There is no monopoly on common sense on either side of the political fence

Each Day, A Film:
January 17th 2011 (Retrospective)

I've seen Starship Troopers twice in my life, to my knowledge.



In the town where I used to live, there wasn't a cinema - you had to go either one town west or one town east, and the one to the east closed in the mid-eighties, so unless you wanted to journey three further towns east, it was west all the way, baby.

I  know that makes things sound like I lived in a tiny one-street no-horse tinpot town, but it's true; back in the day when video was king, Going To The Cinema was still a viable alternative. Maybe not so much anymore, what with streaming, DVDs being cheaper than cheap, and torrenting - indeed, one of my tutors maintains that the cinema release is now completely irrelevant in economic terms as anything other than a promotional campaign for the DVD - but back then, it was actually easier to see a film at the cinema.

As long as you had transport, of course.

So when I saw Starship Troopers for the first time at the tender age of approximately sixteen, I had to go west with a parent to a small Odeon cinema which felt a lot like a converted theatre even though it was probably always a cinema. It was kind of a beautiful building; there was a small staircase up to the entrance hall, where there was an old-fashioned ticket booth and a small concession stand, and that's probably why it had to die; it was too pretty. There were two small screens downstairs and one larger auditorium upstairs. It was, for want of a better word, nice.

As I say, this is probably why Odeon had to close it and re-open at a different site ten minutes walk away that allowed them to have nine or so screens and an entire lobby devoted to concessions, because, as the suspicion goes, cinemas take a higher percentage on popcorn than they do on actual ticket sales.

I don't remember the auditorium as being particularly full - the 1990s weren't a great time to be a science fiction fan, at least in my memory - but it didn't matter; to my sixteen-year-old self Starship Troopers was a validation that I was part of an audience for that kind of film. Plus, there was a fair amount of female nudity in it, so hey, sold. What? I was in my teens. Sue me.

Because of that, however, I didn't really notice the commentary on the prospect of a militarised fascist state "operating under conditions of perpetual war" (thank you, Grant Morrison). It was all just special effects - which still seem to hold up to this day, to my mind - and young, pretty people running around shooting things, and, yes, occasional nudity.

The second time I saw the film was a little more niche, although I still didn't really view it as anything other than a twisted army recruitment video; having been to a gig at ULU in Russell Square with a fellow student journalist (a cheap way of getting into things for free, if that's not a tautology) I was invited back to Hainault to 'chill', which involved watching Starship Troopers at something like three in the morning on a beanbag and passing out occasionally.

As an interesting side note, the gig was curiously high-powered, although the bands were just starting out; Muse were promoting their first album on a tour supported by Soulwax (now 2 Many DJs, I believe) and Crashland, who remain forever Crashland, having released one album and then disappearing into the ether, leaving me with no lasting memories of their sound but instead a drumstick that I use as a door wedge to this day.

Muse were pretty amazing, although at the time the complicated riffs on Sunburn and Muscle Museum had to be stripped down to be played live, something which my early-twenties self found slightly funny. I'm sure they're better at it now.

So we watched the film - very quietly - then watched some of the oddly over-sexualised deleted scenes - and then I believe I must have waited for my compatriot to fall asleep before leaving to find the train station and getting the train back west to East London. Complicated, I know, but that's Hainault for you. The compatriot in question went on to attempt a career at music journalism before going into PR, in case you were wondering.

Let's flip back to a flippant comment earlier, though, about Grant Morrison, because at the time I saw the film the first time round I was also reading - in trades to begin with, then in single issues - The Invisibles, a comic Morrison intended as a "Hyper-Sigil" to create more Invisibles, which always struck me as a bit of bastard irony; the series is - in part, at least - about resisting mind control and the forces that want to take over our lives and our fates, and to combat this, Morrison created a spell that would... Take over the lives and fates of the readers by turning them into their own countercultural warriors.

Or maybe it's all a cosmic joke.

Anyway, in the second volume of the series, there's a sequence devoted entirely to a character called Mason Lang, a monstrously-rich supposedly countercultural warrior who supplies and supports the quasi-terrorist activities of the central characters, although they're starting to question this. But at one point, Mason gives a nice little one-side-of-a-telephone conversation speech about Starship Troopers without explicitly naming it, and to my teenage self, this was another confirmation that even famous comics writers were watching the same films as I was at the time, which was a little mind-blowing.

These things matter, when you're a teenager.

So I need, really, to see Starship Troopers again, really, to see if it holds up to my memories, and to see if in the post-desert-war times the allegories still hold up.

One last story; after a while, there was a direct-to-dvd sequel, imaginatively titled Starship Troopers 2. (Well, there was the subtitle, Hero of the Federation, but let's skip past that.) Starship Troopers 2 was not lusted after by cinema-goers of the world, so it went straight to DVD, where I ended up fixating on it a little because it sounded so bad. You may remember from earlier postings that a close friend and I have a thing for bad movies, although they have to be good-enough-to-be-bad-enough, as they can't just be shite. So I dutifully ordered the film on DVD via Play.com, and we watched it, and I was too drunk to actually remember anything about it, and so it's stayed in my DVD wallet ever since, languishing, waiting for a second, non-inebriated watch.

Maybe that day will come soon.