Starship Troopers: Invasion

The latest adaptation of the hugely influential Heinlein novel, Starship Troopers: Invasion is a bit of a mix of the various different adaptations that have been made over the years... perhaps the most notable difference from the best known iteration of the franchise - the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film - is that this is fully CGI and that the titular Starship Troopers are indeed wearing at least some kind of power armour.

This particular outing returns to main the characters from the 1997 movie, although several years on with the Federation still at war with the Bugs. The first thing to note about this film is that it's very limited in its visuals. If you feel that too many sci-fi films end up us as endless succession of identical corridors, this film will do little to disabuse you of that notion. We start out on a space station, move to a spaceship and then on to another spaceship and that's pretty much it. It's almost certainly due to budgetary constraints but it makes the  whole thing feel very limited - granted, the 1997 film was mostly set on a series of big ol' sandy planets but we had a number of different locations there... ravines, a fort and tunnels. Enough to give variety... and of course in the 1999 CGI TV show we had a number of substantially different places in each campaign.

Starship Troopers: Invasion offers us little more than the same metallic hallways and bland rooms every step of the way and while that isn't something that makes it inherently bad - it's very limiting and when you've got the ability to make any kind of world you want inside a computer it just feels a little disappointing.

Storywise, this runs with Carl being a creepy black ops type who steals Carmen's ship to run experiments that naturally pertain to Bugs and end up goin awry, killing everyone and leading to the eponymous invasion... there's not really anything remarkable in terms of story or character. It doesn't rely entirely upon the cookie cutter military cliches but it really doesn't matter as the power armour does precious little good and the weapons remain as useless as ever, so most of these characters are just meat for the grinder.

It's enjoyable as a standard sci-fi action piece, the CGI animation is actually fairly impressive (if lacking in variety) but it lacks the satirical kick that made the original film stand out from the crowd. You'd have thought someone would want to bring back the tongue-in-cheek propaganda stuff but admittedly, they'd probably feel somewhat out of place here as this is far more serious in tone than the often cartoonish Verhoeven film.

All-in-all, it's a good effort and not a bad way to spend ninety minutes and definitely something fans of the franchise (or sci-fi or creature feature fans for that matter) but there's nothing particularly iconic here... so, while even years on people will probably still remember some of the stuff from Verhoeven's gloriously over the top film, Invasion is something that is unlikely to be anything more than a series of long, grey corridors...