Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004)
They're coming back to wipe us out!
I could pick a nice winter themed movie since it’s winter, but instead I picked something with bugs. Why? Honestly, because I watched it forever ago so in theory it makes the review part a lot quicker to do. Well, that and who knows, maybe it’s not as bad as I remember it being. Everyone remembers the first movie, some of us have read the book and wondered how the two could end up being so functionally different - and a bunch of us must have watched the second movie because they gave us a third - and movie companies don’t do that if they don’t think they’ll make money. Funny part is, you never hear anyone talking about two or three - so heck with it, tonight we jump back into the front and watch Starship Troopers 2.
You know how some of the most fun sequels end up doing a genre shift? Well, this one kind of attempts something like that. We go from that classic war propaganda satire to essentially a horror movie. It’s effectively if everyone saw that scene in the first with a guy hiding in a closet and thought “yeah, this would be a great plot while keeping the budget down! We follow a squad of mobile infantry who end up shacking in a spooky base that’s all wrecked up as they try and escape a bad situation and pickup isn’t coming down. Twists and turns happen when the find a single man alive, locked inside a furnace. Records state the war hero is a murderer, but more is going on than anyone might know. With the bug threat closing in from outside, will any of them survive?
Actors get to have a lot of legwork to do here. Yes, there’s some bugs, but unlike the original this one is very well contained to the base and the squad taking refuge in it.. It’s honestly a bit of a strange mix of over-the-top you’d expect from the original, and a bit of classic CG eye line nonsense. If we look at it as a budget kind of flick, the acting isn’t that bad - albeit some of the drama that gets injected into the movie the actors need to contend with feels a bit out of place honestly. For the most part though, everyone has a role to play and the do what they can with it - and sometimes that “with it” ends up feeling a bit stiff or flat, while other times with specific actors it’s a bag of gusto that whether intentional or not ends up being far more entertaining. I don’t really particularly remember it being amazingly acted, but it could have certainly been far worse.
The characters are a bit of a mix. The only one that you’ll really feels reasonable is the guy they find locked in an incinerator. A bunch of the other characters feel less like soldiers and more like a frat house at times - random romance drama and the likes. In the first it worked a little bit because it was the main character, here it’s less working given it’s a bunch of characters we have no idea about. That said, they do fill the role of hapless slasher fodder like what you would see in a horror movie. At least when people start acting weird it does feel out of character for most of them, but there are two characters who get to have some stuff that goes on with them - even if our lady lead is really the only one who might end up having a bit of a character change by the time the film is over.
File that one for the propaganda poster.
The thing about the movie is that it almost feels more like a budget direct to home video than it does anything else. Some of the effects stuff isn’t bad - despite me just saying that - but everything about it feels very much a let down for those looking for more of the first movie. It has some of the gear, and it lightly pushes that propaganda satire that the first one does - but for the most part, it’s a bit of a mess. We have a guy that is always to scared to fight, but there anyways. You have a guy that doesn’t know what direction your six is - I mean, these troops look less like people that went through boot and more like people that might not know how to put on their boots. Unfortunately because of that, it all feels like a SyFy original - and since they like to pull out those computers for the bugs, which is reasonable in theory, it ends up combining to make things feel way less effort than before. You’d expect me to say “it all looks horrible” - but the sad truth is that it doesn’t.
The bugs look very similar to before. They might have a little bit more of a CG sheen to them, if that makes sense, but it’s not like in most instances they look horribly off-put. There aren’t exactly a lot of moments when you will see a bug and feel like it’s practical here, but considering most the movie is dark and in a sand storm it probably helps hide most of the visual garbage that might be occurring - so you are just left with that rather obvious CG plane of existance they all exhibit and the at times absolutely horrible sight lines. One of the pictures I attached for the review shows a great moment of this, where one of the soldiers looks like they’re just mad at the sky, shooting their flashlight at it while a bug casually eats one of their comrades before flipping them off into the distance as bugs do. Costumes also look like they at times take a hit - sure, some are wearing very recognizable gear from the first, but most the guns are somewhat different than what you remember and they try to add some flairs like Frank over there not wearing a helmet and instead going the “cool guy” bandanna route. It’s like it’s trying to add that personal flair that Aliens did for it’s Colonial Marines, but here it doesn’t quite go as strong or make quite as much sense and instead feels like they didn’t have enough of the costumes for everyone.
The main strength of the movie is that it does something different - and I’m sorry if this is spoilers for you, but I’d just be saving you the disappointment of watching this without using it as a drinking game anyways - with the puppet spider bugs. Yeah, that’s right, spider bugs that crawl in you and use you like a silly little meat suit. You don’t even really look any different - outside of when the body rot starts setting in and things start turning black and you eventually look like the Cryptkeeper’s long lost cousin. I can’t complain too much - the more subtle effects are usually the effects that look better, and the one guy constantly loosing body parts is worthy of a good laugh. The idea isn’t entirely off - we did have the brain bugs in the first sucking up peoples brains with it’s little pointed straw tongue deal - so why not a bug that sits in there and turns you into a gross bio-mech? Yes, that does raise more questions than really get answered, and much to the disappointment of many I’m sure leads to a classic “humans think they are so much better but your just lame and bad for everything” pitch. And it spells it out for you on screen with a line delivery at one point, so yay for that. If you are the thinking type maybe you’d enjoy it more since it does have a few things in it - but to be real with you the only real nice thing the movie did is add more stuff to the universe. It’s got some new guns - even though they are basically laser tag guns - and some new bugs and tech, and the idea that pregnant women with latent psychic abilities get super-charged about it. Don’t think too hard about it really, you’d be better off looking into the satire on display in the first.
The movie is there. I wouldn’t really recommend it to people, although I did just force someone else to watch it tonight, so maybe I’m a bit off kilter. It’s not the worst movie I’ve seen, but it certailnly doesn’t feel like a polished well thought movie that had a ton of budget. If you set expectations for a B movie it’ll be a smoother ride, and it does have some universe feel to it even if it doesn’t shine with those elements because of everything. There’s some actors who are doing a decent job in there - even if their character might suck - and there’s plenty enough of the scene-chewing cheese that you would remember in the first one, although it doesn’t have the same tongue-in-cheek feeling and ends up being a bit more of an attempt to turn something that was an action flick into a horror flick .