ALL BUGGED OUT, AGAIN

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Welcome to the retrofuture. It's a time when they're fighting a high-tech intergalactic war but talking about it in the kind of lowbrow rhetoric--hysterical jingoism--we haven't heard issuing from movie screens since World War II.

Besides the weaponry and the enemy--monstrous, profoundly malevolent bugs--a few other things have changed. There's a world government now, and the combat troops are fully gender integrated--to the point where they take showers together. This implies, of course, that more saltpeter than ever is being dumped into their rations.

Essentially, however, it's business as usual in Starship Troopers. Basic training is still brutal. The platoon we follow from the first day of enlistment to battlefield apotheosis contains many familiar types--supermacho drill sergeant, dopey yokel and, at its center, Johnny (Casper Van Dien, a newcomer with a useful, uncanny resemblance to the old B-picture star John Agar), who is the traditional spoiled and aimless kid. He has--need one say?--joined up for the wrong, selfish reasons, but when his hometown is destroyed, Pearl Harbor-style, he embraces the right, vengeful-idealistic rationales for merciless slaughter and achieves heroism.

Johnny has a high school girlfriend, Carmen (Denise Richards), who becomes the hottest pilot in the star fleet. This gives director Paul Verhoeven, always a coldly calculating craftsman, and writer Ed Neumeier, adapting a Robert A. Heinlein novel, a chance to satirize old-fashioned aerial-combat movies too. Johnny also has a frustrated high school admirer, Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who lands in his platoon, finally gets his attention and then heroically dies. This gives the filmmakers a chance to strike that note of romantic self-sacrifice--death transfigured--that is integral to movies of this kind.

There is not, indeed, a base they fail to touch. The enemy is never particularized, so we never have a sympathetic thought for them. And scattered through the movie are online equivalents of those old-fashioned, pseudo-documentary short subjects designed to keep the home front heated up--cheerfully massed soldiers stretching as far as the lens can see, overheated descriptions of atrocious enemy behavior, that sort of thing.

Pretty funny. But not always very funny. For Starship Troopers contains an unexplored premise. There are two classes in this futureworld: civilians, who have sacrificed voting privileges for material ease, and warriors, who earn the right to rule by their willingness to die for the state. In short, we're looking at a happily fascist world. Maybe that's the movie's final, deadpan joke. Maybe it's saying that war inevitably makes fascists of us all. Or--best guess--maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications.

--By Richard Schickel