Starship Troopers: Invasion

Plot synopsis:
On an asteroid, the Terran Federation's Fort Casey is crawling with bugs. The starship Alesia begins to deploy its Mobile Infantry troopers, by dropship, to seize and control the hangar and rescue any survivors. Lieutenant Daugherty's 'Alpha' team lands and immediately engages bugs, fighting through to rendezvous with the surviving Fort Casey troopers. After setting explosives charges, the troopers head to the starship John A. Warden for evacuation, only to see it leave dock without them – Minister Carl Jenkins has commandeered the Warden from Captain Carmen Ibanez, sending her to Alesia. Before leaving, Jenkins orders that Major Henry "Hero" Varro, the commander of Fort Casey's K-12 troopers, be escorted to Alesia as a prisoner. Alesia docks with Fort Casey for emergency evacuation of the surviving troopers, and the Fort Casey asteroid is successfully destroyed.
While en route to Earth, Alesia is contacted by General Johnny Rico from High Command at L-6 Base. When he orders Alesia to search for the Warden, which has broken all contact, the Fort Casey troopers agree to do so on condition that Varro leads them during the mission. When they find the Warden, Daugherty's team escorts Ibanez to the bridge while Varro's team secures the Engine Room, both teams finding nothing but dead crewmen and a few dead bugs. Varro finds a deranged Jenkins and is warned – too late – not to power up the Warden as 'she' has hacked all the systems. As the engines recharge the Warden, an Arachnid Queen inside takes control of all systems and opens bulkhead doors to release her bugs. As Ibanez and the troopers attempt to return to Alesia, the Queen uses the Warden's main weapons to destroy the other ship, then flies Warden into a wormhole whose outlet is in near-Earth space. The troopers return to the Warden's bridge, where Varro reveals he was arrested when Jenkins had ordered his unit to capture the Queen alive on Fort Casey, but Varro had refused to sacrifice his squad.
General Rico deploys three starships from the L-6 Base in Earth orbit, but they are unable to stop the Warden. The Queen sets the bug-infested Warden on a trajectory to crash land in Paris, but Alpha Team sniper Trig manages to shoot out the wires linking the Queen to the ship, allowing Ibanez to re-direct the Warden to crash in a mountain range. Meanwhile, General Rico leads a squad of troopers in Marauder suits to stop the bugs from escaping the crash site, while high command gives him 30 minutes before they will drop nukes from the L-6 Station to sanitize the site.
Back on the Warden, the five surviving troopers make their way towards the Queen. Ice Blonde protects Ibanez at a nearby airlock while Mech and Ratzass go to the engine room to blow it up. When Varro and Bugspray find Trig's corpse, Bugspray uses Trig's family-made sniper rifle to buy Varro some time to reach the Queen. Jenkins, having recovered from his mental breakdown, provides Varro back-up with bugs under his mind control – revealing an important Terran breakthrough in the war and the reason for capturing a live Queen.
Rico is the only one from his squad to reach the Warden. The extraction shuttle from L-6, and the nuclear strike, are all destroyed by the Queen's control of the Warden's weapons. As Jenkins leads the team to his shuttle from Fort Casey, Rico rushes to distract the queen and rescue Varro. Varro, critically injured, blows a grenade when surrounded by bugs. Rico abandons his broken Marauder suit and uses a combat knife on one of the Queen's eyes, buying Ibanez time to make take-off preparations. Rico barely sprints back into the dropship as it escapes the Warden before the explosives detonate and destroy the Warden.
Mech, Ice and Ratzass pay their respect to their fallen comrades while Ibanez confronts Jenkins over the recent crises. Jenkins sidesteps the issue, telling Rico and Ibanez that his research will someday save the entire galaxy. In the aftermath, one warrior bug is seen navigating a sewer system, having survived the Warden's destruction.

Tags: paranormal, violence

Review:
Hope this will reboot the franchise in a good way (forgetting the sequels and the bad animated series).But it is like entering in a big video game demo with non-stop action scenes.Very entertaining, popcorn in a bucket, and sit tight to watch it with friends.
The movie seems rushed in some parts, the plot was nothing terribly complex, but it's a classic alien/bug hunt; people die in a variety of noble/self-sacrificial ways, as befits a cap trooper, bugs are killed and there's lots of explosions.
The thing is that Starship Troopers was never meant for anything like that; the setting is a sci-fi universe with much more gore, trash and nudity than would be expected.
This movie is meant for the old Starship Troopers fans, those who know the movie (the first for god's sake) and the Roughnecks animated series; it isn't a good introduction to the setting but it wasn't meant to be.
Overall, if you liked the source material, and you know the setting this is a nice follow up and much better than the god-awful movie sequels.
the original Starship trooper though never achieve legendary status like Aliens or Predator, still a very good enjoyable movie.
It was adapted into Paul Verhoeven's wildly prescient 1997 feature-length movie (which appeared to be more of a pro-/anti-war satire of Heinlein's novel), and more importantly (to me, anyway) the cast members of James Cameron's "Aliens" (1986) - my #5 movie, by the way - were required to read the book as part of their "basic training" for the film.Regardless of what you think of Heinlein's points in the book, it's first-rate sci-fi entertainment and pro-war military propaganda of the first degree.
Two sequels to Verhoeven's original film have been produced, and one animated sequel from "Appleseed" (2004) director Shinji Aramaki - 2012's "Starship Troopers: Invasion" (which was ultimately supported by an ultimately flawed script by screenwriter Flint Dille)."Starship Troopers: Invasion" is the most worthwhile sequel so far to Verhoeven's 1997 cinematic offering of Heinlein's most celebrated work (for me, that is).
Like the not-so-freakin'-bad "Starship Troopers: Marauder" (2008), "Invasion" takes a little bit more inspiration directly from the pages of Heinlein's original novel, even though "Invasion" is, in fact, a direct sequel - more or less - to Verhoeven's first live-action movie.What connects this particular feature to its predecessors - despite being animated - is that three central characters from Verhoeven's 1997 film reappear here: Johnny Rico, Carmen Ibanez, and Carl Jenkins (who were played, respectively, by Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, and Neil Patrick Harris in Verhoeven's first film).
Van Dien and "Starship Troopers" screenwriter/long-time Verhoeven collaborator Ed Neumeier serve as producers on "Invasion." "Starship Troopers: Invasion" is a nicely animated feature with a largely Japanese Anime' production team behind it, with American actors voicing the parts.The film begins with the mysterious disappearance of the Federation Starship "John A.
And Johnny Rico, now a general, is forced to join the fray in order to save his friends and the galaxy from a full-scale Bug infestation.Unlike its predecessors, the plot to "Starship Troopers: Invasion" is pretty straight-forward science fiction warfare and lacks the vicious humor aimed at satirizing wartime values and military propaganda that marked its three predecessors.
(It's quite remarkable that the presentation and overall appearance of the Bugs here is still quite faithful to their presentation in Verhoeven's original - where they were first designed by special effects artist Phil Tippett - though they're more for cannon-fodder here, rather than a misunderstood indigenous species defending their home from hostile foreign invaders.)Shinji Aramaki created a lean, mean, and focused Japanese-style animated feature with "Starship Troopers: Invasion." The film takes a little more inspiration from Robert A.
However, you have to admit that if the story writer can really put a little bit of philosophical ideas from the original novel into conversations and the environment around characters, just like the ST1 did, this new movie will be on a new level.
I should say I have seen the shadows of the original novel, and you can tell the designer have really put a lot of effort to making these things look comfortable, and surely it's just very fun to watch how these men's stuffs to work in the movie.
most punch lines, some small details, even some characters that seem forced into the film are from the old CGI starship troopers series.
They actually took care with this production and has me looking forward to not only more Starship Trooper sequels, but also viewing more digital movies as well..
At times it felt like I was watching an extended video game cut scene (when are they giving us a Starship Troopers video game???).
8/10, would recommend to sci-fi fans, Starship Trooper fans, and anyone looking to watch a fun movie..
I didn't have high hopes for this film, as Starship Troopers is the type of franchise where, like Aliens or Terminator, you really need a big budget to properly do justice to on screen.
In fact, she looked more like a flight attendant than a starship captain.Likewise, the body and facial styles in the film are all stereotypical of anime characters--to the point that most of the male protagonists look pretty much alike.
Though I personally would have stuck with the black and field grey color scheme for the mobile infantry gear/costumes instead of the jungle green cameo (this is supposed to read C-A-M-O, as in camouflage; please ignore IMDb's idiotic autocorrection) they used in the film, which is more reminiscent of U.S. marines than German storm troopers (and also not making much sense in space or inside of the silvery monolithic starships and space stations).The overall CGI quality is actually very impressive considering that in theory, Stage 6's target production budget is at most the same as that of Ultramarines (the admirable but ultimately disappointing WH40K animated film), and yet ST: Invasion is head and shoulders above what Ultramarines managed to achieve with their budget.If you want to be picky, sure, there are a few stereotypical mannequin moments that nearly all 3D animes tend to have, where the body movements seem a bit too rigid or the facial animation doesn't seem quite right (like the virtual actor had too much Botox).
Like so many other great Japanese animated works, this one was ruined in the final leg of the race by a studio that just didn't care enough about the English voice-overs to get it done right.It's a real pity, as the story was actually pretty serviceable and the rest of the film was very high quality overall, with only the aforementioned quibbles (all fairly minor and easily overlooked), and would probably do well with a major release in North America if not for the painfully bad English VOs. And supposedly this film was never even dubbed in Japanese (at least Akira and most other animes with poor English dubs are watchable in Japanese with English subs).
However this makes this movie a confusing experience at times for so many male characters actually looking very much alike while sharing a similar type of voice.But for me, the main let down however reside in the fact that I couldn't shake the impression of watching a video game with its many levels: a very brief explanation of the mission is followed by a shooting session to the next brief explanation of the next mission and so on and so forth, making the feeble attempts of humanization of its synthetic characters laughable.In the end, the resulting piece becomes a series of interchangeable battles devoid of any emotional impact.
The CGI is good and so is the story line and action sequences the only downside about this is the acting, Some of the characters are sub-par at best.If you are a big fan of first starship troopers well I highly suggest you give this one a watch.
Like many reading this review, i was a big fan of the original STARSHIP TROOPERS movie.
This movie, more then any other, feels like a true sequel to the original film.
The movie feels a bit like a riff on James Cameron's ALIENS, but the action is good, and they get the FEEL of the original movie right.
1st watched 12/10/2012 – 7 out of 10(Dir-Shinji Aramaki): Well made CGI movie that continues the bug-alien tradition of 3 other live action "Starship Troopers" movies -- but really betters at least the original, in my opinion, because it focuses of the action.
This is a unique movie by a Japanese director, with a very American-like feel to the story but is a lot of fun and is a very worthwhile addition to this franchise..
Starship Troopers is one of my favorite sci-fi films, and even though its straight-to-DVD sequels were far from reaching the same level of narrative ingenuity or technical perfection, I found them decent "B-movies" which respected the basic precepts from the first film and continued the mythology established on the Robert A.
However, the film Starship Troopers: Invasion took the unexpected route of animation to continue with the franchise, something which allowed a level of visual attraction which would have been impossible to see in a live-action film...but at the same time, the digital actors feel too cold and rigid in order to transmit any emotions.I found the screenplay from Starship Troopers: Invasion generally competent, because it respects the events from the first film and also introduces new variables which fit well into the canon of the saga.
Screenwriter Flint Dille took the good decision of making Starship Troopers: Invasion independent from the other sequels; in other words, it's not necessary to watch them in order to enjoy this film, but it doesn't contradict what happened in them either.
And something which also decreases the characters' humanity is the insipid voice work from the whole cast; it's easy to note that the producers decided to save money by hiring broadcasters instead of actors.As I said before, I think it was strange to make Starship Troopers: Invasion an animated film, but there's a precedent: in 1999, the TV series Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles was a "provisional sequel" of Starship Troopers, and even though the animation was of an excellent quality, the high production costs and low ratings hauled its cancellation after only one season.
Fortunately, Starship Troopers: Invasion has a better screenplay and conserves the same solid production design; the animation might not aspire to the photo-realism of Wall-E, but it comfortably fits into the quality standard we can find in the "cut-scenes" from any modern video game.
Nevertheless, I would have preferred the use of a "green screen" system (in the style of Sin City or Mutant Chronicles), which would have allowed the presence of real actors able to express emotions (instead of dummies similar to the ones we saw in, for example, The Polar Express), but without loosing the lavish settings nor the special effects which complement the experience.Another thing I didn't like in Starship Troopers: Invasion was the complete absence of the political satire we saw in the previous films from the saga.
Nevertheless, I had a good time while watching Starship Troopers: Invasion, and I think that that is enough to make it worthy of a moderate recommendation despite not being something highly memorable..
Every sequel to the Starship Troopers movie I have watched, but none has come near the quality and excitement of the brilliantly creative original directed by Paul Verhoeven.
This film is all CGI animation, so it's like watching one tedious long scene from of a really bad and boring video game.
This time the Starship Troopers franchise explodes onto screen as an R-Rated, cutting edge CGI feature film from the director of Appleseed Ex Machina and Halo Legends.
At very least, this movie has learned from previous mistakes and manages to be decent entertainment fare with enough action and eye candy to thrill all.I was slightly disappointed that this was not a continuation of the critically "Roughnecks: Starship Trooper Chronicles" CGI TV series.
A big plus,especially for fans of the franchise, is that the characters from the first Starship Troopers movie return and play major roles in the story.
STARSHIP TROOPERS INVASION brings back the powered suits and the mechs that were featured in the original novel but absent from the first movie.
Hair flows, movements are smooth, and the filming style mimics that of live action movies, thus making the CGI look a lot better than it really is.
But like previous Japanese CGI projects, style overpowers substance and no amount of visual beauty, creative directing or eye candy can excuse a confusing, convoluted mess of a story with none of deeper themes that its predecessors had nor the complete lack of character development.
Starship troopers returns with much more faith to the novel.Humanity is still fighting their war against overwhelming swarms of the bugs or "Pseudo-Arachnids, battling them in Exo-powered suits and other feat of military technological advancement much as what Robert Heinleins describe in his book.
Fans and those who have seen the past films will appreciate and enjoy a generous face lift of the Starship troopers universe in CGI than its live-action predecessors, with the return of their favorite characters since the 1997 film.
I really like the Starship Troopers franchise, all of the movies including this one.They are lots of fun, lots of action and lots of special effects.
Which is always good, not like some movies where the characters are weak and boring and you don't care if they live, die, succeed or fail miserably.The plot felt predictable and i found myself thinking i could guess what was going to happen next but then all of a sudden it changed and caught me by surprise.
Well, I admit, it's not being a horrible movie either but there just is no good reason for you ever to watch this animated movie, not even if you're really into the whole Starship Troopers franchise.
The movie feels like nothing more than just another cheap movie to cash in on the whole Starship Troopers franchise, without attempting to do and try anything new.
Okay, not as horrible as Starship Troopers III, but that's a really low bar.The animation of the "bugs" is about the same as it was in the other movies, but the human animation just didn't work.
Plot holes the size of killer asteroids, lapses in simple logic that would make a Steven Seagal film Oscar worthy, and characterizations for people you know won't survive and any back-story given is simply a cheap way to get the audience to become invested for the duration of the movie..
Every since the first Starship Troopers film which was brilliant SCi-Fi action thriller this series always has its fans hoping against hope.
In some aspects it's a little like the Star Wars franchise as ST:I is the concluding piece in Rico's story from recruit, to NCO and finally to General.Whilst ST:I probably won't win any awards for scriptwriting, it is an impressive piece as far as computer animated film making goes.
Fifthly, this is, after all, Japanese movie, therefore sometimes it looks like one of many anime products.
Then again when your watching a computer animation movie from the same people that worked on the likes of Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles and Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina how can one be disappointed?
The story itself seems like a fusion of 'Aliens' and the first Starship Troopers.
But no, it's Starship Troopers, so the whole thing was watched.They dared to put "A fast paced thrill ride, that tops the Original" on a poster for this movie.
This is a canon continuation to the animation series, the original characters have become big wigs in this movie in their respective fields.The staffs are mostly Japanese so expect Japanese quality of CGI and style.
It is actually better then the first movie from 1997, with better action, acting "voice acting" and its realistic science fiction style is unmatched in any film/anime/CGI I have seen.
The only people who are not giving this amazing film good reviews must not have liked the original film or high quality CGI that is actually made for adult audiences......
Rated R, animated ( don't have to deal with the constrictions of a live movie budget as we've seen in the sequels) but over all I was a little disappointed.I always have high hopes for this franchise and it seems that it never gets a fair shake to shine.Upsides : graphics are pretty good, You feel slightly nostalgic watching it, you get to see bugs die, some animated nudity ;)Downsides : Lame plot, could have been something much more then it is.
You only start having some fun watching this movie in the last 20 - 30 minutes.All in all even though Roughnecks was made about 13 years ago, I would rather take have another couple episodes of that series then this.The only reason I rated it a 7 is I love starship troopers, Favourite movie of all time, it should be a huge franchise but this movie probably won't appeal to anyone but die hard fans..
This 2012 installment to the franchise takes us back to the level of the first original movie, except it is a CGI animated movie, not a real live action movie.The story is as to be expected from a "Starship Troopers" movie; lots of action, lots of bugs, lots of guns, and not too deep dialogue.
When I sit down on my sofa getting ready to watch a Starship Troopers film, I don't expect a 90 minute machinima with a bad storyline and terrible voice acting.
Including Starship Troopers 2, which was a good horror movie.Almost every single aspect of this film had let me down.
You see the bugs recreated perfectly in CGI; I felt they did a great job animating them, really reminded me of the original movie.
I love anime and having seen his work in Appleseed, I knew I'd enjoy this too.Bottom line: if you like Sci-Fi, the original Starship Troopers, anime, or just action movies, I think you will enjoy this..