Battleangel

What on earth did happen to the “sequel” anyway? According to IMDB, Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation should premiere on DVD and TV at the end of April. The reason I mention this now is because someone uploaded a massive SVCD of ST2 in German to Suprnova.org. I wouldn’t have noticed ordinarily but for a while it had over 10000 people downloading so it kind of stood out. Still waiting for an English version though. Even if you sort of know the language, watching a German dub is NOT pretty.
Anyway, there are three things to remember here … it IS after all TV movies, it is NOT a sequel per se and we will NOT get to see the power suits, armor suits, mechs etc. I.e. the Phil Tippett crew is working hard once again to disregard the Heinlein book by the same name that is after all a template for the franchise. The question is, will it be any good or will they be able to screw it up beyond ST1 even despite starting out on rock bottom? Realistically it can only get better. Especially since they pledged to move the story away from the battlefields of ST1 and towards a more close up horror theme. Someone made the comparison between Alien and Aliens to illustrate this. Personally I think the story sounds a bit more like Pitch Black meets The Thing …
Other than that it has been extremely quiet on the ST front. A couple of ST2 shots surfaced last year but the hype is not what you could expect. I guess a direct to TV / DVD release does that to a movie.

As for ST1 it is a case of what I’d like to call “unrealized realities”. But that is another rant. Bottom line is that it didn’t live up to expectations. Not on any level. A travesty with the only lasting impression being the political message. But even as such, those propaganda features became a little too much. Too much clumsy freewheeling.
All in all blatantly unskilled and imprudent production.

I’ll make the same recommendation as I have before. If you like Starship Troopers but hated the movie the only thing left (apart from the book of course!) is Roughnecks : The Starship Troopers Chronicles. A series that works miracles on the story.
Despite supposedly being a children’s show it feels more enveloping and mature than most movies in the same genre. Refreshing to say the least. Even if it dropped most of the political concept completely. No matter. If you can’t portray it well, don’t portray it at all. No one likes fruit salad anyway.

And while on the subject, I might also point to the fact that the upcoming Starship Troopers game seems well underway. Should be out for Christmas if everything holds up.
It would be a blast if the devs could turn the Starship Troopers universe into a playable game. That would be about the first time ever that a movie or book to game adaptation worked out in that case … I mean realistically there are only like 4-5 good games each year (and hundreds of failures) so chances are this will bomb.