Starship Troopers 3: Marauder

In the front-line of the Second Bug War in planet Roku San, the charismatic Sky Marshal Omar Anoke (Stephen Hogan) arrives with his assistant General Dix Hauser (Boris Kodjoe) in an starship piloted by his fiancée Captain Lola Beck (Jolene Blalock) and they are welcomed by their friend and hero of Planet P Colonel Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien). While Anoke inspects the facility protected by fences, Dix, Lola and Rico go to a bar to celebrate their reunion. However, Dix has an incident with the local farmers and arrests Rico for insubordination; meanwhile, there is a shut down in the defense fences and the bugs break into the facility. Lola and Anoke escape in the starship, but it crashes in Planet OM-1 and Lola, Anoke, Chief Bull Brittles (Stelio Savante), Jingo Ryan (Cokey Falkow), Dr. Wiggs (Danny Keogh) and the religious flight attendant Holly Little (Marnette Patterson) save themselves in a rescue pod. When Dix discovers that Admiral Enolo Phid (Amanda Donohoe) has no intention to rescue the survivors in the Arachnid Quarantine Zone, he assigns Rico in the Marauder Program to lead a squad with six other troopers to rescue Lola and Anoke.

"Starship Troopers 3: Marauder" is a reasonable entertaining, with good and also awful points. The good ones are the ironic Federal Network, with manipulative messages and brainwash of the citizens; Jolene "T'Pol" Blalock; and the story as a whole that is not bad. However, there are many stupid lines and dialogs; annoying characters and situations (the attitudes and behavior of the flawed Dix is totally incoherent, Holly Little and Jingo are irritating and Anoke is silly); and this exaggerated subplot of religion is never funny and does not work. The special effects are only reasonable and the set decoration is good. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Tropas Estelares 3" ("Starship Troopers 3")

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. Hmm, well I'll start with the good. There was quite a bit of good in this movie. A great starship troopers movie. Like Casper Van Dien says in the making of the movie, this is the true sequel to starship troopers. Casper Van Dien reprises his role as John Rico. He plays the role great, maybe even better than the first film. Supporting lead cast was good. Boris and Jolene played excellent roles. Special Effects were superior to syfy movies but not up to par as first or second movie. Could have been excellent with more money in the budget. They had the right person for the job in Dennis Stotak. The directing was pretty good for Ed Neumier's first directing job. The fednet sequences are good and campy as the first movie. This movie features more citizen and human depth than war with bugs which made it its own picture. The Marauder's needed more screen time and more money to make better CG effects, but it wasn't awful.

The bad: Money and time. Which about sums up the times you can tell when things were CGI effects or looked visually unappealing. The supporting cast was pretty bad, as in they would destroy the dialog or you couldn't understand them too well with the heavy accents. The weapons looked too bulky but at least they were not lazers. They did shoot actuall shell cased ammunition which was a cool thing from the first film. This movie isn't a good stand alone movie which is not necessarily bad but its great for starship troopers fans, but it won't jolt much excitement from someone who hasn't seen any of the other movies or read the book.

I hope they get a bigger budget and maybe create another movie with some more original cast members and an all out war picture. Just my wishful thinking. 6 out of 10, I did enjoy this movie because I enjoyed the others but if you are not a fan of the others you probably won't enjoy this one.

I tell ya I was dying to see this movie when I heard it was going to be released and it is a mixed bag. The Starship Troopers universe is explored in more detail - we see more of the Federation and their behind the scenes antics plus we also get to see what Rico is up to nowadays. You can tell Casper Van Dien has aged from the first movie, but he does such a good job in his role. You can tell his character has been amongst ongoing struggles and has such a commanding presence. And yes he gets his gear off once again (phew, I was hoping). The supporting cast is OK - the Admiral is excellently bitchy and authoritative and the Pilot was very tough and yet feminine, but the rest were merely bodies to fill the screen, in my opinion. The film does touch on a bit of this and a bit of that, but just falls short of feeling substantial, what the first film achieved so successfully. The special effects are adequate for the budget and often look quite OK - there are also a few gory moments for those into exploding heads and such. Probably the most disappointing aspect was not the fact that the ending was awfully soppy, clichéd and predictably going to lend itself for a sequel, but that the Marauder element was so miniscule that if you blinked you'd miss it (relative to the remaining bulk of the film). Hopefully in the next film they push the marauders more and don't get bogged down in too much unnecessary dialogue. But overall Starship Troopers 3 is a worthy watch and a decent followup to the other films. Thankyou for coming back to the series Casper, that's all I can say :)

I don't know why I kept watching to the end, but I did anyway and it really wasn't worth my (or anyone else's for that matter) time.

you don't need a big budget to make a good film, but it's impossible to hide a bad one with a small budget and this one must have had a REALLY small budget.

I was surprised to see Jolene Blalock's name attached to this being a star trek fan I thought she might bring something to the movie, but I'm starting to understand why she was cast as an emotionally void Vulcan in Enterprise. I'd also read comments about the state of her lips and thought it was just internet geeks going overboard, but they are really big now, significantly moreso than in her trek role, I think she needs to ease off on the collagen before they take over her face, they're starting to look like she was beaten up.

the SFX would have embarrassed the Red Dwarf crew at times they were so bad. For an example of how bad it gets check out the scene on the ship at warp where the view out the window isn't even CGI but some space scene on a long roller rolled past the window really quickly with the same repeating pattern over and over. I honestly don't think I've seen that done since the 70's! even the bug CGI is barely up to video game standards and not a patch on the original (which is 11 years old (1997) now and still looking much better than anything in ST3).

seriously guys, if you don't have the budget to make it properly, just don't make it at all, for your own sakes as professionals as well as for the sake of your fans. didn't you learn anything from ST2?

It's obvious to me that the makers of Starship Troopers 2 simply did not understand the original Starship Troopers movie. Starship Troopers was a great social satire, and is more relevant today than it ever was before. The makers of Starship Troopers 2 thought it was just a dumb war action flick and created their sequel based on that assumption.

But Starship Troopers was not a movie about a war; it was a movie about the society which waged this war.

The people who made Starship Trooper 3 did not make the same mistake. They understood the appeal and the message of Starship Troopers, ignored the abysmal second part, and made a true sequel, even expanding on a lot of the themes started in the original.

If you liked Starship Troopers but did not like the second part, give this one a try (and if you haven't seen part 2, simply assume that Starship Troopers 2 never happened and go straight to 3). You will not be disappointed.