In the future, democracy will have shown itself to be inadequate, and a group of veteran soldiers will have usurped them and installed themselves and a fairly large, meritocratic congress as leaders. They have also created a military state, where a distinction is made between citizens and civilians — the former are granted a lot of rights, but the latter are hardly oppressed. It’s basically the kind of benign semi-democratic, technocratic military dictatorship that’s just as realistic as a utopian communist’s vision of the ideal society. But that’s beside the point here, really. And it’s also fun. Great fun, in fact.
Because we are at war, or will end up being at war during the movie, with a bunch of fairly dumb insects, who colonize other planets by shooting their spores out into space. These bugs can also shoot meteors at Earth, just to, you know, really piss us off… (Although anyone with half a brain will suspect that they didn’t, and that the claim that they did originated among the military rulers, as an excuse to go on the offensive.)
We follow a bunch of recruits, mainly in the infantery, but also in the “air force”, so to say (it’s more like “space force”, really), through their last days before signing up for duty, through their training, and through the war to its turning point, as one of the movie’s characters names it. All of these are practically Übermenschen, at least physically; neither they nor their leaders seems like people I’d trust tobe able to change a lightbulb on their own, much less together, and if you wonder why I have formed this opinion of them, just take a look at how they are trained (the soldiers from Old Man’s War would have beat these kids in a second) and especially their battle tactics (which are just abysmal, at least during the first phase).
This whole Übermensch thing kinda makes them shallow. As an example, take the main character Rico, the ultimate superman (he’s apparently even more so in the books), who hardly has an original thought in his head, and who mostly just repeats things he’s heard from others; word by word, actually, so at least the kid has a good memory (which in turn makes me wonder how the Hell he managed to score 35 % on the math test they refer to in the beginning). Almost everyone’s a hero waiting to happen, and most of them get their chance to actually do so. But they still manage to pull it off; the only character I never stop despicing is that of Denise Richards’, who is just a dumb, irresposible and surprisingly naïve little girl. This doesn’t mean any of them are particularly well acted, though. Most are awkward at best, but no one really expects people like Casper van Dien or the aforementioned Richards to win Oscars for their performances, anyway. And Verhoeven throws in too much action and other distractions to get the time to focus on the characters. Which is kinda fun, considering that this is a fairly character-heavy story. 
Depsite of a lot of not-quite-annoying elements, mediocre acting and a very distanced approach to it all (this last one is probably more of a “because of”, though), I really love this movie. It has a lot of great action scenes, many details you can begin to discover after watching it a few times, and a lot of other stuff which makes it one of the most re-watchable movies I know of. It’s obviously no masterpiece, that much should be obvious, but it’s perfect for a couple of hours of pure entertainment. Rewatching it this soon after reading Old Man’s War has made me determined to buy and read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers books as soon as possible over the Winter Solstice holidays. After all, if I’m gonna go around dissing them, I should have something more than a ranty Moorcock essay to base that dissing on.
7.0/10.
(And also a bump of Beowulf to an 8.0.)
Also, a bit of quasi-random, uninteresting trivia: Starship Troopers is one of the few movies I owned on VHS that I bothered to upgrade to DVD.
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