Director Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Basic Instinct) continues his knack for combining violence, gore, dark humor and social commentary in this loose adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s serialized novel about humankind’s future war against a race of insect-like aliens. I can almost enjoy the movie for the action alone. It escalates beautifully, with plenty of exciting sequences and spectacular visual effects. But it’s the satirical edge that helps distinguish Starship Troopers. The whole movie is designed as a recruitment film for a fascist society. When our ‘heroes’ win in the end, the movie has its tongue firmly in cheek, dressing them as full-blown Nazis while Leni Riefenstahl-like propaganda leads us into the closing credits.
Director Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) takes on the web-slinging superhero in this hasty reboot of the franchise (just five years after Sam Raimi finished his trilogy). Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Never Let Me Go) stars as Peter Parker, a high schooler who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and… you know the rest. The approach here is more realistic than Raimi’s, which provides Garfield (one of the finest actors of his generation) the opportunity to sink his teeth into a surprisingly angsty role. I can’t think of another time when a superhero role provided an actor more dramatic range. Emma Stone (Easy A, Zombieland) is given far less to do as Parker’s love interest, Gwen Stacy, but she makes the most of it. Martin Sheen and Sally Field bring gravitas in the roles of Parker’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May, while Denis Leary plays the police chief who doesn’t appreciate Spider-Man’s vigilante antics. Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) picks up the mantle of super-villain, playing Curt Connors, a sympathetic scientist who’s desire to rid the world of disease leads to risky, gene-splicing self-experimentation. He becomes Parker’s third-act adversary — a raging Lizard monster.
This ultra-gitchy flick is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and that’s normally cause for celebration. But if you’re not into playing video games (like me), the film’s rapid pacing and excessively kinetic style may just leave you plain bewildered. On the other hand, the narrative is so simple that without the quick rhythm and psychedelic interludes, the film wouldn’t be very interesting. Director Edgar Wright is consistently clever and inventive in his execution, and does a spectacular job keeping you interested throughout a plot line that could easily have been a snooze.
