Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008)

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder arrives eleven years after Paul Verhoeven's original, direct to video, with Casper Van Dien the lone returning cast member and screenwriter Edward Neumeier taking the director's chair for the first time. The production values are modest. The ambitions are not. Neumeier has said he wanted to examine how a state can weaponize religion, and the resulting film follows through on that interest with a straight face and a great deal of bug viscera. The Federation suppresses dissenters, stages a terrorist attack to bury an inconvenient Sky Marshal, and finally adopts a modified Christianity as official state faith, all in service of recruitment quotas. This is satire aimed at militarism, media manipulation, and theocracy. It has nothing to say about money.

The cast is multiracial in the manner of a military ensemble, with Boris Kodjoe as General Dix Hauser and several non-white actors in support. Nobody remarks on it, which is the correct approach and also the extent of the film's interest. Women hold command: Lola Beck flies the ship, Sky Marshal Phid runs the fleet and arranges a few executions. The screenplay also describes Beck as comely in the official synopsis and finds reasons to undress its cast for a bioscanner. Any feminist reading here is a coincidence of staffing, not a program.

The film's social consciousness is confined to its thesis about religion and propaganda, delivered through pastiche and goose-stepping show tunes. There is no racial allegory, no climate anxiety, no body acceptance, no neurodivergent interiority. Nobody eats the rich. The satire bites at the machinery of obedience instead of the ledger, which is a defensible target and an unfashionable one. A sequel that scolds the state for its use of faith and then hangs the peace protesters anyway is doing something specific. It is not doing anything current.