Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: an invasion of giant insects.
Following the surprise success of RoboCop (1987), which grossed $53 million in North America for a budget of $13 million, producer Jon Davison and screenwriter Edward Neumeier once again wanted to collaborate on a science fiction film. .
In 1992, they embarked on the adaptation of the novel “Stars, attention to you!” by Robert A. Heinlein and naturally entrusted the staging to the director of RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven. A native of the Netherlands, the latter has since moved to the United States, where he shot two other cult feature films: Total Recall (1990) and Basic Instinct (1992).
Interested in the potential of the story, which takes place in the distant future, where five courageous volunteers go on a mission to fight a dangerous civilization of extraterrestrials (the Arachnids), Paul Verhoeven wishes to make a war film similar to those of the 1940s and 1950s. He who lived, as a child, the invasion of his country of origin by the German troops, by the Second World War, is inspired in particular by the visual grammar of the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl (the official director of the Third Reich) , but also from the American propaganda documentary series “Why we fight”.
This is how Starship Troopers was born, whose fierce irony and anti-militarist discourse were not immediately perceived by Uncle Sam when it was released in 1997. Dividing critics, the film brought in only 54 million dollars in revenue in North America. A disappointing score that comes into perspective the international box office to collect a total of 121 million dollars.
With a budget of 105 million dollars, the largest that Paul Verhoeven has ever had, of which 40% is allocated to visual effects (the giant insects are indeed very impressive), Starship Troopers nevertheless turns out to be a blockbuster as entertaining as it is intelligent, playing on the contrasts of its cast between young actors from successful soap operas (Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Patrick Muldoon, Seth Gilliam, Neil Patrick Harris) and familiar “mouths” (Clancy Brown, Michael Ironside, Marshall Bell and Dean Norris).
Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven with Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards…
From 12 years old
Tonight on Arte at 8:55 p.m.