So I'm the guy that actually enjoyed 'Starship Troopers: Marauder'. Yep, that was me. Even though it had its flaws, a lot of that probably due to budgetary constraints, 'Marauder' was a much closer and faithful sequel to the understandably far superior original, with its emphasis on Federation Propaganda and of course the prerequisite bug slaying. Now we see that there is another 'Starship Troopers' movie coming our way, this time a full Japanese CGI feature starring the bizarre in appearance, almost but not quite real looking CGI humans that show up in the CGI Final Fantasy and Resident Evil movies. I kind of liked this movie too, even though it had none of the subtle underpinnings that makes a Starship Troopers movie a Starship Troopers movie, and it was also a little on the mindless side. But it did have CGI titties. I guess that's gotta be worth something.
Our film opens, not surprisingly, with a bug hunt. The bugs have overrun a space station and it's up to our heroes to take it back. They suck at that. Now the mission is to get off the space station alive and then just blow the damn thing up. This they are much better at.
While our trooper grunts are doing what they can do stay alive on the space station, Captain Carmen Ibanez (Luci Christian) is trying to keep her former good friend Dr. Carl Jenkins (Justin Doran) from taking her space destroyer. Jenkins, who you may remember is a powerful psychic, is also a very important member of the federation and completely full of himself, but he needs this ship for a top secret mission. Ibanez, totally not grasping the concept of 'chain of command' doesn't want to relinquish her ship, but eventually she does and she's not happy about it. Soon she will need to take a shower to cleanse the disappointment off of her.
Mindless banter occurs, we get introduced to a series of grunts, most of whom will probably be dead soon, CGI chicks take more showers, and then we get an urgent message from General Johnny Rico (David Martanga). Apparently the John Warden, Ibanez's accosted ship, has gone off the grid and these troopers need to find it. At all costs because Jenkins was on a mission of dire importance.
Simple enough. Our grunts, led by their disgraced leader Major Henry Varro (David Wald), disgraced because he refused to follow orders from Jenkins that were clearly reckless, who also answers to the call sign 'Hero' which almost guarantees him a glorious death, enters the ship with Ibanez by their side. What they see isn't pretty. Detached limbs, bug parts and blood globs floating in zero gravity. They also find Jenkins, the apparent only survivor on this ship babbling like plum idiot. The only thing he was saying that made any kind of sense was 'don't restore the power'. Of course that's the one thing that our troopers do.
Now it's on, bugs are left, right, above and below, and they have a plan. And while we certainly don't want the bugs to get to earth and start wrecking stuff, they do seem to be a little brighter than the humans in this movie, so maybe in this particular universe, this scenario isn't an altogether bad thing.
There is one thing that is different from this Japanese based animated feature and those Final Fantasy or Resident Evil CGI features is that this one makes complete and total sense. Where those movies tend to introduce all kinds of esoteric… read… wacky… plot devices, 'Invasion' keeps it real simple. Real simple. Brain dead simple. Shoot the bugs. Die. Do it all over again. While that might sound a little repetitive, added with voice acting that we have to admit isn't the best we've heard in an animated feature… sometimes atrocious…, and we've already determined that 'Starships Troopers: Invasion' isn't the most intellectually challenging piece of work out there, you might think we didn't care for this movie all that much, but the truth of the matter is that it's all actually pretty darned entertaining.
The reasons for why I found 'Starships Troopers: Invasion' entertaining are about as simple as the movie itself. Director Shinji Aramaki keeps his movie in damn near constant motion, watching CGI bugs explode rarely gets old, watching creepily eerie humanoid characters in motion is always fun in a discomforting kind of way, and on occasion we got CGI titties which I don't think I've ever seen before. That's gotta be worth something.
We could on, discuss more on the occasional horrid voice acting, talk about the occasionally awesome animation, explore the intergalactic implementation of real world particle effects, whatever that means, but the fact of the matter we enjoyed watching CGI humans mow down CGI bugs for ninety or so minutes. The jury is still out on CGI titties.
