carmen's a lot more
• 47:17
  intelligent than Rico, so their relationship was never really
• 47:19
  going to last, probably. But in terms of their arcs, I
• 47:22
  think they're quite similar. Carmen's not a bad person,
• 47:25
  certainly not at the start, where she's presented as
• 47:27
  confident, ambitious, perfectly nice, too nice when it comes to
• 47:30
  Xander sleazing all over her. But like Rico, I think she's
• 47:34
  brainwashed by the state into following their ideologies.
• 47:37
  Whether they understand they're supporting A fascist ideology is
• 47:40
  another question. And I don't think Carmen or Rico
• 47:42
  do. I think they think they're
• 47:44
  fighting the good fight. And it's an interesting
• 47:46
  question. The film asks, are you a fascist
• 47:49
  if you don't actually realize you're supporting fascism?
• 47:51
  And that's how it's done for real.
• 47:53
  I think a lot of Germany didn't suddenly decide to become awful
• 47:55
  people in the 1930s who were mostly fooled by politicians and
• 47:59
  very effective propaganda. And that's exactly what happens
• 48:02
  here with Carmen Enrico. And in that film, Carmen would
• 48:04
  have been a successful woman who leads a good life.
• 48:07
  He actually joins the military. And the last time was say, she's
• 48:09
  wearing a Nazi uniform. It's actually quite a sad point
• 48:12
  I think the film makes. And what I love is if a hoven
• 48:14
  doesn't make it overtly sad in the movie you let us realize
• 48:17
  that for ourselves, that's done quite a lot through common.
• 48:20
  So another good character for me.
• 48:22
  Yeah, I think it's a really interesting performance because
• 48:26
  of the role that her character has in that she's given so much
• 48:31
  responsibility as a female character in this kind of film.
• 48:34
  She pilots the biggest ship. Yeah.
• 48:38
  She makes Sander look fucking stupid.
• 48:39
  Yeah, this is the new course. She is one of the most
• 48:42
  intelligent characters in the whole film.
• 48:44
  She gets far more than Rico does on the mass test.
• 48:47
  She tells him where they're going to make out, when they're
• 48:49
  going to make out what's going to happen.
• 48:51
  She's in control of the whole thing of the whole film.
• 48:54
  You know, normally it's down to the female character to be
• 48:57
  victimized, and she is not in this film, she's not victimized
• 49:00
  at all, even from the start. Everyone else is making out in
• 49:03
  the corridor. She's like, no, not here.
• 49:05
  And she adds this real innocence.
• 49:07
  It's not even virginal innocence either, because, you know, for a
• 49:10
  fact they're going to go back after prom and they're going to
• 49:12
  have sex. It's just this feminine
• 49:14
  innocence that I think Verhoeven is obsessed with.
• 49:17
  And I think you can see that in RoboCop with Lewis, where she
• 49:20
  kind of saves the day, really. And it's always underpinned.
• 49:23
  And Verhoeven always gives really strong motivations to his
• 49:27
  female characters, but puts them in a man's world where you don't
• 49:30
  really see how strong that motivation is.
• 49:32
  And I think that's what Denise Richards brings to it.
• 49:34
  She does it perfectly because she's just the personification
• 49:37
  of the upper class white girl in America.
• 49:40
  And then subverts it slightly with just smiling through all of
• 49:43
  these moments where you think she should be panicking and just
• 49:46
  smiles through it. And she smiles through it, and
• 49:47
  she smiles through it, and you can be taken on face value to be
• 49:52
  a little bit underappreciated by her as a character.
• 49:56
  So it's got this level of intellect to it and I think she
• 49:58
  really, she really shines in the character and she really shines
• 50:01
  in the performance. Well, Nave Campbell was
• 50:04
  apparently the first person for Over and wanted to play Carmen,
• 50:07
  but she was already scheduled in to film Scream too, so she
• 50:09
  couldn't do it, OK? Right.
• 50:11
  And Denise Richard's career at that time, and mostly being as a
• 50:14
  model. And she'd had some smaller TV
• 50:16
  roles as well. Maybe I'm the crazy one, but I
• 50:18
  do think she's all right. Yeah.
• 50:20
  I think for Hovind directors, the cast quite well.
• 50:22
  You make sure they don't have any big monologues.
• 50:24
  I mean, that could have been awful, yeah.
• 50:26
  Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. There were a few scenes filmed
• 50:30
  where Carmen thinks Rico is dead.
• 50:33
  She starts a relationship with Zander, but this was shown to
• 50:35
  test audiences. There was a very, very negative
• 50:38
  reaction to Commons character, so those scenes were removed
• 50:41
  from the final cut. Yeah, for the point of work that
• 50:44
  these are normal people who've been screwed over by the state.
• 50:46
  The audience need to like them, I think so.
• 50:48
  I've not be a good change. Yeah, that's one screw over too
• 50:51
  many, isn't it? Really.
• 50:52
  Yeah, in which there's also said that you're filming for who
• 50:55
  often came to it and said he had an idea for new scene.
• 50:58
  It was a love scene that would require her to be naked, but she
• 51:01
  refused to do it because it wasn't in the script and she
• 51:03
  thought it'd serve no purpose. There it is.
• 51:06
  There we go, sweetie. Ball.
• 51:08
  Hope there's all tricks. Out of fucking Norway.
• 51:11
  Oh, by the way, yeah, I've got this idea, Yeah.
• 51:14
  I've heard you doing this one called Wild Things.
• 51:17
  I would be fair to these. Richards did say that she liked
• 51:19
  Paul Verhoven and she said he was a crazy person, but in a
• 51:22
  good way. Fair enough.
• 51:23
  He does things like that, yeah. Playing the part of Carmen
• 51:26
  Barnes launched the career after these Richards and a couple of
• 51:29
  years after this. She was Bond girl, Doctor
• 51:31
  Christmas Jones and the world is not enough and for us does OK.
• 51:37
  It's common. Yeah, yeah.
• 51:38
  More than OK, I would say. Christmas only comes once a
• 51:40
  year. The third member of our Holy
• 51:47
  Trinity in the cast is Carl Jenkins, played by Neil Patrick
• 51:50
  Harris, a psychic with a pet ferret, Carl ends up in the
• 51:53
  Federation's Military Intelligence division,
• 51:56
  masterminds the capture of the smart bog, and he uses his
• 51:58
  powers to help Rico save Carmen in the climax.
• 52:01
  Yeah, he's in this wolf of the species boys and girls.
• 52:05
  How is Carl and NPH in the role? I think there's a common theme
• 52:09
  here with the performances, isn't it?
• 52:11
  It's how the look and how Verhoven uses them rather than
• 52:15
  anything else. And I think with Neil Patrick
• 52:17
  House, I find he's somebody tends to portray a very similar
• 52:20
  characters. Super smart, very confident, but
• 52:23
  kind of smoke at the same time. Almost like.
• 52:25
  But he does that in Gone Girl but for Horvan knows that and
• 52:28
  that's what he wants. He doesn't want Harris to change
• 52:30
  that persona 1 little bit because he is this super smart.
• 52:34
  I mean, he's psychic who uses the gift for entirely terrible
• 52:37
  ends but doesn't think twice about it.
• 52:39
  And like I say, very super smoke about it.
• 52:42
  So I absolutely hate him, but I'm supposed to, so he's a
• 52:46
  perfect fit. Yeah, I think of the frame we've
• 52:48
  talked about. It's probably fair that Steve
• 52:50
  Neil Patrick Harris is the best actor.
• 52:52
  He was already famous at this point.
• 52:54
  He'd been Doogie Howser, MD and went on to have a successful
• 52:57
  career afterwards. And he's in the film less than
• 53:00
  Van Dean and Richards. But what he has to do, he does
• 53:03
  well. I think he's good as Carl.
• 53:05
  Like I said, Carmen and Rico seem to me to be decent people
• 53:08
  who have been duped by the Federation and being pushed down
• 53:11
  this dark path. This guy, though, this guy is
• 53:14
  just full on Nazi. Yeah, there's signs that he's a
• 53:18
  bit of a twat from the start. He takes pleasure in humiliating
• 53:20
  Rico when he blows up his 35% math scores level and see it.
• 53:24
  And he thinks it's funny when he psychically makes Serrano his
• 53:26
  ferrets attack his mother. That scene where he's testing
• 53:29
  Rico's psychic abilities? The same as that scene in
• 53:32
  Ghostbusters, surely? It's exactly the same, yeah.
• 53:35
  A couple of WAVY lines. It's not your lucky day.
• 53:37
  And here, though Call isn't in the film constantly.
• 53:40
  It is funny how every time we see him, he's somehow man just
• 53:42
  to look even more like a Nazi than he did the last time we saw
• 53:45
  him. By the end, he's just in full
• 53:47
  Gestapo outfit, black coat in cup.
• 53:51
  Doogie Hitler, MD. It's.
• 53:52
  Ridiculous. Terrible human being, but I
• 53:56
  think Neil Paprikaris is good in the film.
• 53:58
  Yeah. Yeah, I think he's great.
• 54:00
  It's a really good arc for the character.
• 54:01
  He just, he does disappear into the role that he's given to that
• 54:05
  point. Where is he psychic?
• 54:06
  Is he not? Is that the whole point?
• 54:08
  Do you get fooled by him? I think the makeup's great on
• 54:10
  him as well, where his face just looks more and more skull like
• 54:13
  as it progresses, he's got like dark eyes and his complexion
• 54:16
  gets white there. But I think he's, yeah, he's
• 54:18
  definitely the best actor in this film, definitely the best
• 54:21
  performance, definitely the most solid.
• 54:23
  Every time the camera goes to me think, yeah, he can do something
• 54:26
  good with this. And that whole sequence where he
• 54:28
  puts it down with a brain stem is fucking wonderful.
• 54:32
  It's just so well done, so well played out.
• 54:34
  Yeah, I think he's fantastic in the film.
• 54:36
  I think he's really, really good.
• 54:37
  But working with Serrano, the ferrets did cause some problems
• 54:40
  for the actors, and Harrison Van Deane referred to him as the
• 54:43
  Ferret from Hell. But in the original scripts,
• 54:45
  Serrano was actually witness a frog or a turtle.
• 54:48
  Yeah, we'll Tina. Well, for a turtle to climb
• 54:50
  those stairs, I think it could be fair.
• 54:52
  Bob. Mom.
• 54:53
  Serrano. I'll be there in 20 minutes
• 54:55
  later. Yeah, just nibbling at her
• 54:58
  angle. Well, after the film, Neil
• 55:00
  Patrick Harris Dig one, have a very successful career.
• 55:03
  Like we said, he starred in the hit TV show How I Met Your
• 55:05
  Mother and the movies Gone Girl on the Matrix resurrections are
• 55:08
  two of his biggest Yeah. And here as Doogie Hitler.
• 55:11
  We think Neil Patrick Harris is good.
• 55:14
  He's really good, yeah. He's just missing.
• 55:16
  What shall we talk about? He is.
• 55:20
  There is a wider cast and we will talk about more of them as
• 55:22
  we go. But in those three, Casper
• 55:24
  Vandina's recalled Denise Richards as Carmen and Neil
• 55:26
  Patrick Harris as call. Not a wealth of acting talent,
• 55:29
  maybe, but they lead the film just fine.
• 55:32
  Well, absolutely. We'll always be friends, yeah.
• 55:43
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  That's betterhelp.com/A TRM. Thanks again to better help for
• 56:53
  sponsoring this episode. The middle.
• 57:02
  The middle of Starship Troopers is where the film starts to
• 57:04
  deliver on the promise of the trailers.
• 57:06
  Lots of bugs, lots of Starship Troopers.
• 57:08
  And we're diving right in. Yes.
• 57:11
  The scenes following Rico and Co joining unit Roughneck 20 are
• 57:15
  coming, but first we're off to Klendathu, home of the bugs.
• 57:19
  We are. So after Buenos Aires is wiped
• 57:22
  off the map, the Federation retaliate and launch a full
• 57:25
  scale invasion of the Bugs homeworld Klendathu, a return to
• 57:28
  the battle we saw during the opening.
• 57:30
  Things go wrong as the Bugs open, a kind of human whoop as
• 57:33
  resulting in more character deaths and Rico are being
• 57:35
  brutally wounded. Yeah.
• 57:38
  To fight the bug, we must understand the bug.
• 57:40
  Rusty. Yes.
• 57:42
  How was Glendarthu? Unfortunately, that comes after
• 57:44
  Glendarthu, because that's a fucking clue what's going on
• 57:47
  here. Dropped into it, you know,
• 57:50
  you've got some really, really great moments where they're
• 57:53
  approaching it and it's very Omaha Beach and everything's
• 57:56
  getting blown to pieces. And there's some great moments
• 57:59
  where the spaceships crashing into each other and no one has a
• 58:01
  fucking clue what's going on, which is so reminiscent of
• 58:04
  anything during World War 2, any kind of invasion where they just
• 58:08
  make it up as the go along. So I mean, it's awesome.
• 58:11
  It's an awesome, awesome sequence and I'm probably going
• 58:13
  to say this from now on. As for the rest of the film,
• 58:16
  there's Aliens drop shit moment. It's always fucking brilliant.
• 58:20
  The soundtrack on this bed is fucking unreal.
• 58:23
  The Klendathu drop on the soundtrack is huge.
• 58:26
  Massive. But it's just the way the
• 58:28
  underestimate the opponent. There's just the ignorance
• 58:30
  that's here very much in the in the similar style to like flags
• 58:34
  of our fathers or letters with Mirajima when they do the the
• 58:37
  attacks on the Pacific, very much the attacks against the
• 58:40
  Americans, against the Japanese in World War 2.
• 58:43
  You know, they've got the tunnels that don't know the
• 58:44
  terrain, that don't know what the fighting against.
• 58:47
  They've got no idea. They've got cameramen on there
• 58:50
  just nonchalantly given some kind of it's a bug planet, an
• 58:54
  ugly planet. No one has an idea what's going
• 58:57
  on and it is absolute carnage and it starts really positive
• 59:01
  and it's just, it's terrifying. But at the same time, really
• 59:04
  well shot, really beautiful shot.
• 59:06
  And the great thing is at the end of the sequence you think
• 59:09
  Rico was dead. You're like, he's dead, he's
• 59:12
  gone. But we've seen this before in
• 59:13
  the start and now we've seen it again and the lead character is
• 59:17
  now dead. Great sequence and just an
• 59:19
  absolute commentary on every single military.
• 59:24
  Everything A military move that America made in World War 2 or
• 59:28
  Britain made in World War 2. They just didn't understand
• 59:31
  their enemy. And just like the ignorance of
• 59:32
  that, it's so well played out. Yeah, I think this is the first
• 59:36
  sequence since the prom was, he said Nice.
• 59:38
  So breaks things up quite well from that point of view.
• 59:40
  Yeah, and I like how it replays the opening of the film before
• 59:43
  we jump like one year earlier. But this time we'll see the
• 59:45
  action from different angles, which I like.
• 59:47
  Yeah though it makes it really odd when Rico shout get out of
• 59:51
  here into the camera instead of add the guy.
• 59:54
  Get out here now. But the filmmaking, I think is
• 59:57
  excellent. The wide shots we get when the
• 59:59
  land and the infantry are like streaming up the hills.
• 1:00:01
  Brilliant, yeah. The battle scenes are frantic
• 1:00:04
  and really. Well edited.
• 1:00:05
  The editors were Mark Goldblatt and Caroline Ross, who did
• 1:00:08
  Terminator Two and True Lies. Yes.
• 1:00:10
  So if they're good enough, Ryan, Jim, they're good enough for me.
• 1:00:12
  Absolutely, yeah. There's a blend of location
• 1:00:15
  shooting, matte paintings, model CGI, all comes together
• 1:00:18
  brilliantly and you can tell there's a big narrative plotting
• 1:00:21
  coming soon because characters start getting killed off left
• 1:00:24
  right and centre. Yeah, once the Hovind doesn't
• 1:00:26
  need you, you were gonna and it's not going to be pretty.
• 1:00:28
  Yeah, there's some foreshadowing in the shower scene earlier when
• 1:00:31
  Shizumi says he signed up because getting into Harvard
• 1:00:33
  will cost normal leg and his arm in his leg.
• 1:00:36
  Both get ripped off by a bug foreshadowing for Hovind style.
• 1:00:40
  Yeah, there's a lot of that. And that moment where Katrina
• 1:00:44
  gets dragged into The Cave by the bug, That's terrifying.
• 1:00:47
  That might be kind of like Sam Raimi kind of style.
• 1:00:49
  Yeah, and you never know what happens to her.
• 1:00:51
  It's like she's getting her brain sucked out or she's just
• 1:00:52
  going to get feasted on or what? Yeah, Awful.
• 1:00:55
  Yeah. I mean, 100,000 dead in one
• 1:00:57
  hour? Apparently.
• 1:00:58
  So. Not the most successful invasion
• 1:00:59
  ever, but what we're hoping does well is that we finally get the
• 1:01:03
  bugs. We definitely get the brutality.
• 1:01:05
  But he still leaves plenty of places he can go.
• 1:01:07
  I think it's excellent. Yeah, it's great.
• 1:01:09
  Yeah, I'm going to follow this up when Rico's recovered and
• 1:01:12
  he's joined the Roughnecks because everybody's dressed like
• 1:01:15
  a Nazi now and. Like everybody's dressed like a
• 1:01:20
  Nazi now. Nobody.
• 1:01:21
  Is like there's an audience. You don't even blink at it.
• 1:01:23
  You just go. Yeah, that's fine.
• 1:01:24
  You. Don't think fair enough?
• 1:01:25
  Are we the buddies? That's it.
• 1:01:27
  It's not me. It's only after your hang on a
• 1:01:29
  minute. It is that, yeah.
• 1:01:31
  Like should they be looking like that?
• 1:01:34
  I mean when Carmen turns up absolutely looking like a Nazi
• 1:01:37
  fight commander because she's going, Johnny we go, you just
• 1:01:42
  overlook it completely because we've mentioned before but it is
• 1:01:45
  it's very Beverly Hills 9O2 on O type dialogue and it's love
• 1:01:49
  triangles and it's guys letting the Eagles getting in the wind,
• 1:01:52
  getting in a fight over a girl or bonding with the roughnecks
• 1:01:56
  by getting a tattoo together. And I think Denise Richard, see,
• 1:01:58
  when she's talking about home being blown up, like her
• 1:02:01
  delivery of when it hits me, I can't stop crying.
• 1:02:04
  I don't get the impression whatsoever she's doing any
• 1:02:06
  crying or any thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, whether that
• 1:02:10
  delivery is on purpose or not, I'm not sure.
• 1:02:12
  But it just adds to this idea that by now all these young guys
• 1:02:16
  and girls, they look amazing on the surface, but actually
• 1:02:19
  underneath the all just slowly turning into monsters.
• 1:02:23
  Yeah, brainwashed. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:25
  Well, Nathan did go to see Rico in the tank and she says three
• 1:02:27
  more days. So he's just floating there for
• 1:02:30
  three days. You go mental.
• 1:02:32
  But I think there's a good CGI effect there as well, where we
• 1:02:34
  see the surgical machine kind of stitching up Rico's leg.
• 1:02:37
  That still looks good. Yeah, it does.
• 1:02:38
  Yeah. And the big plot turn I was
• 1:02:39
  talking about then comes in Rod Check's roughneck showing up.
• 1:02:42
  The shot where Rod check appears in Mercedes mechanical arm and
• 1:02:45
  it kind of pans up as he walks between the troops is really
• 1:02:48
  good. Yeah.
• 1:02:48
  Would have been great if it had been Michael Douglas riding in
• 1:02:53
  Ronald. Imagine that from nowhere.
• 1:02:55
  Yeah, cigar. Why the lens?
• 1:02:59
  But you know why Inside's great as well, obviously.
• 1:03:00
  Yeah, he's great. And Rajek says, I only have one
• 1:03:03
  rule. Everybody fights.
• 1:03:05
  No one quits. You don't do your job or shoot
• 1:03:07
  you like 3 rules at least, surely?
• 1:03:09
  Yeah, but bringing the roof next in works really well in
• 1:03:12
  developing the narrative, developing the journey we goes
• 1:03:15
  on, and bringing in some new characters to freshen things up.
• 1:03:18
  Yeah, and it's around this time when Rico runs in a Carmen on
• 1:03:21
  Ticonderoga space station, right?
• 1:03:23
  Gets into it was under and they have their fight and when they
• 1:03:26
  filmed up it took 40 takes and Casper Van Dean accidentally
• 1:03:29
  punched Patrick Muldoon right in the face and post his lip. 40
• 1:03:33
  takes, yeah. Kubrick Zamma does have a pretty
• 1:03:40
  punchable face to be very much. So yeah, 50 takes for me.
• 1:03:46
  And Ticonderoga. It was named after four
• 1:03:48
  Ticonderoga, which apparently played a key role in the
• 1:03:51
  Revolutionary War. Yes.
• 1:03:52
  So it looked pretty good, I think All the space station
• 1:03:54
  sets, yeah. But on the sets on Total Recall
• 1:03:56
  anyway, yes. Yeah, definitely.
• 1:03:59
  So deaths come thick and fast on Clandathu, and those characters
• 1:04:02
  are quickly replaced by the Roughnecks.
• 1:04:04
  Let's find out more about them, should we?
• 1:04:06
  We should, yes. It's not long before the new
• 1:04:11
  Roughneck recruits are thrown into the action.
• 1:04:14
  After the disaster on Clen Dathu, there's a new strategy to
• 1:04:17
  attack the outer planets in the Bogstar system.
• 1:04:19
  Yeah, the raid on Tango Urilla brings us Air strikes, Rico's
• 1:04:23
  promotion to Corporal, and a new arachnid in the form of the
• 1:04:25
  tanker bug Westie. You've been tangoed.
• 1:04:30
  What do you think of Tango Urilla?
• 1:04:32
  Yeah, I think this is a lot more focused when you've got Clen
• 1:04:36
  Dathu and then you come into this moment.
• 1:04:37
  And this to me feels like a massive foreshadowing to the
• 1:04:40
  invasion of Afghanistan, which was obviously years later.
• 1:04:45
  But it does feel like the hunt for the bad guys, you know, the
• 1:04:48
  hunt for Osama bin Laden, they're all in caves, they're
• 1:04:51
  all hidden away. The landscape looks very, very
• 1:04:53
  familiar. And I think they did a lot of
• 1:04:56
  research. I know Vilvin did a lot of
• 1:04:57
  research into thinking what's going to come from now.
• 1:05:00
  And I think this whole sequence is just a lot more refined than
• 1:05:04
  Glendathu. The roughnecks know how to kill
• 1:05:06
  the bugs a little bit better without any explanation
• 1:05:08
  whatsoever. And there's some great moments
• 1:05:11
  in this. I think it comes back again to
• 1:05:13
  Rico's past and the fact that he's into sports and that he can
• 1:05:16
  do backflips and that that is the reason that he can take down
• 1:05:19
  the Tanker book. Like because of Sports USA,
• 1:05:24
  learn some sports. I mean, the effects are quite
• 1:05:27
  Ruby on this bit. And that's probably the only
• 1:05:29
  time I'll say the effects are a bit Ruby.
• 1:05:30
  And I think it's intentional to say, like, how far can I push
• 1:05:33
  this? But there's so many good bits in
• 1:05:36
  this. Like when he when the tank of a
• 1:05:38
  blows up and Van Dean's just standing in front of it and it's
• 1:05:40
  just a carcass behind him on fire.
• 1:05:42
  Yeah, that is badass. Even before that, when it comes
• 1:05:46
  out, then you've got like, the poster image and you're like,
• 1:05:49
  yeah, I love it when you see the poster image in the actual film
• 1:05:53
  and you're like, I can pause that.
• 1:05:54
  There's the poster. But there's so many, like,
• 1:05:57
  little bits in this that really added the story.
• 1:06:00
  I mean, that soldier that gets picked up by that flying bug,
• 1:06:03
  essentially, if you watch it again, he essentially gets raped
• 1:06:08
  because you think it's going to stab him, but it bends him over
• 1:06:10
  and it literally just goes behind him with this fake
• 1:06:14
  fucking spike. And then they rape the brain bug
• 1:06:17
  later on. And there's all these elements
• 1:06:19
  where it's like, did that really happen?
• 1:06:21
  They watch it again. It's so obvious and it just gets
• 1:06:24
  a little bit more nuanced and a little bit more focused and a
• 1:06:27
  little bit more interesting from this point where you just think,
• 1:06:30
  right, I'm in a group of people now who know how to deal with
• 1:06:33
  this situation. What's going to happen?
• 1:06:35
  Yeah, I think in terms of scale and spectacle, this is a step up
• 1:06:38
  from Clandar through. Yeah.
• 1:06:39
  But also for the first time, we get a potential moment of
• 1:06:42
  connection between the humans and the arachnids.
• 1:06:45
  Disney Sugar take down that lone bug and we get a close up of its
• 1:06:48
  eye, like darting around. Yeah, it's the first time we see
• 1:06:50
  any kind of identity. Or humanity.
• 1:06:53
  Or emotion from a bug and then Sugar just shoots the shit out
• 1:06:56
  of it. Yeah, that's that then.
• 1:06:59
  Yeah, it becomes almost human, like I'm not having that.
• 1:07:01
  Exactly, yeah. And then we go get his moment
• 1:07:03
  when he takes down the Tanker Bug, which is very reminiscent
• 1:07:06
  of Luka Skywalker taking down the Anat in Empire.
• 1:07:08
  I think. The moment the book emerges from
• 1:07:11
  the ground and then burns Burgie's arm off is really good.
• 1:07:13
  There's lots of moments in the film which are really clearly
• 1:07:15
  CGI. This is one of them.
• 1:07:17
  And that sometimes bothers me when it's so obvious, but here
• 1:07:20
  it doesn't, I think because they get the blend of digital and
• 1:07:23
  practical, right? Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  And another Van Dean broke a ribbon, chip two of his teeth,
• 1:07:27
  shooting the moment he's on top of the bug because it was, like,
• 1:07:29
  so intense and a fully deserved promotion afterwards for Rico
• 1:07:34
  that he fully deserved. Yeah, but yeah, that's just
• 1:07:36
  because her arms been burned off, though.
• 1:07:38
  Like if she was still right, Yeah.
• 1:07:42
  Well, she just vanished as well once the arrogate.
• 1:07:43
  Exactly. It's like a really massive slap
• 1:07:46
  in the face. But maybe I need someone else
• 1:07:48
  now. So in this sequence to clear the
• 1:07:51
  way for the infantry to land fleet, perform an airstrike and
• 1:07:54
  wipe out thousands of bugs. Most of those explosions were
• 1:07:57
  real, with some CGI added afterwards, and the special
• 1:08:01
  effects supervisor was John Richardson and he had worked on
• 1:08:03
  6 James Bond films and would go on to work on all seven Harry
• 1:08:07
  Potter films. So to pull off that shot the set
• 1:08:09
  of tons of explosives over a mile and detonated them in order
• 1:08:13
  to move closer to the camera. Such a badass shot as well.
• 1:08:17
  Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.
• 1:08:18
  It's fucking brilliant. He was the effect supervisor,
• 1:08:21
  Roy. Aliens as well.
• 1:08:22
  John Richardson, yeah. And at the time, this was the
• 1:08:25
  record for the longest rolling explosion in the film.
• 1:08:27
  It is unbelievable. It looks incredible.
• 1:08:30
  It's like if Chris Nolan the directed Starship Troopers.
• 1:08:33
  This is the only scene. Like, yeah, it's fair enough in
• 1:08:38
  creating the moment where the soldiers are dropped and clen.
• 1:08:40
  Darth Who by Landon craft the Hooven Watch footage of Allied
• 1:08:43
  Forces Landon at Normandy on D-Day during the Second World
• 1:08:46
  War, which is obviously what would thought.
• 1:08:48
  Bowman said it was the hardest scene to orchestrate because
• 1:08:51
  they had 1300 extras at 8000 feet altitude, all running in
• 1:08:56
  armor that weighed 32 lbs. I think you can see the
• 1:08:59
  influence in the way that the doors drop, like a ramp, like
• 1:09:02
  the landing craft at Omaha Beach, yeah.
• 1:09:04
  And the short way the ship lands, we caught from a scale
• 1:09:06
  model to the doors dropping and then the real cast or running
• 1:09:09
  out and it's like seamless. Really good, yeah.
• 1:09:12
  Yeah. I'm going to pick up after this
• 1:09:14
  when they finally have some downtime and to have the party
• 1:09:16
  on Tango Urella at last, at last.
• 1:09:20
  And I think Einteid is particularly great in this scene
• 1:09:22
  because it, yeah, he is that classic trope of the Lieutenant
• 1:09:25
  in charge who is a hard ass. But get on his right side and do
• 1:09:29
  your job and you'll be absolutely fine by him.
• 1:09:31
  It does make me laugh though. He brings all this entertainment
• 1:09:34
  and it's, you know, it's beard, it's booze, it's footballs and
• 1:09:37
  it's his violin as well. Like why?
• 1:09:40
  Why does he get the exceptional? One else gets anything personal,
• 1:09:43
  just him and his violence. Not being shipped in just for
• 1:09:45
  him, I know. It's mental.
• 1:09:47
  It's a weird looking violin as well, isn't it?
• 1:09:49
  It's. Really weird looking.
• 1:09:50
  He's like Kilgore though, isn't he?
• 1:09:51
  Like I inside in this. Like he'll go on Apocalypse now.
• 1:09:54
  Very much, yeah. But so we'd like, I get like
• 1:09:56
  flashbacks to Master and Commander, which we did a few
• 1:09:58
  episodes ago, like for Paul, that need to turn over this
• 1:10:01
  cello, get a big jamming session going on.
• 1:10:04
  Jamming session again. Amazing.
• 1:10:06
  I do also think at this point though, what on earth is this
• 1:10:10
  still seen in Rico like? Obviously he looks amazing, but
• 1:10:14
  he's flat as a pancake Christmas wise and he's been moon and over
• 1:10:17
  calm and non-stop and she still wants to get in with him like
• 1:10:20
  she could do so much better. I agree.
• 1:10:23
  And Rico doesn't do anything until he's ordered to outrage.
• 1:10:26
  Yeah, yeah, man. She's out.
• 1:10:29
  She's fucking. Brilliant, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:32
  I think the party works. A bit of respite from all the
• 1:10:34
  carnage and we get some character moments.
• 1:10:36
  Like when we go and sugar talk about rod?
• 1:10:38
  Check. The dialogue is a little bit
• 1:10:39
  clunky. Sugars like you kill bugs good,
• 1:10:42
  but okay. Fine, you knew him before, but
• 1:10:47
  well, that's what happens when your children get excuse me.
• 1:10:51
  And this is the third Verhoven film We've done.
• 1:10:53
  So knowing him like we do, the second The Days gets what she
• 1:10:57
  wants, she sleeps with Rico and tells me she loves them.
• 1:10:59
  It's like, well, she's dead. Then.
• 1:11:03
  But good sequence As much as anything, It feels like we're
• 1:11:05
  taking a much needed breather before the action goes up.
• 1:11:08
  Yeah. End of the notch, yeah.
• 1:11:10
  Yeah, I would say it wouldn't take me 20 minutes.
• 1:11:14
  I'll be there in 5. Hello.
• 1:11:15
  I am a bit nervous, intense, everyone shouting outside and
• 1:11:17
  playing violins. Make me nervous.
• 1:11:20
  I'm getting really nervous. So we've talked about Ace and
• 1:11:24
  his violin, and the piece of music he's playing is called
• 1:11:27
  Dixie. And that was written in 1859 by
• 1:11:30
  a composer called Daniel Emmett, who was the founder of the
• 1:11:33
  Virginia Minstrels, who were the first blackface minstrel troupe,
• 1:11:36
  and it became the unofficial national anthem of the
• 1:11:39
  Confederate States during the American Civil War.
• 1:11:42
  So we'll deliver a choice Bible? Yeah, so.
• 1:11:44
  It's no accidents, no accident. Here.
• 1:11:46
  Yeah, that sounds nice. Let's have that in there.
• 1:11:49
  What? Connotations does that have?
• 1:11:51
  Yeah. On it like I know Jay Pussy
• 1:11:53
  played the violin for real. He learned for the film and he
• 1:11:55
  was taught by the Hovind, the wife Martine, which is nice to.
• 1:11:58
  Wow. Yeah, really nice.
• 1:12:00
  Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, not sure aces a role
• 1:12:02
  that required going method, but fair enough.
• 1:12:05
  Yeah, it's beauty though. I mean, he's mental.
• 1:12:08
  That's that on the middle. Some huge action sequences as
• 1:12:11
  the humans go head to head with the arachnids.
• 1:12:14
  Character deaths and introductions coming thick and
• 1:12:16
  fast too. Some really good set pieces.
• 1:12:19
  Some great set pieces. Excellent stuff.
• 1:12:21
  Yeah, the. Crew.
• 1:12:28
  While Starship Troopers might seem like the Paul Verhoeven
• 1:12:30
  show, some of that people were involved as well.
• 1:12:33
  And that's what we're looking at now.
• 1:12:35
  Yeah, we're going to be talking about the music and the visuals
• 1:12:37
  in the film, but before we get to that, it's the screenplay.
• 1:12:41
  It is, yeah. So the screenwriter of Starship
• 1:12:43
  Troopers was Edward Newmeyer adapting Robert A Heinlein's
• 1:12:47
  novel of the same name. This was Newmeyer's second
• 1:12:49
  feature film writing credit, having Co pen, RoboCop,
• 1:12:52
  Verhoeven 10 years earlier. Newmeyer and Verhoeven together
• 1:12:56
  again at last Wednesday. Yeah, how would it go?
• 1:12:58
  The same round I. Mean it just, it just goes
• 1:13:01
  wonderfully together, doesn't it?
• 1:13:02
  Inside peas and carrots. It's wonderful for me.
• 1:13:04
  I think it's just it really, really works.
• 1:13:06
  And I think they know each other so well by now that there's such
• 1:13:09
  a trust here where Verhoeven can just say, I want it like this
• 1:13:14
  and you might have go, yeah, I'll make it like that.
• 1:13:16
  Then to the point where he has to explain the novel to him.
• 1:13:18
  Like Verhoeven's not bothered about the novel.
• 1:13:20
  He's not bothered about that. He wants to make something that
• 1:13:23
  makes sense, and I think you may have does.
• 1:13:25
  And I think they wanted to do the same with RoboCop, but I
• 1:13:28
  can't help but think how much they were influenced by Cameron.
• 1:13:31
  Because you've got RoboCop, which is heavily influenced by
• 1:13:34
  the Terminator, and then you've got this, which I think is
• 1:13:36
  heavily influenced by Aliens. Yeah, this will be the pitch if
• 1:13:39
  the both of them are together. They went the studio and they
• 1:13:41
  went it's going to be Aliens, right?
• 1:13:44
  But it's going to be a lot bigger and it's going to have
• 1:13:46
  really good looking people and it's going to be rambunctious
• 1:13:49
  action film. And I don't even think they
• 1:13:51
  would have mentioned the satire at all.
• 1:13:53
  And they just, Oh, yeah, OK, we'll do that.
• 1:13:56
  And I think he's just taken everything that for Hooven's
• 1:13:59
  thrown at him and just calmly put it on the page.
• 1:14:02
  Every actor that we've thought about understands the
• 1:14:04
  assignment, cinematographer, the music.
• 1:14:06
  Everyone understands the assignment.
• 1:14:07
  I think that really is down to Ave.
• 1:14:09
  Maya, who just went, Paul, just give us everything you want and
• 1:14:12
  I'll put it down on the page. I think they both sat down, had
• 1:14:16
  a couple of drinks and went, we're going to make Starship
• 1:14:18
  Troopers and we're going to make it like this.
• 1:14:20
  And they did. So what we're saying is the one
• 1:14:22
  that Yumaya Verhoeven satire based on Titanic or the Abyss.
• 1:14:27
  Imagine. That's the Real Trilogy.
• 1:14:30
  Nazi icebergs, Well, I know that Yumaya said.
• 1:14:32
  His vision was to write something that on one hand was,
• 1:14:35
  let's kill a bunch of bugs and on the other held a mirror up to
• 1:14:38
  society and kind of said, can you see us in here?
• 1:14:40
  And I think that's what his script does.
• 1:14:42
  The bug killing part, The narrative's good.
• 1:14:45
  I mean, it's not Charles Dickens, but the beta logical
• 1:14:48
  character motivations are there, character arcs are there, makes
• 1:14:51
  it easy to buy into, and the whole thing easy to engage with
• 1:14:53
  is a piece of entertainment. The second part, the social
• 1:14:56
  commentary, is the satire, and I think my favorite thing about
• 1:14:59
  that in the writing is the theme of propaganda we'll see often
• 1:15:03
  with the use of the Federal Network transmissions and the
• 1:15:06
  Overhoven. The new Maya never tell us this.
• 1:15:08
  I think all those ads are just full of shit.
• 1:15:11
  Of course they are. I don't believe anything the
• 1:15:13
  film tells us that we don't see ourselves.
• 1:15:16
  I don't think the humans are winning the fight like it says
• 1:15:18
  at the end, and the arachnids attacking Buenos Aires, one of
• 1:15:21
  the key plot points. I don't think that happens
• 1:15:23
  either, no, at least not in the way we're told.
• 1:15:25
  I think it was a false flag put out there by the Federation to
• 1:15:28
  justify going to war, something which has happened in our own
• 1:15:30
  history. Well, society needs war to fund
• 1:15:33
  the society, doesn't it so? Exactly.
• 1:15:35
  Yes, they have ongoing circle. It doesn't even make sense.
• 1:15:37
  The Milky Way is 100,000 light years across in the shores where
• 1:15:40
  Glen Dathy was, and it must be a good 70,000 light years or
• 1:15:44
  something from Earth. So unless it's Dirty Harry
• 1:15:47
  firing in these meteors, nobody's not going to show,
• 1:15:49
  surely. Unless we're just completely
• 1:15:52
  ignoring the physics of the situation, which is also
• 1:15:54
  possible. And that TV debate will see
• 1:15:57
  between the scientists where the guys like a bug that thinks
• 1:16:01
  offensive, that's far too familiar nowadays.
• 1:16:05
  It's like talk TV. You seen that Piers Morgan
• 1:16:08
  yelling at people about Prince Harry, but those comments on the
• 1:16:11
  power of the media to influence people through propaganda ring
• 1:16:14
  true and the really powerful. To me, I think this film is
• 1:16:17
  proof that not only can action films have smart writing, they
• 1:16:20
  can have artistic writing. Because under all the gore and
• 1:16:23
  all the bravado and all the Verhoeven craziness, this is a
• 1:16:27
  piece of art to me. It is, yeah, absolutely.
• 1:16:29
  And then people arguing about bugs look like bugs and say
• 1:16:33
  they've got bug like eyes and they just say bugs can think.
• 1:16:36
  I find that offensive. And the whole thing with the
• 1:16:40
  asteroid is that common change in the trajectory of the ship
• 1:16:44
  and then it hits the meteor and that may be part of it and maybe
• 1:16:47
  you don't know. I know it's that, yeah.
• 1:16:49
  Yeah. The writing is definitely the
• 1:16:50
  aspect like I needed to look at twice when I came back to this
• 1:16:54
  because that's a part that can throw you off balance on 1st
• 1:16:56
  view and which it definitely did for me.
• 1:16:58
  And that's definitely true, The dialogue, like when you get
• 1:17:00
  that. Same with Rico, Carl and Carmen.
• 1:17:02
  When she goes let's make a vow, no matter what, we'll always be
• 1:17:05
  friends. On the surface, that is
• 1:17:08
  diabolical. That is like teen soap opera
• 1:17:12
  nonsense and sort clunky and cheesy.
• 1:17:15
  But again, it has that purpose of being one thing on the
• 1:17:17
  surface and one thing underneath.
• 1:17:19
  And if the dialogue is really smart and witty and
• 1:17:21
  philosophical, on the surface, everything for Hoffman is trying
• 1:17:25
  to say would be obvious. And he doesn't want it to be
• 1:17:27
  obvious. He wants the dialogue to be
• 1:17:29
  these sickly sweet platitudes and Rico going.
• 1:17:32
  That's my girlfriend to Zander during the match.
• 1:17:35
  Yeah. So on one hand the dialogue is
• 1:17:37
  some of the worst I've ever heard, but on the other hand,
• 1:17:40
  it's brilliant. I agree.
• 1:17:42
  What's the subtext going on? I think, yeah.
• 1:17:44
  And when the script was first written, you May had came up
• 1:17:47
  with the idea kind of independently, and it was called
• 1:17:49
  Bug Haunted Outpost 9. When he realized the
• 1:17:52
  similarities to the book Starship Groupers, he went to
• 1:17:54
  John Davidson. They produced RoboCop and asked
• 1:17:56
  him to buy the rights. And Davidson said that he
• 1:17:58
  couldn't believe it when the rights were available,
• 1:18:00
  considering how many of the film makers are clearly taken from it
• 1:18:03
  like James Cameron. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:05
  And there are, as you might expect, lots of differences from
• 1:18:08
  the book. So in the book, Rico is
• 1:18:10
  Filipino, Carmen isn't his girlfriend, and Carla's actually
• 1:18:14
  killed when the Bugs attack a research station.
• 1:18:16
  Ace is a combination of two characters called Ace and Pat
• 1:18:19
  Levy. And in the book Des is a man.
• 1:18:23
  Loads of differences, yeah. What's the similarities?
• 1:18:29
  Yeah, well, in the book We Go doesn't have a relationship with
• 1:18:31
  Des. Unsurprisingly, The only real
• 1:18:33
  similarity is the characters. I've got the same names.
• 1:18:36
  New Maya use the same names. Other than that, yes, almost
• 1:18:38
  entirely different. And also in the book, Rico's
• 1:18:42
  mother dies but not his father, and his dad actually joins the
• 1:18:44
  Mobile Infantry and they have a brief reunion.
• 1:18:47
  Yeah, because it started this book.
• 1:18:49
  Hunt Outpost 9. The narrative in the film is
• 1:18:51
  basically nothing like the book. Although once they got the
• 1:18:54
  rights, I think there must have been a draft where New Mile went
• 1:18:56
  back through and took some elements from the book because
• 1:18:58
  like Zim throwing the knife, it is that is in the book.
• 1:19:02
  Right. OK.
• 1:19:03
  Yeah. And one big change is that the
• 1:19:05
  arachnids in the book aren't mindless books that actually
• 1:19:07
  have atomic bombs and guns. And there's another alien
• 1:19:10
  species in the book called the Skinnies, and they have joined
• 1:19:13
  forces with the Arachnids and the humans at war with them too,
• 1:19:16
  right? Yeah, the skinnies are similar
• 1:19:18
  to humans, but they're really tall and they've got green skin
• 1:19:22
  so well, not that similar actually.
• 1:19:24
  Definitely not and. In the book, it's one of those
• 1:19:26
  atomic bombers that destroys Buenos Aires, not a meteor.
• 1:19:29
  Right, and also Highlands Troopers.
• 1:19:32
  They have power armor which allows them to jump hundreds of
• 1:19:34
  feet in the air and have laser guns.
• 1:19:36
  But obviously in the film the more like modern soldiers with
• 1:19:38
  standard armor and machine guns. That's right, John Davidson said
• 1:19:42
  the power armor idea had to be left out because of the budget
• 1:19:45
  and how Heinlein describes the look of the power armor.
• 1:19:48
  Westy. I think the guys who created War
• 1:19:49
  Armor 40,000 had that definitely in mind. 100% yeah, with the
• 1:19:53
  Space Marines, Yeah, you got the jump troops as well.
• 1:19:55
  They do the same thing. Right.
• 1:19:57
  Yeah. And I think the most surprising
• 1:19:59
  change is the critique of fascism we see all the way
• 1:20:02
  through the film. That isn't in the book at all.
• 1:20:04
  The book plays it very straight and the characters are mostly
• 1:20:07
  portrayed as heroes. Yeah, I mean, Verhoven said that
• 1:20:10
  he wanted to take the world presented in the book and show
• 1:20:12
  us how horrible it would be in real life.
• 1:20:14
  I would say that rather than being an adaptation of the book,
• 1:20:16
  the film is more like an argument with the book.
• 1:20:19
  Yeah, so classic Verhoven. He's always arguing with
• 1:20:21
  someone. Yeah, for Hogan said.
• 1:20:24
  They intentionally made some of the dialogue very pure and
• 1:20:27
  innocent, like a 1950s TV show. So it's basically happy days in
• 1:20:31
  space. Yeah, with loads of violence.
• 1:20:34
  Like when Carmen says let's make a vow, no matter what, we'll
• 1:20:37
  always be friends. And he said to me, it's
• 1:20:40
  artistic, but to other people it's really weird.
• 1:20:42
  Yeah, like I can see where he's coming from and it's just
• 1:20:44
  painting picture. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:46
  That's his career then. Nutshell, isn't it?
• 1:20:48
  To me, it's artistic. Yeah, to everyone else, it's
• 1:20:50
  weird. And Verhofen took inspiration
• 1:20:53
  from Nazi fashion, iconography and propaganda.
• 1:20:57
  And he said he's spoken to people who've called the film
• 1:20:59
  all quite on the Final Frontier, which is quite funny.
• 1:21:03
  And he said when the studio saw the film they said their flag,
• 1:21:06
  it's a Nazi flag. And he responded, No, it's
• 1:21:08
  different colours. Brilliant.
• 1:21:13
  I mean the Opal flag was green, white and yellow and the
• 1:21:15
  Federation flag is green, white and blue, so not that different.
• 1:21:18
  Different colors, yeah. One different color.
• 1:21:20
  They are no argument. It was designed by Alan Cameron,
• 1:21:24
  the production designer. And I think all the designs,
• 1:21:26
  like the flags, the uniforms, everything looks like how the US
• 1:21:30
  military would look if it had been designed by the Nazis,
• 1:21:33
  which I assume is the intention. Yeah.
• 1:21:35
  And a pretty powerful idea, yeah.
• 1:21:36
  It's like Man in the High Tower, isn't it?
• 1:21:38
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's got that kind
• 1:21:40
  of vibe to it. Yeah.
• 1:21:41
  Well, there were other references to the military.
• 1:21:43
  The boot camp was called Arthur Curry Camp.
• 1:21:45
  It's named after a Canadian officer from World War One who
• 1:21:48
  was the first person to rise from the bottom rung of the
• 1:21:50
  ladder to become commander of the Canadian Corps.
• 1:21:53
  Yeah, his nickname was Guts and Gators, apparently.
• 1:21:56
  No, it's my nickname. Ian W Boot Camp.
• 1:22:02
  That's so cool there. And Arthur Curry's also the name
• 1:22:04
  of Aquaman, which is weird. Yeah, No.
• 1:22:06
  Why? I guess that's where DC Comic
• 1:22:08
  got it from too. Right.
• 1:22:10
  Yeah, and those are the military references throughout as well.
• 1:22:13
  So the name of the ship Carmen is on is the Roger Young.
• 1:22:16
  Yeah. And Roger Young was a World War
• 1:22:17
  2 soldier who wants to be demoted, and that's how he could
• 1:22:20
  fight. And he actually won the Medal of
• 1:22:21
  Honor when he sacrificed himself to save his platoon.
• 1:22:24
  Right. Yeah, so he was demoted so he
• 1:22:27
  could fight like Zim in the film.
• 1:22:29
  Yeah, how Watkins dies at the end.
• 1:22:30
  Die like Watkins, yeah. Is how Roger Young died.
• 1:22:33
  Yeah, I mean, you probably didn't shout.
• 1:22:34
  Just trying to kill some bug, Sir.
• 1:22:37
  Hey, my done. The previous sacrifice was
• 1:22:39
  there, Yeah. With the nuclear warhead either.
• 1:22:44
  And the line Do you want to live Forever?
• 1:22:45
  That wasn't written for the film that was said by Sergeant Dan
• 1:22:48
  Daily to his troops before the Battle of Bello Ward during
• 1:22:51
  World War One. World War One, Well.
• 1:22:54
  Yeah, yeah, you apparently said. For Christ's sakes, men, do you
• 1:22:56
  want to live forever? To which my answer would be yes
• 1:23:00
  please. Or quite a bit.
• 1:23:01
  Or longer than the next 5 minutes.
• 1:23:02
  Yeah, a. Little longer than this.
• 1:23:04
  And the Academy where Carmen is trained?
• 1:23:06
  That's called Tereskova Base, named after Valentin Tereskova,
• 1:23:10
  the first woman in space in 1963.
• 1:23:13
  Oh, nice. That's a nice move.
• 1:23:14
  Yeah, Russian cosmonaut. Still the youngest ever woman to
• 1:23:17
  fly in Earth's orbit, apparently.
• 1:23:18
  Wow, so good for Valentina. Yeah, We've talked about the
• 1:23:22
  satirical critique of fascism, and one of the main ways
• 1:23:24
  Starship Troopers does that is through the use of the Federal
• 1:23:26
  Network transmissions. Yes, Where they're trying to get
• 1:23:29
  people to sign up for the infantry.
• 1:23:30
  There's three one right at the start, one around the end of Act
• 1:23:33
  one, and one right at the end, which causes the film.
• 1:23:36
  Yeah. What do I think of those?
• 1:23:38
  I think the first one you see is just so important where it's
• 1:23:41
  like I'm doing my part join. This is what it's going to be
• 1:23:44
  about. And the way that the tutorialize
• 1:23:46
  that the whole fact that it's just kids and the kid pops up,
• 1:23:50
  I'm doing my part too and everyone laughs at him.
• 1:23:52
  But then you realize that kids pop up later in the roughnecks.
• 1:23:55
  Yeah. And the whole, you know,
• 1:23:56
  teenagers. And that's probably more true to
• 1:23:58
  life of the age that the kids fought in World War 2 and
• 1:24:02
  Vietnam. And I think that's really,
• 1:24:03
  really brilliantly done. You get a news report and they
• 1:24:06
  just sugar coat everything invasion.
• 1:24:09
  But they do it in gold letters and it's all like, yeah, hey,
• 1:24:12
  we're invading something and hey, everything's going to be
• 1:24:14
  fine. And this is where the bodies are
• 1:24:16
  and this is where we are most. Show your graphical show your
• 1:24:19
  map, Why don't you join us? And it's just so well done.
• 1:24:22
  And like we said, it is better than RoboCop in that satire
• 1:24:25
  because it's just kicked up so many more notches.
• 1:24:28
  Not even just one. Yeah, but the way that he's
• 1:24:30
  peppered them through the film is perfect because you just get
• 1:24:33
  enough. And this opening sequence where
• 1:24:35
  it seems like it's funny, I'm doing my part too.
• 1:24:39
  It's like, well fuck, that's terrifying if you think about
• 1:24:42
  it. But just the way of the home
• 1:24:43
  plays out, it's just so well done.
• 1:24:46
  Yeah, that ad opens the film and the music is, like, really
• 1:24:49
  jingoistic. And yeah, it's really obese, I.
• 1:24:54
  Mean. It's not how you start an action
• 1:24:56
  film. Typically.
• 1:24:56
  It's a big statement right from the off.
• 1:24:58
  I think it's brilliant, yeah. And to create the opening ad for
• 1:25:01
  Hooven Imitated, a Lenny Reef and Star film called Triumph of
• 1:25:04
  the Will, which was released in 1935, which is very famous.
• 1:25:08
  And the opening shot of Starship Troopers is identical to a shot
• 1:25:11
  from that, and it features Nazi soldiers saying they'll do their
• 1:25:14
  part. Right, Cheerful Nazis.
• 1:25:18
  Cheerful Nazis. That's just such an oxymoron.
• 1:25:21
  I think the second ad is probably the one that stands out
• 1:25:23
  to me, where we're seeing Nazi call demonstrate how we're tear
• 1:25:26
  down a bug. I always feel sorry for that
• 1:25:28
  poor cow that gets fed to the bug.
• 1:25:30
  Yeah. I know.
• 1:25:31
  I think it's amazing how the censor that out and then show
• 1:25:33
  everything else it's. So good.
• 1:25:35
  And we see the ad for the live broadcast of the execution.
• 1:25:38
  The guy was tried and convicted in less than a day.
• 1:25:40
  It's like something from 2000 AD that.
• 1:25:42
  That's not far off that, you know, I don't think that's far
• 1:25:45
  off. There was a lot of other things.
• 1:25:46
  Yeah. They don't hear already, so who
• 1:25:48
  knows? I mean running Man and live
• 1:25:50
  executions. I wouldn't be surprised in the
• 1:25:51
  next 20 years. Well, the prisoner would say he
• 1:25:54
  was going to be executed on TV. Do you remember him in the film?
• 1:25:57
  Yes, yeah. Yes.
• 1:25:58
  So that's a new Maya. Oh, is it?
• 1:26:00
  Really. Oh.
• 1:26:01
  OK. Yeah.
• 1:26:02
  That's right. I thought it was one of the guys
• 1:26:03
  from Beverly Hills Cup who holds up the club, looks just like
• 1:26:06
  him. No, no.
• 1:26:07
  Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills, 90210.
• 1:26:09
  Beverly Hills, 90210 Cup Oh, it's that new.
• 1:26:14
  It's great performance. That is.
• 1:26:15
  It's so much sorrow with his face.
• 1:26:17
  It's great. I want to talk about the one at
• 1:26:19
  the end because it just sums the film up for me.
• 1:26:21
  You know, calm and Rico call all completely fallen in line with
• 1:26:25
  what the seat wants them to do. And and it's just so much
• 1:26:29
  obvious brainwashing by this point.
• 1:26:31
  We need more ships. Yeah.
• 1:26:33
  I mean, not to sell to you everything about why this whole
• 1:26:36
  thing is happening. It's it's all to do with the
• 1:26:37
  money. It's all to do with contracts.
• 1:26:39
  We need you and the whole bit of like and they'll win.
• 1:26:44
  I mean, you know, yeah, don't want to get on me soapbox, but,
• 1:26:46
  you know, just look at certain people in America and the things
• 1:26:49
  that they say and how they say it.
• 1:26:51
  This is exactly the type of language that they use.
• 1:26:54
  It is. It's brainwashing, but stick
• 1:26:56
  that music over the top of it and all of a sudden it's ultra
• 1:26:59
  heroic stuff. Yeah, and the second or third
• 1:27:02
  odds have two clips that are censored on the commentary for
• 1:27:05
  the film. Vovan said the cow being killed
• 1:27:07
  was censored because they had complaints from animal rights
• 1:27:09
  protesters and the brain bug experiment was censored because
• 1:27:12
  the federation made it classified information.
• 1:27:16
  Right. Because they Vovan can't tell
• 1:27:18
  the difference between real life and what's in the film, yeah.
• 1:27:21
  That's the beautiful thing. That's why I love him so much.
• 1:27:23
  Because neither can we. I know, yeah.
• 1:27:26
  For his work as writer on Starship Troopers, Ed Neumaya
• 1:27:29
  wasn't nominated by any of the major awards bodies.
• 1:27:31
  Bought some very interesting and unique writing here for us.
• 1:27:35
  Oh, that's a great. Script really well written.
• 1:27:39
  Ed Neumaya was a previous Paul Wolven collaborator and the same
• 1:27:42
  can be said for the composer on Starship Troopers, Basil Paul
• 1:27:45
  the Doris. Yes, this marked Paul the Door
• 1:27:47
  was 45th film as composer and was his third time working with
• 1:27:51
  PV after Flesh and Blood and RoboCop.
• 1:27:54
  Yeah, a very experienced head on composing duty.
• 1:27:57
  Then, Matt, how did Battle Polar Doors do?
• 1:28:00
  I think you did brilliantly. The music is hilarious.
• 1:28:03
  It's so bombastic. Yeah, it's so OTT and it has
• 1:28:07
  this really great balance where you can take the music from the
• 1:28:09
  action scenes. You could put them over any
• 1:28:11
  other action scene from any of the film and it would work.
• 1:28:14
  Yeah, it sounds so genuine. It's not taking the piss.
• 1:28:17
  But then when you've got the lighter stuff, like when Carmen
• 1:28:20
  slides down the banister on the ship because she's so excited to
• 1:28:22
  be your pilot, or the music that accompanies the TV channels and
• 1:28:26
  it's so enough and it's so cheesy and on the nose.
• 1:28:29
  But again, that's the point. It's this great mixture of stuff
• 1:28:32
  you should take seriously and stuff you shouldn't.
• 1:28:35
  And once you in on it, once you get that joke, it's very, very
• 1:28:37
  funny at times. I mean, to me, a lot of it
• 1:28:39
  sounds like the Police Academy theme it.
• 1:28:43
  Does. Yeah, it does.
• 1:28:44
  You know what I mean? And that shouldn't work, but
• 1:28:50
  it's really funny. It's brilliant.
• 1:28:52
  I love it. Yeah, I mentioned the music and
• 1:28:54
  the ads. Open to film, that works great.
• 1:28:56
  The main theme you played at the start is good without being
• 1:28:59
  brilliant. I think very percussion driven,
• 1:29:01
  very militaristic, obviously reflects the authoritarian like
• 1:29:05
  utopia that is the Federation, I think.
• 1:29:07
  Yeah, loads of the scores based around recurring motifs where
• 1:29:10
  the arrangements change depending on how they're being
• 1:29:12
  used. Mostly action based obviously,
• 1:29:15
  but there's no emotional cues in there too.
• 1:29:17
  But Samba piece that plays during this funeral that comes
• 1:29:19
  from Norway. I know that Verhoven said it's
• 1:29:21
  the most beautiful piece Battle ever wrote, right.
• 1:29:24
  But my favorite moment in terms of the music is what you
• 1:29:27
  mentioned before. Westie the Clandafu drop where
• 1:29:30
  the troops arrive on the planet in the score and the sound
• 1:29:32
  effect are kind of intertwined around each other almost.
• 1:29:34
  That's really good. Yeah.
• 1:29:36
  I mean, I wouldn't say the score elevates the film massively or
• 1:29:39
  anything, but it does what the over needed to and probably a
• 1:29:42
  bit more. I think it fucking elevates it
• 1:29:46
  absolutely, 100%. I went for a run on Sunday and
• 1:29:49
  I've just got back listening just to this soundtrack.
• 1:29:54
  It's absolutely massive. It's got such a bombastic
• 1:29:59
  comfort and tone to it, and it's bigger than the film and the
• 1:30:02
  film's big, but it makes the film seems small when you listen
• 1:30:06
  to it. When you watch it on a big
• 1:30:07
  screen, it's just absolutely floods the visuals.
• 1:30:12
  With this huge Tiffany drums, bam, bam, bam.
• 1:30:15
  There's these big minor drops. Everything there loads it.
• 1:30:20
  And I don't think there's a film that I've seen where a
• 1:30:22
  soundtrack kind of overpowers the satire, just threw pure
• 1:30:27
  sound over the fact of the visuals and it does that.
• 1:30:30
  It really reinforces the satire. It's what Rocky does.
• 1:30:34
  Rocky like kind of gets you in the mood and you want to go out
• 1:30:36
  for a run and you want to go and punch someone in the face.
• 1:30:38
  Because I don't. Yeah, done, done, done.
• 1:30:40
  It's like fucking, yeah. And it really reinforces what
• 1:30:44
  Verhoeven's trying to do. And that's why the soundtrack is
• 1:30:47
  so important. I mean, if you play the
• 1:30:49
  Klendathy Drop and congratulations to anyone who's
• 1:30:52
  out for a run because we're going to play like 30 seconds of
• 1:30:55
  it now we are going. In with first play, he's more
• 1:31:00
  buck for us to kill. You smash the entire area.
• 1:31:03
  You kill anything that has more than two legs.
• 1:31:05
  You get me? We got.
• 1:31:07
  Two sons, remember your training and you will.
• 1:31:19
  Make it back. Alive
• 1:31:36
  they are. The ridiculous power of that is
• 1:31:39
  going to push you over the line, no matter if you believe
• 1:31:41
  anything or not. You've got elements of it.
• 1:31:43
  A RoboCop? Yeah.
• 1:31:44
  But this is this is really pushed over the edge and it's
• 1:31:47
  fantastic stuff. Beautiful.
• 1:31:50
  And Paula Dawson's daughter, Zoe?
• 1:31:52
  She's also composer, and she said that her father took a lot
• 1:31:55
  of inspiration from Igos Stravinsky, and he told her he
• 1:31:59
  wanted to write a sci-fi ballet of madness and carnage.
• 1:32:03
  And Paula Doris was given six months by Verhoeven to compose,
• 1:32:07
  and he brought in a percussion specialist to help.
• 1:32:08
  And it was performed for the soundtrack by the Hollywood
• 1:32:11
  Studio Symphony, conducted by Paula Doris himself.
• 1:32:14
  Nice. Of course it was.
• 1:32:16
  Think of a famous film score since the 50s and there's a
• 1:32:18
  decent chance it was performed by the Hollywood studios
• 1:32:21
  Symphony, yeah? Definitely.
• 1:32:22
  And so he is in the film as well.
• 1:32:24
  At the graduation party we talked about at the start,
• 1:32:26
  there's a band on stage playing Have I Not Been to Oxford Town
• 1:32:29
  by David Bowie. This singer is Zoe Bolladoras.
• 1:32:33
  All right, very nice. Although something by the
• 1:32:36
  spiders from Mars would have been more appropriate, sure.
• 1:32:39
  Yeah, it would have been, Yeah, that's a big.
• 1:32:41
  There's another child of a famous person in there as well,
• 1:32:44
  Stephen Ford, the son of the ex President Gerald Ford.
• 1:32:47
  He plays the commander of Willie's Wildcats in the Battle
• 1:32:50
  of Clandathu. He's the one on the ship who
• 1:32:52
  says you kill anything that has more than two legs.
• 1:32:54
  You get me? Right, OK.
• 1:32:56
  Is he not the same guys? Like, remember your training and
• 1:32:59
  you'll stay alive and he's the first one who dies.
• 1:33:01
  No, I think they all just seem the same.
• 1:33:03
  All right. Yeah.
• 1:33:06
  You never can't tell. So I know that familiar face of
• 1:33:09
  a whole when it comes to the music on Starship Troopers and
• 1:33:12
  Basil. Polar Doris work here as
• 1:33:13
  composer. Very good for us.
• 1:33:15
  Oh, huge massive. Really good.
• 1:33:20
  We've talked about how Starship Troopers read on the page and
• 1:33:23
  how it sounds on the vinyl. Now for the visuals, which are
• 1:33:26
  huge as we talk about the cinematography from director of
• 1:33:28
  photography Yosfa Kano working with Verhoeven for the fifth
• 1:33:31
  time, and the visual effects provided by no less than seven
• 1:33:35
  visual effects studios. Yeah, Westy Captain
• 1:33:38
  Cinematography. How's Yosfa Kano's work here?
• 1:33:42
  I mean, it's it's just a sight to behold, isn't it?
• 1:33:46
  Because it's so good that you can ignore it and you forget
• 1:33:49
  that you're actually watching a film that's been so carefully
• 1:33:52
  crafted and so beautifully shot. There's so many beautiful moves,
• 1:33:57
  there's so much blocking and there's so much attention to
• 1:34:01
  detail that you'll miss it all. You need to watch this over and
• 1:34:04
  over and over again and really stop and watch it and slow it
• 1:34:08
  down to realize everything that he's put into this.
• 1:34:11
  It's absolutely amazing. I mean, he shot RoboCop with
• 1:34:13
  him, and this is the next step of, I think it's the lighting
• 1:34:16
  for me, where it makes it almost cartoonish.
• 1:34:20
  There's no kind of sense of realism in this.
• 1:34:22
  There's no Jordan camera, There's no saturation that's
• 1:34:26
  been brought down. Everything is just there at the
• 1:34:29
  Hovens, like, you know exactly what I want.
• 1:34:31
  You know exactly how we deliver it.
• 1:34:33
  And there's not a shot where you go takes out the film, every
• 1:34:36
  single shot pulls you into the film, even crash zooms, even
• 1:34:40
  with pans. Everything wide angles,
• 1:34:43
  telephotos, everything's in here.
• 1:34:45
  He uses absolutely everything he's got, but you can't
• 1:34:47
  differentiate between them. I think it's beautiful,
• 1:34:50
  beautiful piece of work from a cinematography point of view.
• 1:34:53
  I don't really know anyone who's done anything like this that's
• 1:34:56
  so beautiful and so ignorable at the same time.
• 1:35:00
  I think one of the most impressive things about the film
• 1:35:02
  today is how it looks. Yeah, I think it still stands up
• 1:35:05
  really well. It really does, yeah.
• 1:35:07
  Yeah, the visual effects are a big part of it and we'll talk
• 1:35:09
  about that. But Jos for Kano delivers as
• 1:35:11
  well. Obviously for Kano and Verhoeven
• 1:35:13
  know we should have really well, Vicano was DP on RoboCop and
• 1:35:16
  Total Recall, so completing the trilogy and like those other
• 1:35:20
  two, this is well shot, especially the action.
• 1:35:22
  And what's impressive, I think, is how they were filming
• 1:35:24
  Starship Troopers with lots of new challenges.
• 1:35:27
  Filming with CGI in mind was still a fairly new thing for
• 1:35:30
  cinematographers at this point. Yeah.
• 1:35:32
  So shooting with no subject in the frame, because I'll be added
• 1:35:34
  later. Directing the actors how to work
• 1:35:36
  with that. Working with motion control,
• 1:35:38
  essential for CGI filming sequences where one shot has a
• 1:35:41
  CGI bug, the next will have a prosthetic bug.
• 1:35:44
  All challenging. Yeah.
• 1:35:45
  And working with seven FX studios.
• 1:35:47
  Different studios have different ways of working in terms of the
• 1:35:50
  kind of film stock they use or how the one that filmed to be
• 1:35:53
  developed. So The Corner will be doing
• 1:35:54
  setups and have to think, hang on, is this ILM or mass Illusion
• 1:35:58
  doing this shot later on? Yeah, all that and working the
• 1:36:01
  strict deadlines and budgets. Obviously it's mad.
• 1:36:04
  Yeah, and remembering it's all shot on film as well.
• 1:36:06
  This is all 35 mil. Yeah, it's not digital waiting.
• 1:36:09
  Just go. I'll try this.
• 1:36:11
  Yeah, everything costs money. Yeah, I mean with all that in
• 1:36:14
  mind, the fact they look great then and still holds up today, I
• 1:36:17
  can't quite believe it to be honest.
• 1:36:19
  Brilliant work for Whenever Connell's best Hollywood
• 1:36:21
  collaboration for me. It's so good you can ignore it.
• 1:36:25
  That's how good it is. Yeah.
• 1:36:26
  Yeah, there was some pre-existing footage using the
• 1:36:29
  film to the shots we see of bonus areas after the bug attack
• 1:36:32
  where video was taken from the Oakland firestorm in California,
• 1:36:35
  which killed 25 people unfortunately in 1991.
• 1:36:39
  Yeah, that's the footage. The Recruit.
• 1:36:40
  Watch it. Boot camp on the screen.
• 1:36:42
  Yeah, it fits in well though. Doesn't look out of place to me.
• 1:36:45
  It's fantastic. So seven visual effects studios
• 1:36:47
  work on the film, like we said. So that was Tippet Studio, Sony
• 1:36:51
  Pictures, Image Works, ILM Boss Film Studios, Visual Concepts
• 1:36:55
  Engineering, Amalgamated Dynamics and Mass Illusion.
• 1:36:59
  Some of the big boys, Matt. Was that my illusion or mass
• 1:37:02
  illusion? Did you get in there, Matt?
• 1:37:05
  Sneaking in there. If you're well done, Matt, if it
• 1:37:07
  wasn't. You.
• 1:37:08
  Yeah. Beautiful work.
• 1:37:09
  So my best stuff. I don't know why I didn't
• 1:37:10
  understand the. Film.
• 1:37:11
  It would be understated, if anything.
• 1:37:13
  No one knew. I love all the the effects in
• 1:37:17
  this. I really like the practical
• 1:37:18
  effects. I love the the ships, how
• 1:37:20
  everything on the ships feels quite clunky.
• 1:37:23
  It isn't, you know, really shiny and completely streamlined, but
• 1:37:26
  it doesn't have that kind of grim, industrial, sentient,
• 1:37:29
  something like Alien. I think the books still look
• 1:37:32
  great. I don't think this is a film
• 1:37:33
  where it would benefit if they were more practical based, like
• 1:37:37
  the Oran aliens. I think it's no problem at all
• 1:37:40
  that they do have this slightly cartoonish look to them.
• 1:37:43
  I think it fits the tone of the film.
• 1:37:45
  I think the only sequence to do find a bit dated is that
• 1:37:48
  sequence of commonship in the asteroid that is very kind of
• 1:37:52
  late nightly CGI, but not in a good way.
• 1:37:55
  But apart from that, really great work from everyone.
• 1:37:57
  Involved. Yeah, it's the blend for me.
• 1:37:59
  Great mix of CGI, practical effects, models, sets,
• 1:38:03
  paintings. The practical stuff brings like
• 1:38:05
  a weight for the simpler stuff and then the CGI for the
• 1:38:08
  spectacular and the complex stuff.
• 1:38:10
  I think when there's no saturation of digital in the
• 1:38:12
  film it sometimes doesn't look great, but they get the balance
• 1:38:15
  right here for me and it's all the better for it.
• 1:38:18
  But I know it wasn't easy. They weren't meant to be 7
• 1:38:22
  studios on the film, but they had no choice.
• 1:38:24
  John Davidson hired Phil Tippett to do with the bugs effect work
• 1:38:27
  because he'd done the stop motion effects fired 2O9 on
• 1:38:29
  RoboCop and then he worked on Jurassic Park as well and
• 1:38:33
  Davidson was looking in the studios to work with for the
• 1:38:34
  space scenes and the starships. But Sony told him that he had to
• 1:38:38
  use their in house company Sony Pictures Image Works, and they
• 1:38:41
  basically didn't do a very good job.
• 1:38:43
  Almost everything was late. A lot of what they did wasn't
• 1:38:46
  good enough, so lots of their work had to be outsourced to ILM
• 1:38:49
  and those are the studios. And the release was put back
• 1:38:52
  from July to November largely because of the effects delays.
• 1:38:56
  Ken Ralston was the guy heading Sony Pictures.
• 1:38:58
  Image Works. I imagine that stress four
• 1:39:00
  months later. And Craig Hears from Tippet
• 1:39:04
  Studio designed all the bugs which to save time they revised
• 1:39:07
  some unused designs from of all films, Tremors to aftershocks,
• 1:39:12
  which they were working on at the same time.
• 1:39:14
  And he gave the bugs a hierarchy based on the military saw
• 1:39:17
  warrior bugs, the infantry tanker bugs, the tanks, the hop
• 1:39:21
  bugs, the Air Force, and the plasma bugs the heavy artillery.
• 1:39:24
  Yeah, yeah, that works great. And they knew they wanted to
• 1:39:27
  feel like there's thousands of bugs.
• 1:39:28
  So some of the shots, like the shots where we see hundreds of
• 1:39:31
  warrior bugs on the screen at once, they would take 32 hours
• 1:39:34
  to render per frame. Wow.
• 1:39:37
  So for a 5 second shot they were looking at about 5 months for
• 1:39:41
  rendering. Yeah, 24 frames a second, didn't
• 1:39:43
  you? Yeah, exactly.
• 1:39:44
  Yeah. And then, once the designs were
• 1:39:46
  approved, they then had to figure out how they would move.
• 1:39:49
  They agreed that the warrior bugs would weigh about 1700 lbs,
• 1:39:53
  about the same as a polar bear. And they did months of research
• 1:39:56
  on bugs and insects and then did a lot of animatics to figure out
• 1:39:59
  how they should move on screen. Right.
• 1:40:01
  Yeah, they're doing the research and they're doing it properly.
• 1:40:03
  That's how you've got to do it. An animatic is like an animated
• 1:40:06
  storyboard, basically, and the movement of the warrior bugs
• 1:40:09
  looks perfect, I think. Yeah, that's how Phil Tipper was
• 1:40:11
  able to move from stump washing to CGI.
• 1:40:13
  So effectively, I guess totally different technologies, but so
• 1:40:16
  much of his understanding in terms of just how things move
• 1:40:19
  will have just carried over. Yeah, so when ILM and Boss
• 1:40:22
  Studios were brought in, it was to handle the model spaceships.
• 1:40:25
  They built a lot of models that took fourteen months and told to
• 1:40:28
  build them all. Two of the model ships were 18
• 1:40:30
  feet long. Jesus Christ.
• 1:40:32
  Like me? And when the plasma plugs
• 1:40:34
  attacked the ships and two of them crash into each other,
• 1:40:37
  Verhoven had them ram the model ships into each other, like
• 1:40:40
  physically ram them into each other.
• 1:40:43
  We loving that, I bet. Yeah, but I mean, how, where
• 1:40:45
  does he have to do that? It's 18 feet long.
• 1:40:48
  That's going to take ages. That's really behoving that
• 1:40:51
  like. Oh, massively.
• 1:40:53
  It's ridiculous. And where we see space and the
• 1:40:55
  plasma bursts through the bridge window, the actors just saw a
• 1:40:58
  green screen and then moved lights across it to create the
• 1:41:00
  lighting effect of the plasma burst, which is quite clever
• 1:41:03
  sounds. A brilliantly the effect, I
• 1:41:04
  think. Yeah, but, Hovind said.
• 1:41:05
  It was like an August row of light that they hadn't matched,
• 1:41:08
  didn't they? Yeah.
• 1:41:09
  And the interior set of the Roger Young bridge that was
• 1:41:12
  mounted on a gimbal and would rock back and forth to simulate
• 1:41:15
  the crashes for the actors. And in total, there were 200
• 1:41:18
  effect shots in the movie, which was the most ever in the film at
• 1:41:21
  the time. Ever.
• 1:41:23
  Yeah, at the time it was, yeah. Jesus.
• 1:41:24
  I mean, no idea is the average Marvel film has about 1600
• 1:41:27
  effect shots. Yeah, Avengers end game had
• 1:41:29
  almost 3000. Wow, so OK.
• 1:41:32
  The effects team on Starship Troopers was nominated for an
• 1:41:34
  Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The film's only Oscar nomination
• 1:41:37
  lost out to Do you Know Who? No idea, Matt.
• 1:41:41
  This is yours. No.
• 1:41:42
  It's very nice category. It's guessable.
• 1:41:45
  We've mentioned Titanic, So is it Titanic?
• 1:41:48
  It was Titanic. There you are.
• 1:41:49
  You see, I believe in you even if you don't.
• 1:41:52
  I fucking love you, man. When everything king of the
• 1:41:55
  world. Yeah, did, yeah.
• 1:41:57
  For us, though, some excellent effects work on Starship
• 1:41:59
  Troopers. Yeah, yeah, great.
• 1:42:02
  It's unbelievable. Still holds up now I think.
• 1:42:04
  So a massive team behind the scenes on Starship Troopers,
• 1:42:07
  almost all of them already familiar to Verhoven and the
• 1:42:10
  names we've been through. There.
• 1:42:11
  Ed Newmeyer is writer Basel Paul, the Doris composer Yos for
• 1:42:14
  Connor with DP and Tippett Studios and the other Six Effect
• 1:42:17
  teams all integral to the success of the film. 100%
• 1:42:21
  everyone bring in the Ray game. I think the end.
• 1:42:30
  The concluding act of Starship Troopers is bugs, bugs, and more
• 1:42:33
  bugs. The finale, featuring the big
• 1:42:36
  fat smart bug will be discussed before.
• 1:42:38
  It is though we have the biggest battle sequence in the film to
• 1:42:41
  get into. We do certainly do.
• 1:42:43
  So after receiving a distress call from a colony of Mormons on
• 1:42:46
  the remote outpost, the Roughnecks head to Planet P to
• 1:42:49
  mount a rescue mission at the Whiskey Outpost siege.
• 1:42:52
  We see the final moments of Rajek, the final moments of
• 1:42:55
  Days, and here, maybe the greatest line in movie history.
• 1:43:00
  They sucked his brains out. How's Whiskey Outpost Westie?
• 1:43:05
  I mean, it's great, isn't it? Yeah, it's just awesome.
• 1:43:08
  But this is a bit where it all kind of comes together and
• 1:43:12
  becomes a little bit more acute for the viewer, I think, and
• 1:43:14
  becomes acute for us as an audience, where you're part of
• 1:43:17
  the crew now, you're part of the platoon, you're in there with
• 1:43:21
  everybody. It's very Zulu that's got a
• 1:43:24
  massive influence on it. Yeah.
• 1:43:26
  It doesn't help out like World War 2.
• 1:43:28
  It doesn't go back to Afghanistan.
• 1:43:29
  It goes back to the almost colonial kind of battles that
• 1:43:34
  people have. It's a very traditional battle,
• 1:43:36
  but it's just, again, just beautifully done with these
• 1:43:39
  little elements that come in and these aliens that fly through
• 1:43:44
  and then take people's heads off.
• 1:43:46
  It just jump off what? What the fuck's going on?
• 1:43:50
  How the fuck was supposed to deal with this?
• 1:43:52
  Ironside, right in the middle of it, and that incredible moment
• 1:43:55
  where he goes over the side and does that great.
• 1:43:59
  Like, really, America? I don't know why it's so
• 1:44:01
  American, but it's really American.
• 1:44:02
  We just wipes his mouth with these prosthetic kind of, yeah,
• 1:44:08
  nice. I've got to now do something
• 1:44:10
  about this. It's a wonderful sequence.
• 1:44:13
  The effects on this are absolutely fantastic.
• 1:44:15
  Oh, yeah. Ironside is wonderful in this.
• 1:44:17
  And it's a really good death sequence.
• 1:44:19
  Of that crane shot where the arachnids arrive and we follow
• 1:44:22
  the troops up the ramps and over the barricades to reveal
• 1:44:25
  hundreds of bugs swimming towards them.
• 1:44:27
  Brilliant. Ah.
• 1:44:28
  Terrifying. Yeah, it's massive, with a
• 1:44:30
  blender practical in the digital effects, it's just still stands
• 1:44:33
  up. It's fantastic.
• 1:44:34
  And the sound design is ridiculous.
• 1:44:36
  Oh, it's really, really good. Scotland, it's just.
• 1:44:38
  Yeah, yeah, it's good. When the troops first arrived at
• 1:44:40
  the outpost too, in the fine General Owen hiding in the
• 1:44:42
  cupboard played by Marshall Bell Quarto in Total Recall.
• 1:44:47
  And he's in twins. Yeah, yeah, the guy with the
• 1:44:49
  face where belly. She got quanto in there.
• 1:44:51
  Should have thought it's his fault with his brains sucked out
• 1:44:57
  just at his belly. Which brain though?
• 1:44:59
  Well, who knows? When it all kicks off though,
• 1:45:02
  it's just all so well put together.
• 1:45:04
  It's absolute carnage. That guy who jumps off the
• 1:45:06
  battalion and the bug like, catches him by stabbing him in
• 1:45:09
  the back and then tosses him over the barricade to his bug
• 1:45:12
  mates. And then that guy gets
• 1:45:13
  decapitated by the bug flying in and his head, like, pops off.
• 1:45:16
  It's just mental. Twice there's 1/2 a face, and
• 1:45:20
  then there's one whole head. Half head.
• 1:45:22
  That's ridiculous. I think there's a hint here as
• 1:45:25
  well that it was the humans who start things.
• 1:45:27
  These Mormons are communists who basically just turned up on the
• 1:45:30
  bug's land. So the bugs are basically
• 1:45:31
  defending their territory. I think is the idea.
• 1:45:34
  Yeah, so who's the bad guys here?
• 1:45:35
  Yeah, exactly. A great sequence.
• 1:45:37
  But it's also got the strangest moment in the film for me, and
• 1:45:41
  that's saying something. All right, Do you remember that
• 1:45:43
  shot during the battle where we're inside the fortress,
• 1:45:45
  looking up as it pans along the battalions showing the bugs
• 1:45:48
  breaking over the walls? Yeah, it's kind of panning left
• 1:45:51
  to right really smoothly. Then all of a sudden it
• 1:45:54
  massively speeds up for about half a second and then just
• 1:45:56
  stops. Like, what's that about?
• 1:45:59
  Yeah, it's like the Hovind suddenly yelled at the camera
• 1:46:01
  operator. Like quicker, quicker, more
• 1:46:03
  quickly. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:46:05
  It's really odd. Yeah, there's a great moment
• 1:46:07
  with Rico and Ace as well, where they've got the guns facing
• 1:46:10
  forward and then it's like all of a sudden they go bang in
• 1:46:13
  unison and just point them up 90°.
• 1:46:15
  Yeah, in exactly the same direction.
• 1:46:17
  It's like, I don't know, it feels like a music video almost.
• 1:46:20
  Yeah, I know that. You mean yeah.
• 1:46:21
  Yeah, when the film and Rat checks last moments when Rico
• 1:46:24
  shoots him. This was supposed to be there as
• 1:46:26
  well. But when they shot, the moment
• 1:46:28
  the book comes up through the floor and bites Rat checks legs
• 1:46:30
  off, Dean and Mia fell and was knocked unconscious.
• 1:46:34
  It's fucking ridiculous. So that's why she's not even in
• 1:46:37
  there at all. Everyone was in the wars.
• 1:46:40
  I know, right? Yeah.
• 1:46:41
  I like Rajic signing off with, you know what to do to recall.
• 1:46:44
  Brilliant. You know what to do say is
• 1:46:49
  venture. Yeah, I am.
• 1:46:53
  I'm going to have to talk about this getting killed because
• 1:46:56
  genuinely don't know if this is a joke by for all from that, in
• 1:46:59
  terms of the students and the recruits, the one that Verhoeven
• 1:47:03
  kills off is the best actor out of all of them by considerable
• 1:47:07
  distance. That just feels like it's part
• 1:47:08
  of the whole joke to me and I just feel so sorry for this.
• 1:47:12
  Like I said earlier, wasting far too much time over Rico, she
• 1:47:15
  could have had her pick of the men, she should have the run of
• 1:47:19
  this platoon anyway and she's the one who gets killed.
• 1:47:22
  And I think it says all about Deana May's performance and it's
• 1:47:24
  the one genuine emotional beat in the entire film, you know,
• 1:47:28
  within reason. It's not a tearjerker, but all
• 1:47:29
  the same, I'm very sorry to see you go.
• 1:47:32
  And it's another scene that on the face of it's quite cliche,
• 1:47:34
  the soldier dying in the comrades arms, but Maya really
• 1:47:37
  makes it work. And just in general, it's my
• 1:47:40
  favorite action sequencing the typhoon, because like Bessie
• 1:47:43
  says, huge debt to Zulu, which I absolutely love, All those
• 1:47:46
  scenes of the bugs rushing the walls and climbing over.
• 1:47:49
  But you sit and you think about and you think, well, are the
• 1:47:51
  actions of colonial Britain really something you should want
• 1:47:54
  to mimic? I mean, I don't think they are,
• 1:47:57
  and I suspect for all of them would.
• 1:47:58
  Probably agree. Yeah.
• 1:48:00
  I think for a film that doesn't exactly take itself overly
• 1:48:03
  seriously and her other point is trying to make, it's impressive
• 1:48:06
  how bad I feel when Dizz dies. I mean, she didn't deserve it
• 1:48:10
  and it's pretty textbook the way they do it.
• 1:48:12
  She's had her time with Rico, then he actually comes to the
• 1:48:15
  rescue when she throws the grade in The Tanker Bug.
• 1:48:17
  So when the Warrior Bug turns up behind her, it's like, oh shit,
• 1:48:20
  here it is. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:48:22
  But that shot of the bug behind is obviously a CGI composite.
• 1:48:25
  And then we'll cut to a close up of Dina Maya with the bugs legs
• 1:48:28
  like prosthetic sticking out of her.
• 1:48:30
  Seamless. Brilliant, yeah.
• 1:48:32
  Yeah, it's unreal. Yeah, great.
• 1:48:34
  A nice bit of action will be right into when Rico saves over
• 1:48:36
  the intercom. I hope you have a crazy pilot.
• 1:48:38
  And then crazy Carmen swoops in to save them and it ends how it
• 1:48:41
  started with that final shot when the shuttle takes off from
• 1:48:44
  the planet and we get a wide shot where there's now thousands
• 1:48:46
  of bugs outside. Yeah, I don't want to know how
• 1:48:49
  long that took the render, yeah, but what an action sequence.
• 1:48:54
  And I think Verhoeven makes a death hit harder than 95% of
• 1:48:57
  more serious action films. Yeah.
• 1:48:59
  Yeah, definitely. And when the film the moment she
• 1:49:01
  is killed, Diana May had said to Verhoeven that she shouldn't
• 1:49:04
  scream because she's been slapped through her back and out
• 1:49:07
  of her chest, so therefore she'd have no air in her lungs and
• 1:49:09
  wouldn't be realistic to scream. But according to her, Verhoeven
• 1:49:12
  just said just scream. Yeah, it's not that kind of
• 1:49:16
  film, to be fair. Just scream, Dana.
• 1:49:18
  Just be thankful that you keep your clothes on.
• 1:49:21
  Now he's looking for realism. I think she's really good.
• 1:49:26
  Tina. Maya.
• 1:49:27
  She is really good. She said she was asked to brief
• 1:49:30
  a Carmen, but when she got the script she was like, no, no, I'm
• 1:49:32
  definitely Dizzy the tomboy, which?
• 1:49:34
  She is, yeah, definitely. Yeah, she's fantastic in the
• 1:49:36
  film. So all the planet scenes,
• 1:49:38
  including these ones, were filmed in the Badlands of Hell's
• 1:49:41
  Half Acre in Wyoming. Torrential rain and wind storm
• 1:49:45
  damaged some equipment and LED the crew having to evacuate the
• 1:49:49
  area for two weeks when the return temperatures during the
• 1:49:52
  day got as high as 46°. Scotchio out.
• 1:49:57
  And that will try the equipment off surely?
• 1:49:59
  Exactly, yeah. Whiskey Outpost was a set that
• 1:50:02
  took six weeks to build and behold and had the production
• 1:50:04
  team take influence from fortresses in borgess.
• 1:50:08
  A French found Legion fell from the 30s and like you both
• 1:50:11
  mentioned, Zulu. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:13
  Wasn't it like there was loads of rattlesnakes everywhere as
• 1:50:16
  well and there's so much going on?
• 1:50:18
  Yeah. I would not want to have been
• 1:50:21
  there, no, without you. 46° torrential rain rattlesnakes.
• 1:50:26
  Yeah, I'm fine where I am. Cheers.
• 1:50:28
  Thanks. Some big action and drama.
• 1:50:30
  The Outpost, then. And sorry to say, right, chicken
• 1:50:33
  does leave us. No, definitely right.
• 1:50:36
  Check definitely does, yeah. Oh, really sad, Yeah.
• 1:50:41
  Having mourned their loss at Disney's funeral, it's not long
• 1:50:43
  before the Roughnecks are back on Planet P The Roger Young
• 1:50:47
  comes under attack, leading to Carmen and Zander abandoning
• 1:50:50
  ship onto the planet's surface, while the roof necks find
• 1:50:52
  themselves returning on a mission to find the Smart Bug.
• 1:50:56
  It all culminates in another spectacular showdown.
• 1:50:58
  Matt. Doesn't need.
• 1:50:59
  How is it for you? I love it.
• 1:51:02
  And when Carmen and Zander abandoned ship which is where I
• 1:51:04
  want to go from what I love about that and you might
• 1:51:07
  disagree, John, I don't know. It's just got such a Star Trek
• 1:51:10
  vibe to this. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:51:12
  I'm not a Star Trek expert by any means, but if I think of the
• 1:51:15
  Enterprise getting attacked, it's rocking from side to side.
• 1:51:18
  The smoke everywhere, alarms, player and consoles are explored
• 1:51:21
  and that's what I think the sequence is going from.
• 1:51:24
  The pulls it off brilliantly. I think you're right.
• 1:51:26
  It obviously looks a lot better than the average Star Trek
• 1:51:28
  episode. Whoa.
• 1:51:30
  To the average run. To the average run.
• 1:51:34
  Shit, right. I'll see you later.
• 1:51:36
  Because I'll tell you what I love in this that shot of those
• 1:51:39
  guys just initially having lunch at the table before the ship
• 1:51:42
  gets ripped in two and then they just get sucked up into the air.
• 1:51:45
  That's incredible. Bad shots.
• 1:51:47
  That's amazing. I love that.
• 1:51:48
  So it's spectacular. I do love a good last minute
• 1:51:51
  escape sequence. This is a great one.
• 1:51:54
  But it's also very much frying pan into the fire, isn't it?
• 1:51:56
  Because the land and the bugs layer.
• 1:51:58
  This is where Xander gets us being sucked out.
• 1:52:01
  And you know, that was always going to be in here, because for
• 1:52:03
  Hoven loves nothing more than a practical special effect where
• 1:52:06
  you can mess with someone's face and have their eyes bulge out.
• 1:52:09
  And thankfully, this one's a lot better than the one in total.
• 1:52:12
  Recall how painful does it look when the bug stabs and on the
• 1:52:17
  back of the leg? Really.
• 1:52:19
  So yeah, yeah. I like how the brain bug gets
• 1:52:22
  carried out on top of all the little bugs like the King.
• 1:52:24
  And I could not be more pleased as he's and I go, to be honest.
• 1:52:28
  Definitely having his brain sucked out finally wipes out
• 1:52:31
  smoke. Look off his face.
• 1:52:32
  Yeah. And what I always notice here as
• 1:52:34
  well is Xander's final line which says to the bug, one day
• 1:52:37
  someone like me is going to kill you and your whole fucking race.
• 1:52:40
  Not species, he says. Race.
• 1:52:42
  Yeah, surely a very intentional use of that word.
• 1:52:45
  Yeah. He dies a fascist in a way all
• 1:52:47
  fascists should go getting your fascist brain sucked out.
• 1:52:50
  Yeah, I think that's really important, The way that he goes
• 1:52:53
  out and that getting his brain sucked out is the ultimate
• 1:52:55
  demise for the bugs. And the best thing is, is that
• 1:52:58
  you walks in with the fucking nuclear warhead Great.
• 1:53:01
  And the bug knows exactly what it is.
• 1:53:03
  And he's like probably one of the worst bits where a cringe
• 1:53:06
  where he's like, I don't know if it's great or not, kind of like
• 1:53:11
  it, but I kind of don't want to like it.
• 1:53:13
  You know what I mean? Like, I like it, but I don't
• 1:53:15
  want to. And it's crazy.
• 1:53:17
  Yeah, this is me acting. Look at me.
• 1:53:19
  I'm good. They are great.
• 1:53:21
  And say carbon's, like, being pierced through the the arm that
• 1:53:24
  she grabs, which is like, oh, yeah, it's fine.
• 1:53:27
  I'm fine now. No worries.
• 1:53:28
  Yeah, let's get off. It's a nuclear warhead.
• 1:53:30
  All right. It's going to be the Vasquez
• 1:53:32
  moment for Walkins. That's absolutely wonderful.
• 1:53:34
  And then they're just down a tunnel about, what, maybe 304
• 1:53:39
  hundred yards? Yeah.
• 1:53:40
  And a nuclear warhead goes off and the worst thing that happens
• 1:53:43
  is just a little bit of rock falls in front of them.
• 1:53:45
  It's all terrifying in this underground layer of all these
• 1:53:49
  bugs. And the brain bugs just escaped,
• 1:53:51
  and they've just reported where it's going, but they still gets
• 1:53:54
  picked up. And you just get that wonderful
• 1:53:56
  moment where you just come into the daylight and all of the
• 1:53:58
  troops are running past and you're like, Oh yes,
• 1:54:02
  everything's going to be fine. Like everything's all right.
• 1:54:05
  And then everything just seems to be all right, which is great.
• 1:54:09
  Yeah, I think the two separate plot lines of carbon and Rico
• 1:54:12
  coming together is classic stuff, but they do it really
• 1:54:14
  well. Yeah, When Rico comes in with
• 1:54:16
  the explosive and the whole tone of the scene changes, works
• 1:54:19
  really well. I think the big show, it's
• 1:54:21
  really good. And what can sacrificing myself
• 1:54:23
  to save them? Again, I feel it, and I feel bad
• 1:54:25
  for him that you think he's on the right side, which I think is
• 1:54:28
  surely the point for Holman's making.
• 1:54:29
  Yeah, all works really well. But after seeing that behind the
• 1:54:32
  scenes stuff, whenever I watch this scene, now all I can see is
• 1:54:36
  Paul Verhoeven standing in front of Denise Richards with a big
• 1:54:38
  shot. I'm a bug.
• 1:54:40
  Shoot me. Shoot.
• 1:54:42
  Me ruined it for you. So Denise Richards said that the
• 1:54:45
  moment they escaped, the bugs Leah and the Bomb Explodes was
• 1:54:48
  filmed for real. Richards, Van Dean and Boozy had
• 1:54:52
  it Sprint through the tunnel and they set the explosive sauce
• 1:54:55
  behind them. Behoven told them it was
• 1:54:57
  dangerous, so they had to film it last like like you might.
• 1:55:02
  Die. Yeah, film it last.
• 1:55:04
  So if you die, it doesn't matter.
• 1:55:06
  It's. Really dangerous, but let's see
• 1:55:08
  this last. And only had one tea to get it
• 1:55:11
  right, which they did. That looks really good as well.
• 1:55:14
  It looks great. Before we leave Bug City, it's
• 1:55:16
  time for our second DTRMP. One question.
• 1:55:19
  OK, so this time we have one from Tim Bruscha Leary.
• 1:55:22
  Hello, Tim. That pronunciation may be miles
• 1:55:24
  off, so sorry if it is. Yeah, it's fine for me.
• 1:55:27
  I'll just say. Hello, Tim.
• 1:55:28
  Yes. So leading on from Xander's
• 1:55:31
  death, Tim has asked question brain sucked out by a giant bug,
• 1:55:36
  floating and suffocating in space, crushed by a giant door.
• 1:55:39
  What is your worst way to go in this or any of that movie?
• 1:55:43
  What do you think, Wesley? Oh, I mean, there's so many,
• 1:55:46
  isn't there? You can get into a real black
• 1:55:48
  hole with this. And I did.
• 1:55:50
  And I Googled the loss and I thought, oh God, I'm not getting
• 1:55:53
  into this. I'm going to stick with Forhoven
• 1:55:56
  and I'm going to go a meal. Toxic waste.
• 1:55:59
  RoboCop. Classic.
• 1:56:01
  That's all I'm saying. You don't need to say yeah, the
• 1:56:05
  worst way to go here I would say is the brain sucking bug.
• 1:56:09
  But there's lots of horrific deaths in that film.
• 1:56:11
  Was an alien bursting out your chest while you're having your
• 1:56:14
  dinner like Kane? I can't imagine it's too
• 1:56:16
  pleasant. Yeah, bitten in half below the
• 1:56:18
  waist like Quentin Jaws. Or when you're sitting on the
• 1:56:20
  toilet like Gennaro and Jurassic Park.
• 1:56:23
  Neither of those is ideal, but I've got 2 vying for the number
• 1:56:26
  one spot right, One physically awful and one psychologically.
• 1:56:30
  OK. The physical one is in Bone
• 1:56:32
  Tomahawk, specifically Deputy Sheriff Nick, who was bisected
• 1:56:37
  alive, My God, by a tribe of Troglodytes.
• 1:56:40
  Yes, I'm not going to say more than that, but it's the most
• 1:56:43
  gruesome on screen death I've ever seen.
• 1:56:45
  Yeah, And the other, the psychological one, is Kowalski,
• 1:56:50
  George Tony's character in Gravity.
• 1:56:52
  And that's not who sacrifices himself to save Sandra Bullock.
• 1:56:55
  I mean, hey, he wouldn't, but he ends up just floating off in the
• 1:56:58
  deep space by himself. Horrendous.
• 1:57:01
  I was expecting a surfboard of the face from Lethal Weapon Two
• 1:57:04
  if I wanted. In this one, I would definitely
• 1:57:08
  agree has to be the brains being sucked out.
• 1:57:10
  And then in terms of films outside this, like Westy, I went
• 1:57:13
  down some dark rabbit holes. I saw the thing of the Saw
• 1:57:16
  films. I mean, I've not seen them all,
• 1:57:18
  but the one that's six in my mind is a guy who's stuck in a
• 1:57:21
  VAT and it's slowly being filled up by rotting pig carcasses that
• 1:57:25
  have been fed through a blender. Yeah, I can't remember which one
• 1:57:28
  that is. But I remember thinking I think
• 1:57:30
  this is where I'm going to draw the line.
• 1:57:31
  All of them, isn't it? Probably, yeah.
• 1:57:33
  I think that's three, I think. I don't know though, yeah.
• 1:57:36
  The other one, I thought I went to seven, and I think Gluttony
• 1:57:39
  in particular is horrendous. Oh, it's getting fed to death.
• 1:57:43
  Oh God, no. Yeah, that.
• 1:57:45
  One, yeah. Well, from there, we're strained
• 1:57:46
  to the final sequence. After Zim catches the smart bug,
• 1:57:49
  Rico, Carmen, and Carl are back together for a final reunion.
• 1:57:53
  So how's this for a way to wrap things up?
• 1:57:56
  I love the scene. Zim's back.
• 1:57:57
  He saved the day. He's not dead.
• 1:58:00
  This is what I mean about the music being ridiculously funny
• 1:58:03
  once you get it and understand it.
• 1:58:05
  Ultra cheesy reunion with Rico and Carmen and Carl, who has
• 1:58:09
  gone full Nazi by this point. He's taught from Raiders.
• 1:58:12
  When he turns up, he's gone. That's the biggest laugh in the
• 1:58:15
  film. It's brilliant.
• 1:58:16
  Carl Goebbels. Yep.
• 1:58:19
  Yeah, it makes me laugh as well. When Ace is like, Zim, man, Zim
• 1:58:22
  caught the bug. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:58:23
  And. He's like Hogan, him, yeah, get
• 1:58:27
  the headlock. How did one guy catch that
• 1:58:30
  thing? It's.
• 1:58:30
  Muscle. The part that always stands out
• 1:58:33
  to me here though, is when Carl uses his psychic ability on the
• 1:58:36
  bug and he's like, it's a phrase and everyone she has, it's
• 1:58:40
  afraid. Yeah.
• 1:58:41
  Yeah, no human. Your compassion left by this
• 1:58:44
  point. That's heartbreaking for me,
• 1:58:45
  that. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:58:46
  Fucking heartbreaking. And.
• 1:58:47
  Then Carl says, now we know how they think we can kill them, not
• 1:58:51
  we can work out some understanding with them.
• 1:58:53
  Yeah, and I love Overhoven shoots it as if it's a genuinely
• 1:58:55
  happy ending. But what's going on is like,
• 1:58:58
  horrific. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:58:58
  We have shown that how nobody ever sees themselves as the bad
• 1:59:01
  guys, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, I mean it.
• 1:59:04
  I'm exactly the same. I think it's the perfect end to
• 1:59:06
  a promotional film. Fear is power and violence is
• 1:59:10
  power. It really resonates with me is
• 1:59:12
  that we have that outpost sequence where we're so scared
• 1:59:15
  for Resnick and we're so scared for all the soldiers.
• 1:59:18
  But at the end, all the humans look like the books.
• 1:59:22
  They're all cheering and they all look like this horde of
• 1:59:25
  people with no identities whatsoever, just this horde of
• 1:59:29
  idiots who were just screaming and shouting and one violence
• 1:59:33
  and one death. And I think that's a perfect way
• 1:59:35
  to end a propaganda film where like, we have won even though
• 1:59:40
  we've lost, and the next thing that comes up is join us, you be
• 1:59:45
  part of this. And in this part Rico asks Carl
• 1:59:48
  if he's responsible for psychically guiding him to
• 1:59:50
  Carmen, and Carl says that's classified.
• 1:59:53
  But in the original scene he admits that he was responsible,
• 1:59:55
  but the fact he can now read humans minds is classified.
• 1:59:59
  Yeah, that's set up in that Ghostbuster scene with Rico in
• 2:00:01
  the first that we talked about where Carl says I can't do
• 2:00:04
  humans yet. Yeah.
• 2:00:06
  Yeah, but I will. Mr. should have said that, Yeah.
• 2:00:12
  And with that, and following the final Federation ad we talked
• 2:00:15
  about, things are wrapped up a happy ending, But not really, is
• 2:00:19
  it? Not really, Not really.
• 2:00:21
  It will be eventually if you join.
• 2:00:23
  Yeah, reception and awards. That's the story from behind the
• 2:00:32
  scenes on Starship Troopers, and it burst into cinemas in
• 2:00:35
  November 1997. I always received a tale all of
• 2:00:38
  its own. And math.
• 2:00:40
  I think you're going to tell it to us.
• 2:00:42
  I am indeed. So the production budget, that
• 2:00:45
  was $105,000,000 and it only took $121 million at the global
• 2:00:51
  box office, which means when you add in the marketing budget it
• 2:00:54
  was a money loser. And the producer, John Davidson,
• 2:00:56
  who we've talked about, he said he thought one of the reasons
• 2:00:59
  that failed was that it was originally scheduled to be
• 2:01:01
  released in the summer of 97, but the studio pushed the
• 2:01:04
  release date back. As we said, that was partly
• 2:01:07
  because of the the huge effects delays, but also so wouldn't be
• 2:01:10
  in direct comparison with Wolfgang Peterson's Air Force
• 2:01:13
  One. Come on.
• 2:01:16
  Terrified of Air Force One. Jesus Christ.
• 2:01:20
  I know it's awesome for, but still, come on.
• 2:01:22
  I saw an interview with Casper van Dean where he said he was
• 2:01:24
  told by box office experts their Starship Troopers had been APG
• 2:01:27
  13. Rather than an R rating, it
• 2:01:30
  would have made twice as much money.
• 2:01:31
  Yes, good point. It may be, but I don't wish I'll
• 2:01:34
  be talking about it now if it was all nice and wholesome
• 2:01:37
  swings in roundabouts, yeah. But what it also did now were
• 2:01:40
  the reviews. For Hoven said the studio
• 2:01:43
  promoted the film was just another Bang Bang movie in his
• 2:01:46
  words, and a lot of critics at the time didn't realise was
• 2:01:48
  meant to be a satire. Hoven said he would get verbally
• 2:01:51
  attacked in interviews in countries that historically had
• 2:01:54
  problems with fascism, such as Italy, such as Germany, and one
• 2:01:58
  critic said, what is this meant to be the new Star Wars?
• 2:02:01
  And for Hoven replied, yes. But they're all fascists.
• 2:02:08
  That's for the critics. We'll start with Roger's
• 2:02:10
  roughnecks. OK.
• 2:02:11
  How did Roger Ebert rate the film, do you think?
• 2:02:14
  That's unfair because I know this, so I'm not really going to
• 2:02:17
  say. I think he would have got it,
• 2:02:19
  but I'll say 3. I'll say 2.
• 2:02:23
  It was. What a good guess, Westie.
• 2:02:25
  It was two stars out of and, he said.
• 2:02:29
  The bugs aren't important except as props for the interminable
• 2:02:31
  action scenes and as an enemy to justify the film's quasi fascist
• 2:02:35
  militarism. There is a sly satire.
• 2:02:38
  The action sequences are heavy laden special effects, but are
• 2:02:40
  curiously joyless. There's nothing sly about that
• 2:02:44
  satire. Rog No.
• 2:02:45
  No. No, he's missed the point there
• 2:02:47
  a little bit. The review in the Washington
• 2:02:50
  polls from the time is similar, but also quite funny.
• 2:02:53
  It starts by saying Starship Troopers follows the escalating
• 2:02:56
  hostilities between the galaxy's two dummish species, bugs and
• 2:02:59
  fashion models. The outsize insects are bent
• 2:03:02
  under strong humankind, and only Doogie Howser and the cast of
• 2:03:05
  Beverly Hills 9O21-O can stop them.
• 2:03:09
  Fair enough. Brilliant.
• 2:03:12
  And damningly, Verhoeven's tone, which varies from calm to
• 2:03:14
  cynical, is so inconsistent that it's impossible to decide
• 2:03:18
  whether he's sending up the Third Reich or in love with it.
• 2:03:23
  I'm not sure. The tone is inconsistent.
• 2:03:25
  He's just got two different tones running at the same time,
• 2:03:27
  I think. Very fucking consistent, yeah.
• 2:03:29
  I think it's really consistent, yeah.
• 2:03:30
  Yeah. Empire magazines seem to get it
• 2:03:32
  a bit more They rated Starship 2 miles four out of five, and said
• 2:03:36
  Verhoven's cast are deliciously unaware that they are in part
• 2:03:39
  the fodder for an $80 million urine extraction project.
• 2:03:43
  Yes. I think they're very aware of
• 2:03:45
  that. I think the world way as.
• 2:03:47
  Well, yeah. Yeah.
• 2:03:49
  I mean, it wasn't marketed properly, and satire is not a
• 2:03:51
  typical way to spend a $100 million budget.
• 2:03:54
  So I'm not surprised that some audience members missed.
• 2:03:56
  It's like us. But yeah, if you're a critic and
• 2:03:58
  critiquing films is your job, yeah, there's no excuse for me.
• 2:04:02
  I mean, for fuck's sake, just have a look at what's going on.
• 2:04:05
  You've seen RoboCop. Yeah, exactly.
• 2:04:06
  You know, for Horvan. Yeah, it's not the first time
• 2:04:09
  you've seen anything like this. No, especially in the late 90s.
• 2:04:12
  Come on. Doogie Hitler in there.
• 2:04:14
  It's not exactly subtle, is it? No.
• 2:04:17
  Yeah, it's a fourth time. You've said Doogie Hitler.
• 2:04:19
  It's a third. It's a third.
• 2:04:20
  Sorry, I'm not going to tire of it.
• 2:04:23
  There will be a floor. There will be.
• 2:04:26
  And so today on Rod and Tomorrow's Starship to This has
• 2:04:29
  a critics approval rating of 72% and 70% from audiences.
• 2:04:34
  And on IMDb it's currently with a rating of 7.3 out of 10.
• 2:04:39
  A little lower than I was expecting, to be honest.
• 2:04:41
  Yeah yeah. So a strange journey for
• 2:04:43
  Starship Troopers since its release a commercial and
• 2:04:46
  critical Turkey in 1997. But his reputation has improved
• 2:04:49
  significantly since and I think it might be best summed up by
• 2:04:52
  Verhoeven himself. I saw an interview where he said
• 2:04:56
  people didn't get it at the time.
• 2:04:57
  Now though, I get asked, how come, after such a beautiful
• 2:05:00
  movie like Starship Troopers, you did a piece of shit like
• 2:05:03
  Hollow Man? Beautiful movie sequels and
• 2:05:12
  influence. Despite the film flopping pretty
• 2:05:17
  spectacularly at the box office, Starship Troopers spawned not
• 2:05:20
  one but two live action sequels. Starship Troopers 2 Hero of the
• 2:05:24
  Federation came in 2004, directed by Phil Tippett.
• 2:05:28
  Right. And then in 2008, we got
• 2:05:31
  Starship Troopers 3 Marauder, which was written and directed
• 2:05:35
  by Enya Maya. You know those written and
• 2:05:38
  directed by Quentin Tarantino T-shirt you see people wearing?
• 2:05:41
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:05:41
  I think we'd tell many written and directed by Ed Neumeyer,
• 2:05:44
  Cops. Yep, I'll buy one.
• 2:05:46
  So would sell one. Ed would buy one, says 2.
• 2:05:50
  That's. 2 The sequels are straight to video and have a
• 2:05:53
  reputation for being shockers, so we're going to skip right
• 2:05:56
  over them and stick with the original.
• 2:05:58
  OK. So where do we see Starship,
• 2:06:00
  Tripod, Legacy and Influence today, do we think?
• 2:06:04
  I think because it's a film you don't necessarily get on that
• 2:06:07
  first attempt, it probably doesn't have the influence that
• 2:06:09
  it should. Because I imagine there's a lot
• 2:06:11
  of people like me who didn't get it on 1st view and but they
• 2:06:15
  probably haven't gone back and given it a second chance and
• 2:06:17
  realised what was going on in it because of how Verhoeven
• 2:06:21
  approached the cast. And it's not like it's a film
• 2:06:23
  where you can see or it launched this person's career.
• 2:06:26
  It wasn't that type of film either and I think if he's
• 2:06:29
  someone who was born after this came out, I will totally
• 2:06:32
  understand. If they looked at the Post and
• 2:06:34
  went Denise Riches, Casper Van Deen in an Alien invasion from.
• 2:06:38
  I don't think so, no thanks. So it's probably not had the
• 2:06:41
  influence that it should have done or the legacy.
• 2:06:44
  And I think really in Legacy, it's probably just for Hovind's
• 2:06:47
  last great film, sadly. Yeah, I think the film
• 2:06:50
  definitely has a legacy. Mainly for me, it's a science
• 2:06:52
  fiction sapphire. I think like any genre, science
• 2:06:55
  fiction has its subgenres. Action, horror, cerebral,
• 2:06:58
  dystopian, lots more. And I think in cinema one of the
• 2:07:01
  least explored is the sci-fi satire.
• 2:07:04
  Some of the biggest science fiction stories ever are
• 2:07:06
  satirical, but usually in other mediums like Judge Dredd or
• 2:07:10
  Watchmen in comic books, or The Hitchhike as Guide to the Galaxy
• 2:07:13
  in literature. And this Starship Troopers
• 2:07:15
  proves that not only can satirical science fiction be
• 2:07:17
  done in cinema, it can be done really well and have a prescient
• 2:07:20
  message. Unfortunately, I don't think
• 2:07:22
  many film makers are falling at footsteps.
• 2:07:24
  Yeah, the Truman? Sure.
• 2:07:25
  Maybe District 9? Possibly.
• 2:07:28
  I'll say. Let's have more films inspired
• 2:07:30
  by Paul Volvin please. Definitely, yeah.
• 2:07:33
  Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that.
• 2:07:35
  I think it's the ballsy nature of this and the ballsy nature of
• 2:07:38
  what he's trying to commentate on that really makes this film
• 2:07:41
  shine. And I don't quite think were
• 2:07:44
  they yet. It's kind of like Doctor
• 2:07:48
  Strangelove, where we're going to come back to this and go, oh
• 2:07:51
  right, this makes sense. Yeah, we didn't quite know what
• 2:07:54
  this was saying. And there will be an audience
• 2:07:56
  for this. But I think it's far, far
• 2:07:59
  further in the future than it is for us.
• 2:08:02
  And there's a lot of time for people to get this and go
• 2:08:06
  actually, yeah, this is fun. That makes real sense.
• 2:08:10
  So the sequels of Starship Troopers don't stand up to the
• 2:08:12
  original for us, and they have been talks of a remake.
• 2:08:16
  Would you fancy that? No.
• 2:08:18
  No. Not at all.
• 2:08:20
  And besides me, neither. Might be nice to see some new
• 2:08:23
  films go down this typical science fiction path though.
• 2:08:27
  Yeah, definitely. But not a remake.
• 2:08:28
  You could only make this one particular way and it's being
• 2:08:31
  done. All the right movies ranking.
• 2:08:38
  And we are at the end of Starship Troopers.
• 2:08:40
  That's the full story of how it came to be.
• 2:08:43
  Just one thing left, and that is to give the film the ATRM
• 2:08:46
  ranking treatment. Yeah, Westy, you know what to
• 2:08:50
  do. Your summary in score for
• 2:08:52
  Starship Troopers, please. Suck my brains out.
• 2:08:56
  There's only one thing to do in that is really just address how
• 2:08:59
  much I love this film and the reason I put it up and the
• 2:09:02
  reason that it's so important and the reason that cinema is so
• 2:09:05
  important and there is the film is so important.
• 2:09:07
  And the reason that film is like for over, and it's so important
• 2:09:10
  that they're fearless. And I love that and the putting
• 2:09:13
  stuff down there and people still get it and the state still
• 2:09:16
  resonates and it's still worthwhile.
• 2:09:18
  One thing I can't stand is watching a film that has no
• 2:09:21
  fucking substance and has no fucking point.
• 2:09:24
  This has so much substance. It has so much point, it has so
• 2:09:29
  much to say and it has so much to do.
• 2:09:32
  It's not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but
• 2:09:36
  for me it's up there in a perfect film that really needs
• 2:09:38
  to punch Hollywood in the face in the late 90s and say, hey, we
• 2:09:42
  can still say something and you haven't got control over us.
• 2:09:45
  So for that reason, it's nine on 10.
• 2:09:48
  Yeah, great film to revisit this one for a few reasons.
• 2:09:51
  Always good to cover a Porva Orven movie and nice to complete
• 2:09:54
  the Dutch trilogy. Yeah, it's based on a classic
• 2:09:56
  science fiction novel. It has a interesting cast who I
• 2:10:00
  think are OK, Yeah, yeah. All great.
• 2:10:03
  Mostly it's interesting. And then it's a blockbuster with
• 2:10:05
  subtext and a message, which isn't usually the case in this
• 2:10:08
  kind of movie. It does the things blockbusters
• 2:10:10
  do and does them well. The spectacle is exciting and
• 2:10:13
  well put together when it comes. The blend of practical and
• 2:10:16
  digital effects still looks excellent to me, but it is that
• 2:10:19
  critique of fascism, how it can take hold and where it leads,
• 2:10:23
  that gives this film a pretty unique place.
• 2:10:25
  Nowadays, artistic action films aren't too common, but Starship
• 2:10:29
  Troopers is definitely that. And it's for that reason.
• 2:10:32
  And the other I mentioned that I'm giving it also nine out of
• 2:10:35
  10. Lovely.
• 2:10:37
  Love that. Come on Matt, Don't fucking let
• 2:10:39
  us down. Your summary and score for
• 2:10:41
  Startup Troopers, please. I'm so glad I did give this film
• 2:10:45
  another chance back in the day. And when you go through it in
• 2:10:48
  the way that we have, when you take it apart, when you see
• 2:10:50
  what's in the right and what's in the direction.
• 2:10:54
  However, Hovind is using the actors how he's dictating what
• 2:10:56
  the music should be. It just makes me want to go back
• 2:10:59
  in time and slap my 17 year old self around the head and think
• 2:11:03
  how could you miss all that? Like why didn't you give a
• 2:11:06
  second chance earlier on? But at the same time that then
• 2:11:10
  becomes its biggest flaw for me. Because once you do realize
• 2:11:13
  what's going on, that's also the reason I don't come back to this
• 2:11:17
  film a lot because there's no emotional content or journey in
• 2:11:22
  there to really get your teeth into.
• 2:11:23
  And that's very deliberate by For Whorfin course it is.
• 2:11:26
  I get that, yeah. But just keep me at a remove
• 2:11:28
  ever so slightly and obviously the performances you've got to
• 2:11:32
  take in the right way as as well as you do some of the dialogue.
• 2:11:35
  But having said that, I don't know who would have the balls to
• 2:11:39
  make this today. And it is such a unique film and
• 2:11:42
  I do think it is for Hovind's best film, so it's also getting
• 2:11:46
  a nine for me. Nice. 999 Well, we also put this
• 2:11:51
  out there to our Twitter or X followers.
• 2:11:54
  Would you like to know more? Kind of.
• 2:11:57
  Yes, we'll see. Your life in your hands there,
• 2:12:01
  yeah, well, Andrew Hashtag, Alaska at Desert Granite said.
• 2:12:06
  Everything changed on my views when I listened to the director
• 2:12:09
  commentary. The entire film is designed to
• 2:12:11
  be a propaganda film. It makes it one of the best
• 2:12:14
  sci-fi films ever made because of the critique of our culture.
• 2:12:17
  Still to this day, 10 out of 10. Yeah, wonderful.
• 2:12:20
  OK, agree with that. I think most people went through
• 2:12:23
  the awakening moment with this film, where it was like, hang on
• 2:12:25
  a minute. This wake up one day.
• 2:12:29
  Dressed as in Nazi at the end? What's?
• 2:12:31
  Going on, I'm 25 years old. This makes sense.
• 2:12:36
  Labie at Labour FM said I remember a magazine gave it the
• 2:12:40
  best creature was a Shower Scene of the Year award.
• 2:12:42
  I assumed it must have been meteor shower and was confused
• 2:12:45
  on where all these movies with meteor showers I was missing
• 2:12:47
  were. Nine out of 10 delivers on all
• 2:12:50
  shower scenes. Fair enough.
• 2:12:52
  I mean, gratuity show our scene of the year.
• 2:12:53
  Verhoeven owns that award. Sure.
• 2:12:55
  Of course. He just took it home.
• 2:12:57
  And one of our patrons, Liz Booth, said we need more dark
• 2:13:01
  satire from Paul Verhoeven. I mean, that's true enough.
• 2:13:04
  Yeah, I took it on face value as a teenager, but as an adult,
• 2:13:07
  seeing it set in a fascist America with Nazi references
• 2:13:10
  blew my mind ahead of its time. Land of the free, home of the
• 2:13:14
  fascist. Nice.
• 2:13:16
  Oh, nice. Like that.
• 2:13:17
  I think you have listeners pitching for a new national
• 2:13:19
  anthem there. Can't see that catching on to be
• 2:13:21
  honest, Liz. No.
• 2:13:22
  Maybe give a timeline to be fair.
• 2:13:24
  And all together, our followers rated the film as.
• 2:13:27
  What do you think? I'd love it to be a nine.
• 2:13:32
  Yeah, go on then. I'll go 9.
• 2:13:35
  It was 8 out of 10. OK, that's fine, right.
• 2:13:39
  That's fine. So that gives Starship Troopers
• 2:13:42
  35 out of 40 in total. Maybe you will live forever.
• 2:13:46
  Maybe we'll be 4040 in the next 20 years.
• 2:13:50
  Yeah, and that's all we have on Starship 2 Buzz.
• 2:13:52
  We hope you've liked it and it hasn't been a trip down washout
• 2:13:55
  lane. Next time.
• 2:13:57
  Luke, Westy and Matt are only seeing what they want to see.
• 2:14:00
  They don't know they're dead as they talk M Night Shyamalan,
• 2:14:03
  Bruce Willis and Hayley Joel Osmond in The Sixth Sense.
• 2:14:07
  Yes. That's a big one Spirit you
• 2:14:09
  want? Well, in the meantime, to find a
• 2:14:12
  mobile Becoming a Patreon, supporting what we do and
• 2:14:15
  accessing our archive and bonus episodes, please visit
• 2:14:17
  patreon.com/all the Right Movies or the subscribe link on Apple
• 2:14:21
  Podcasts. Yep, please subscribe Rain
• 2:14:24
  reviewers on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all of your other
• 2:14:27
  podcast platforms. 5 stars please.
• 2:14:30
  Yes, of course. Guarantee section CHIP.
• 2:14:32
  Yep. So sure, you can keep up with
• 2:14:33
  all the right movies on Twitter or X where we are at 80 right
• 2:14:37
  movies. We post threads on there that
• 2:14:39
  tell the stories behind classic films, where everything we post
• 2:14:42
  has been said by someone involved in the production or
• 2:14:44
  comes from three separate sources, the same as on our
• 2:14:47
  podcast. So please do check that out.
• 2:14:50
  Definitely. You can find us on YouTube at
• 2:14:52
  youtube.com/all the right movies on Instagram and Threads We are
• 2:14:55
  at all the under score Right movies on Blue Sky.
• 2:14:59
  We are at all the right movies.com.
• 2:15:01
  We have a Facebook group where you can join in with lots of
• 2:15:03
  movie discussions and our website is full of great
• 2:15:06
  features and that all the right movies.com.
• 2:15:09
  Yeah. Yeah, we're all off now to look
• 2:15:11
  at our next podcast until we're dead or until you find someone
• 2:15:15
  better. Good luck with that.
• 2:15:17
  Come back for the 6th sense. And as always, thanks for
• 2:15:20
  listening everyone. Yes, thank you guys.
• 2:15:22
  Massively appreciate it.