ninjawaiter

I really want to rate this higher. When it came out this show absolutely captured my young imagination. Rewatching it in 2023 though, I didn't even make it to the end. The concept is excellent, some of the storytelling and characterization are great, but most of the individual episodes are so silly and cringe that I'm probably being too generous with the 4/10 rating. When it was on TV I couldn't believe it got canceled after one season, and chocked it up to Fox's long history of canceling great shows after a single well-regarded season. On the rewatch I get it. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.

I really wanted to like this. It's such a great CONCEPT, and has so many good ideas behind it that a competent, non-ideological team could have turned into something brilliant.

Instead it is a slog. Some of the episodes in season 1 are actually quite good, while others are downright atrocious and nigh-unwatchable. I don't blame anyone who bailed early.

"Current day" radically racialized hyperbolic and hysterical (not in the funny sense) Leftist propaganda is jam-packed into every scene. It's like being lectured by The View, but with fairies and goatmen. There is scarcely a single scene in the entire show that isn't trying to beat you over the head with racism.

Because I have an overactive imagination that likes to read between the lines and explore my own ideas about the concept, I got enough enjoyment out of it to stick it out, but I had very mixed feelings about a second season.

Any fears I had for the second season proved entirely unfounded though, because my overactive imagination could never have conjured the horrors the people who made this show did. Everything terrible in the first season was cranked up to 11, and everything good diminished to negligibility.

The 4/10 I've given it is EXTREMELY generous, probably owing more to the sparks from my own imagination inspired by the concept than to anything actually put to screen.

I love this film. I saw it 4 or 5 times in theaters. I also love that Paul Verhoeven once again utterly failed to make a satire (just like with Robocop). The man is an outstanding action filmmaker, and the most incompetent satirist of the 21st century.

The fact that he didn't even read the book, misinterpreted a radical Libertarian utopia as fascism, and then tried to satire it in film, only to accidentally make another stellar gung-ho action film beloved by millions, is almost as good as the film itself.

That having been said, this film has basically NOTHING to do with Robert A. Heinlein's masterpiece 'Starship Troopers'. Verhoeven took tiny number of very superficial elements of the society, the general "there's a war between humans and aliens!", and the names of characters, and then completely made up his own thing. None of the characters even remotely resemble their namesakes from the book. The aliens don't even remotely resemble their namesake from the book. The combat doesn't even remotely resemble the book. And, well, neither does anything else. I love this film, but it's a Starship Troopers book skinsuit.