Starship Troopers (1997) on Netflix
Teenager Johnny Rico joins the Mobile Infantry, hoping to stay near his girlfriend, aspiring pilot Carmen Ibanez. Their Earth is at war with giant insectoid creatures called Arachnids.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.3/10350,092 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes72%
Trailer
Plot summary
The United Citizen Federation rules Earth as a stratocratic regime, and citizenship comes only through federal service. Johnny Rico, a teenage sports star, joins the Mobile Infantry against his parents' wishes to remain near his girlfriend, the pilot Carmen Ibanez. Their psychic friend Carl Jenkins enters military intelligence, while Isabelle "Dizzy" Flores, who loves Rico, transfers into his squad. Humanity is locked in an interstellar war with the Arachnids, insectoid creatures the troops call bugs. Carmen ends her relationship with Rico as their careers diverge. Rico impresses drill sergeant Zim during training, but a mistake in a training exercise costs him his rank as squad leader and brings a flogging.
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Starship Troopers (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began as Edward Neumeier's own treatment, Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, a jingoistic war story wrapped around a teenage romance. He made the enemy insects because his wife was afraid of them.
- Starship Troopers became a Heinlein adaptation only after TriStar executive Chris Lee rejected Neumeier's original bug treatment. Neumeier and producer Jon Davison then found that the rights to Robert A. Heinlein's novel were free and pitched that instead, using pieces of Outpost 7.
- To convince a hesitant TriStar, the team shot a test scene. The studio put up $225,000 for the "Bug Test", filmed at Vasquez Rocks on 21 July 1994 by a 30-person crew and directed by Paul Verhoeven while he was still shooting Showgirls.
- When the test footage was screened in October 1994, TriStar executives including Chris Lee and Mark Canton were impressed without realizing the bugs were computer-generated, and approved pre-production on the strength of it.
- Paul Verhoeven never finished Heinlein's novel. He tried, gave up, had Neumeier summarise it for him, and found its militarism clashed with his own childhood in the German-occupied Netherlands, so he set out to satirise the book instead.
- Verhoeven cast the film to match the blonde, blue-eyed look of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. Stars he wanted, such as Chris O'Donnell and Christian Slater, were already in their thirties, so he turned to television soaps and found Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards and Dina Meyer.
- Jake Busey was among the crew treated for heat stroke after working in heavy costume at Hell's Half Acre in Wyoming, and production shut down for a week while he recovered, at a reported cost of $1.5 million a day.
- Casper Van Dien was roped to a moving fiberglass Tanker Bug shell that kept slamming him against it over three and a half days of filming, chipping a tooth and bruising his ribs. He said nothing at the time rather than hold up the shoot.
