Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)

(In French, On TV, June 2019) Don’t feel bad if you’re just learning that there’s a fifth Starship Troopers film called Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars—most people don’t even know that there was a second one, or that the second and third ones were low-budget live-action efforts before the fourth and fifth became photorealistic computer-animated movies. With such a messy pedigree, it’s kind of a surprise to find out that this fifth film brings back four of the characters and two of the actors (or at least their voices) from the first film, not to mention the same screenwriter. As a result, Traitor of Mars is an interesting follow-up—very much a follow-up to the fourth film in tone and execution, with links going back to the Verhoeven film through its satire of a militaristic society (“Would you like to know more?”) but also to the Heinlein novel in its uncompromising depiction of armoured-suit combat against the arachnid enemy. Much of the film is incredibly dumb, but at least it’s consistently dumb with the rest of the series so far—we’re not really supposed to believe in hordes of alien spiders taking over planets, or that military infantry would be the best solution to that problem, or people being so stupid as to blindly follow a military dictatorship. But those are the assumptions of the series, and Traitor of Mars does make the most out of them. Playing with science-fiction devices such as terraforming towers, this is a film solely dedicated to its action sequences, and accessorily to some kind of mandarins-eating-each-other political subplots making life more difficult for our fighting heroes. It’s actually fun to see all four lead characters of the first film back for more (even Dina Meyer voicing Dizzy Flores!) and the tone, despite the focus on action, is very similar to the original. What’s new since the fourth instalment, of course, if the photorealistic CGI—Traitor of Mars is similar to such efforts as Starship Troopers: Invasion, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and Resident Evil: Vendetta, all aiming to deliver as convincing a movie as it’s possible to do inside a computer. It falls short in presenting humans, but often succeeds in shots that don’t show human flesh—making it a perfect choice for exo-armour combat. I’m not going to argue that Traitor of Mars is any good a movie—it could go much farther in both the satire and the action, and at significantly less than 90 minutes it’s not trying to be anything much more than another instalment for the fans. Still, it’s not bad and can even present a few good sequences five movies (or three, depending on how you feel about movies 2 and 3) into the series.