REVIEW: Starship Troopers

Starship troopers: a Maligned Classic

“Someone asked me once if I knew the difference between a civilian and a citizen. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.”

John Rico

Starship troopers is one of the most maligned films of all time, panned by critics on its release, 17 years ago, they called it a “nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer block buster look intelligent” in the Deseret News and the New York Post called it a “Crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Even Roger Ebert who had lorded the social satire of Robocop said that the movie was a “one dimensional trivial nothing pitched at 11 year old sci-fi fans.”  But is that all it really is?

I feel that the critics have missed the mark somewhat; Starship troopers was, and is, a searing incitement of right wing militaristic culture.  Even though the film is 17 years old now (yes I feel old too RBD) the message is still as clear as a bell and that message can be summed up simply as “War makes fascists of us all.” The movie comes out and says that violence is “the supreme authority from which all others are derived” and that “Naked force has resolved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence doesn't solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always die” these are not the words of a military recruitment officer or of a drill sergeant but the words of a teacher in a high school.  The director of the film, Paul Verhoeven, (he of Robocop and Total Recall fame) is on record as saying that the film was playing with fascism and fascist imagery to point out certain aspects of American culture.  And one can’t help but see a comparison between the gung-ho jingoism of the propaganda films and the rightwing media in the states, especially fox news.

Set in the far of future where mankind has reached out to the stars and started to colonize alien planets. This rabid colonialism has provoked an otherwise peaceful race of insect-like aliens to lash out against earth, which it suddenly and quite rightly now sees as hostile. Seeing fairly obvious self-defense tactics as further gestures of aggression Humankind musters its global forces and charges headlong into a grossly outmatched interstellar war, the film uses this as a spring board for a satire on the first Gulf war but it really works for any war that the USA has fought in since the end of the second world war, with the well trained and well equipped troops of Earth representing the states and the poorly equipped and not at all trained bugs representing the Vietnamese or the Iraqis The film is loosely  based on a 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A Heinlein the book was meant to be more of a political Essay than a work of pure fiction with large a large portion set in a school classroom the charicters debate with there History and moral philosophy teacher(played by the awesomely understated Michael Ironside), who many consider to be speaking in Heinlein’s own voice. The script itself was a totally unrelated entity called ‘bug hunt at outpost nine’  Paul Verhoeven admits to not being able to finish the book as he found it ‘depressing and boring’.  The film can also be seen as a work on ‘paradise lost’ with the innocents of youth replaced with the hell of war.

 

Even by todays standard the special effects look good, partly because they used real models, it took over a year for model builders, and special effect artists boss film Sony image works and good old industrial light and magic to make the ships that you see on screen.   The movie offers up a beautiful totalitarian state where all the children are beautiful wide eyed and innocent, whereas the adults by contrast are usually maimed in some way from there service.  The world itself feels fully fleshed out with different types of alien fulfilling different roles put together the world feels rich and detailed, if somewhat unsettling.

The movie concerns the lives of three high school friends, all of whom sign up for military service after leaving high school. Denise Richards plays Carman a high flyer who wants to pilot starships, Casper Van Dean plays Johnny Rico her boyfriend who doesn’t really want to join the military but signs on to impress his girlfriend, and there mutual friend Carl, played by Neil Patrick Harris who joins up because… well they never say but it is strongly implied that career choices are limited.  So the three join up, Carmen goes to fleet to learn how to fly, Johnny goes into the Mobile infantry to learn how to kill and Carl goes into military intelligence to learn how to commit genocide and the film then follows John Rico’s journey from being a fairly amiable high school jock hero to being a cold blooded killing machine.  Our hero loses the love of his life when she decides to make a career out of being a pilot, as opposed to just fulfilling her two year service as Rico intended on doing, then an accident on the training field see him take ten lashes as punishment, his dues paid he decides to wash out and quit before he finishes his term of service and to give the fascist state in the movie its due they allow him to, that is until his hometown, Buenos Aires, is whipped of the face of the planet by a meteorite.  It is then at our heroes lowest ebb that he reaches inside himself and is reborn, now a man.  It is worth mentioning that there is no concrete proof that the meteorite strike was in fact an attack by the ‘bugs’ and could have in reality just been a random regular act of god, but the all-powerful Earth government treated it as a hostile action and used it as justification to go to war.

 

NEWS: Curiosity finds nitrates on Mars



The Curiosity rover takes a selfie.

NASA’s Curiosity rover is still finding clues that could point to the red planet once have been sustaining life it was revealed today.  Nitrates, key to sustaining life on Earth, have been discovered in the Martian soil these could be an indication that the planet once harboured life.

Nitrogen is a prime ingredient of life here on earth so the discovery of it in the Martian rocks makes it more plausible that there was once some forms of life on the red planet. As with the discovery of methane in December 2014 it doesn’t mean that there is life, but it shows that there could have been life during the planets heyday. If nitrogen exists it would have been possible to form the component parts of life like amino acids and DNA

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) a lab on board the rover found the compounds containing nitrogen in the sediment that it scooped and drilled from the surface.

“Discovery of indigenous Martian nitrogen in Mars surface materials has important implications for habitability and, specifically, for the potential evolution of a nitrogen cycle (the process where nitrogen is changed between its different forms RBD) at some point in Martian history,” the authors of a new paper describing the findings write 

“We’re going to try to understand whether this process is still happening today at all or whether this all happened in the past in a different Mars, in a different climate regime, in a different atmosphere.” Jennifer Stern, a NASA geochemist, told the LA Times "People want to follow the carbon, but in many ways nitrogen is just as important a nutrient for life Life runs on nitrogen as much as it runs on carbon."

The nitrate could have arrived on the planet via lightning from a volcanic plume or by an asteroid impact causeing thermal shock rather than by life itself having created it.

FEATURE: The Drake equation, How many civlised planets are there in the Galaxy

Forty years as an astronomer have not quelled my enthusiasm for lying outside after dark, staring up at the stars. It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills me. It's the sense I have that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all. Who look across space with wonder, just as we do?

Frank Drake

The Drake equation is a famous equation for trying to estimate how many Technological civilisations there might be in the universe, when you look at the size of our galaxy with its billions upon billions of stars around witch many exoplantes orbit the fact is that we simply cannot be alone as the only sentient beings in the cosmos.  However as The Fermi Paradox asks why, given the seemingly endless amount of stars in the night sky, we have not heard from another intelligent race yet.  The simple answer is we don’t know.  Now don’t get me wrong on this I don’t believe that mankind is visited by little green man or even that what happened at Roswell was anything other than a botched military exercise but, I like many better men before me including the grate Carl Sagan himself believe that we are not alone.  The only question is how many other species are out there, and, this is where the drake equation comes in.

The man himself, Frank Drake.

First put forward by Frank Drake in 1961 the equation identifies the specific factors thought to play some role in the development of such civilizations.  There is no unique answer to the equation but it is a generally accepted tool amongst the scientific community to examine these factors.

The equation runs like this:

Where N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible.
R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy.
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point.
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life.
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

to give an answer to this equation I'm going to hand over to a much better man than myself.  the late grate Carl Sagan: