Series note: Although this film is something of a train wreck, it would be even worse if one didn't watch the original Starship Troopers (1997) first. The first film is excellent, and will help you figure out what is supposed to be going on in this film.

A group of Starship Troopers becomes stranded while engaged in warfare on a "bug planet". They make it to a mostly abandoned makeshift fort and succeed in holding the enemy at bay outside, only to discover that they may have enemies just as lethal amongst themselves.

Phil Tippet may be a genius with visual effects in other films, but in his first turn as a director, he's made a mess of Starship Troopers 2. Admittedly, it's not a complete loss. I actually ended up giving the film a 5 out of 10, even though that is a rating I usually reserve only for "so bad they're good" films. No, Starship Troopers isn't really good, but at times it threatened to get a 3 out of 10, while the closer it got to the finish line, the more it started seeming like a 7 out of 10 to me. I decided to average it. Keep in mind that in my rating system, a 6 is equivalent to the grade of D.

Oddly, I thought that the script was almost worth a C (or a 7) throughout the film. The biggest problem script-wise, aside from the fact that the tone of this film is completely different than the first (a fact that will turn off many viewers, but for which I wouldn't subtract any points in itself),was that the dialogue is overburdened with pseudo-militaristic gobbledy-gook and there are far too many characters to keep track of and care about. Towards the end, when the film turned more into a horror film than its previous contentment with being a war flick (this one is never really sci-fi),I thought the ideas were actually very good. I'm a huge horror fan, and the horror material worked for me. There was a nice amount of gore and decent suspense.

But those are the positives. Let's get to what the film does wrong. The biggest problems are the cinematography, lighting, and production design. For some reason, the opening scene of the film, which we could say goes on for maybe 40 minutes (far too long),is almost exclusively close-ups. We routinely have a screenful of someone's nose, mouth, or some other body part. Close-ups aren't bad in general, but when that's all a viewer sees for 40 minutes, and in the midst of what's supposed to be a grand-scale war with hundreds or thousands of combatants, it's awful. Everything is also too dark, and when it isn't dark, it's usually too bright, in that Tippet has a light or two pointing directly at the camera. And during fight scenes, we only get to see troopers face-on. We hardly ever see what they're shooting at.

Now, being generous, we might say that the point of all the above is to convey the claustrophobia and chaos of war. But that's being far too generous. The original Starship Troopers conveyed the chaos of war very nicely. In Starship Troopers 2, Tippet is really trying to cover up the fact that they had no budget to build sets, acquire props, hire many cast members, pay for cgi-rendered environments or even matte paintings. There are some cgi-rendered bug aliens (and maybe a couple small things done with mechanicals) and there is one set, but that's about it. Most of the film is poorly lit and backlit so that we can't see that the actors are on a mostly empty soundstage. The close-ups are an attempt to distract our attention from the small, low-budget scale of things. All of these aspects fail miserably. At least until halfway through the film, when we begin to see some cinematography and lighting on the single set that we could call "almost competent".

Even though I wouldn't subtract points for the difference in tone, it is quite a shock if you start watching Starship Troopers 2 expecting anything even remotely resembling the first film. The first film is a clever satire on society and militaristic thinking via its depiction of a future, war-hungry culture. We see clever commentaries on behavioral norms in our culture via different norms depicted in the film. We see funny things that are very similar to our present culture, but that are underscored by their temporal alienation. The first film is an ingenious, fast paced, epic scaled sci-fi/war/horror extravaganza.

This film on the other hand is just about as pedestrian as you can get. Even though the horror material is good once it finally arrives, it isn't exactly groundbreaking. There is no satire here, no cleverness, it's not fast paced, and it's the complete opposite of epic scaled. Even the tongue-in-cheek military/war advertisements shown on a computer-like screen from the first film fall flat here because they're presented more like television commercials with no window dressing or explanation for context.

Starship Troopers 2 isn't a complete failure, but I can't recommend it beyond its curiosity value, or for die-hard horror fans who are slightly masochistic and don't mind sitting through the war material to get to something more interesting. If a Starship Troopers 3 is ever made, more than likely you'll be able to skip this entry. As things stand now, 2 is not at all necessary to the story. This is more like an obscure footnote to the first film, about some long lost troop that no one really cares about. Only the new kind of "monster" may be of any interest.

The suits have basically taken the action adventure franchise and made a small horror movie out of it. The movie is inferior in every way. The CG is actually inferior after 7 years. The real effects are also inferior due to the smaller budget. The cast is also smaller. The first one had a budget around $100M but this one is listed at $7M. That accounts for most of the difference.

The odd thing is that they got Brenda Strong to come back. Of course she died in the first one, but in this one, she's the Sergent leading the group. The cast is limited to around 15. Most of them are B-list or lower actors. This feels like a straight-to-video, oh wait it is.

It's a big disappointment that they didn't attempt a big production big scale action sequel to the original. It's rare for Hollywood to not do sequels. Who knows what happened.

The other big problem is that the lighting is all very dark. It was probably easier to cover up all the deficiencies. As a horror movie, it helped to have the darkness. But when the action gets going, the darkness obscures too much.

As for the story, after an action start, it really grinds to a halt. The actors grumble their lines. They transition to a more horror oriented story. It takes a long while to make that transition. Once it transitioned, it became too chaotic to get a handle on who's who in the movie.

I mean, really now. Flood the market with a good name... 2 Million people each spending 3 dollars to rent this movie, and you have made your budget. Easy right. Easy for the filmmaker. This movie was the equivalent of putting out a LOTR movie made with stick figures. Just terrible. I'm sorry, but there is something seriously unethical about doing this sort of thing to the consumer... But they don't care, all they want is stupid money.

And that's a good hour and 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back... Thanks. Seriously consider not buying, or renting this movie. This movie was quite possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life. Yet because of this it still lingers in my mind. Not cool. And I will forever remember the horridness of it. Unnecessarily gory, horribly dark action scenes where you can not see more than 3 bugs at a time, and really, really, really cheesy guns... "Hey, let's fire light at the bugs, maybe that will scare them!!!" "OK!!!11!!1!" Like really, are blanks that expensive?