There are many theories about how the war between the humans of Earth and the bugs of Klendathu started. Some say they attacked us first, sending a meteor off course to hit us as an act of aggression. Others say we were always the aggressors, and that the meteor was a false flag operation meant to drum up support for the war and silence protestors(because we weren’t hanging them fast enough). Whatever the case may be, the war is on, we’re in the thick of it, and there’s no turning back. Our war against the bugs has stretched to all corners of the galaxy, so when a distress signal goes out from Fort Casey, a space station that was unknowingly built right on top of a bug nest, nothing initially seems out of the ordinary with this... Until it turns out to be a deadly trap, one that threatens the lives of not only the soldiers performing the rescue operation, but through an unexpected chain of events, the fate of Earth itself. As it turns out, an ambitious high ranking officer has been fucking around, and we’re all about to find out.

Starship Troopers: Invasion is, no surprise, not your typical anime. I’m honestly kind of surprised it qualifies as one, but I’m not about to look a gift bug in the mouth. As a direct to video fourth installment of the Starship Troopers franchise, I guess you could call it more of an OVA than a movie, but either way, it has a pedigree that’s pretty tightly suited to titles of its ilk. There are a few entities that I can find attached to this project, with director Shinji Aramaki, and production companies like Wonderium, Sola Digital Arts and a few others. Between them, the majority of their primary credited work seems to consist of OVAs and movies attached to popular franchises, with a few standalone titles for good measure. Aramaki in particular stands out due to his involvement in the critically reviled Rick and Morty anime projects. I don’t remember Vexille very well, and the only thing I remember about Halo Legends is the AMV Hell clip it appeared in, but Appleseed Alpha? Woof, I remember roasting that piece of crap with some friends.

All of that is to say that yeah, this is a pretty unconventional anime title, and while the names behind it might not be promising, it actually looks pretty good. Well, for the most part, anyway. See, it has one advantage that most of its contemporaries didn’t, and that’s the fact that the characters spend most of the movie in suits of armor and big metal helmets, a benefit that Appleseed Alpha sorely needed. The vast majority of the film consists of soldiers in full armor fighting giant bugs, and when it’s just that, I’ve gotta say, it looks pretty fucking sick. The fights are directed and choreographed well, thebugs are made to look super terrifying in their numbers, and seeing the soldiers mow them down with a hail of bullets as they still manage to inch ever closer to them is somehow simultaneously suspenseful and satisfying.

The combat armor the characters wear largely does look the same, with slight nuances between them, and the same could be said from the bugs, but in my opinion, Starship Trooper armor and the basic soldier bugs have always looked awesome and they’ve always complemented each other well, so I’m not about to complain. Besides, this movie does introduce some new bug designs, including a terrifying new queen design that looks like a mix of Volcarona, The Predator and Mother Brain, which I think looks super fucking cool. And then you have the humans themselves, which, yeah, that’s where things kinda go downhill. There are a few memorable designs in the bunch... The main three female characters are easy to distinguish from each other, at least, Varro looks like an acceptable action hero, and Johnny Rico looks pretty cool in his limited appearances... But for the rest, I’m sorry, the only way to really tell any of them apart is with their gimmicks and their voice actors.

And the animation on the humans when they’re out of their armor is just straight up not good. These troopers might as well have been on a mission to the uncanny valley for all the good it did for the aesthetic of the movie. From what I understand, most of the animation was based on motion-capture models, and I distinctly recall there being a making-of feature on the DVD I used to own that showed the English language voice actors being the ones acting as the models, but I have the feeling their movements were over-articulated in translation, because even the most casual of movements go just slightly too far in most interactions. Also the facial animation can be stiff as hell sometimes for everyone other than Johnny and Carmen, and the nudity looks more like a bad Tomb Raider nude mod than anything intentional. What bothers me the most is that around the same time, Red vs. Blue was airing volumes 10 and 11, which went over the backstory of Project Freelancer, and they used similar motion capture technology for the entire storyline, and it looked way better, faces and all, and I’ll eat my hat if they had half the budget Sony gave Invasion.

It doesn’t appear as though Sentai Filmworks handled this dub, it seems to have actually been credited to Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, but with the names involved, come on, Sentai had to have been involved. David Matranga and Luci Christian return from Appleseed Alpha, and thankfully, Steven Foster gave them a better script this time. Not a lot better, the banter between the soldiers is honestly pretty awkward at times, but better. This honestly might be one of Foster’s best dubs, which isn’t saying much, I know. Luci Christian is full of fire as the scorned Carmen Ibanez, and David Matranga makes you feel every ounce of pain that Johnny Rico has lived through to get to where he is, and the two have the perfect level of chemistry for a pair of estranged lovers torn apart long ago by their duty. Emily Neves is so charming as Trig that she almost makes the backstory exposition dump she has to deliver sound natural. For most of the cast, though, this is basically just a casting call for people with tough sounding voices, so Andrew Love, Leraldo Anzaldua, David Wald, Jovan Jackson and Melissa Davis are right at home in their roles. The casting ranges from good to outstanding, no duds in the bunch, highly recommended.

Starship Troopers is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s one of the only movies I know where I’ll drop everything to watch the censored version on TV, despite owning the DVD version. It’’s a perfectly well made movie from all angles, I could talk about it for days. Not only is it an awesome popcorn movie, it’s smart, and has layers upon layers of actual depth. The more you watch it, the more you read about it, the better it gets. It also spawned two sequels, which were absolutely terrible pieces of shit, but I still love them in the same way that only a mother can love her own ugly-ass baby, because as bad as they are, they still give me more Starship Troopers, and they’re at least entertainingly bad. I even loved the American cartoon series, which, well, it had it’s own problems. I’ve never read te original book, all I know is that it’s some right-wing pro-military fascist propaganda, which the movie did a fantastic job subverting and deconstructing, telling the same story with pretty much the opposite message. Pretty ballsy if you ask me, and sure enough, this is a pretty ballsy franchise.

So with that all established, how well does Invasion hold up against the legacy it was built upon? Well first of all, on a purely functional level, the Starship Troopers franchise has a surprising amount in common with Attack on Titan. You have a dedicated army of human soldiers who basically signed up to be cannon fodder, and know they’re probably not going to survive to see the ultimate victory, battling it out against single-minded terrifying monsters with superior numbers who are able to swarm and outnumber them very easily, and while one or two main characters may have plot armor, nobody ever feels safe from the danger these forces represent, and named characters that you probably like and feel attached to are constantly and heartlessly being killed off. To that end, Invasion does not disappoint. The action is fun and intense, but sometimes also nerve-wracking and stressful as the stakes are constantly being raised, and the situation is ever-evolving, full of sudden twists and game changers.

Also like Titan, the primary cast is made up of a group of three lifetime friends, and here’s where the legacy becomes really important, because those friends happen to be Carmen Ibanez, Johnny Rico, and Carl Jenkins, the main trio of the first movie. Why didn’t they bring back Ace Levy? Presumably because creating a 3D rendering of Jake Busey would have been too terrifying even for this franchise. Also apparently this film ignores the existence of movies two and three, which is fair, because again, as much as I love them and will protect them from slander with my life, they are terrible. In any case, this film is intended to work as a sequel to the original film, and it does work as one. The war has advanced in more or less believable ways, and the dynamic between Rico, Ibanez and Jenkins does feel completely solid. These are three people who have grown apart, followed their own paths and grown into their own careers, but they still have a history together, and they still have very strong opinions on each other and their work. Watching this movie, it genuinely feels like I’m catching up with these characters twenty years down the road.

Aside from them, though, this movie does not have very many of what I would call actual characters. The closest to a fleshed out human being is probably Trig, even if her backstory was just an exposition dump. Other than her, mostly everyone else is either an interchangeable gimmick or a plot device, like we’re watching the Doom movie all over again. Hell, most of them have call signs and nicknames instead of real names, and I just can not take that shit seriously anymore. I’ve either seen or read plenty of pieces of media that went to great lengths to discuss how dehumanizing this kinda thing is, from the novel The Savior’s Champion to the Clone Wars cartoon, and while I didn’t love the first season of 86, this is something they made a profound fucking point about. Besides, it’s just so lazy and edgelord. “He’s called Ratzass because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass!” Oh, you’re so fucking clever. The guy laying bombs is called Mech, because of course. There’s a religious dude who marks his skin called The Goat... Oops, wait, that’s what he was called in Doom, he’s called Holy Man here.

And look, I already said I love the live action sequels, so technically speaking these movies don’t have to be good for me to like them, I’m willing to put up with a lot. There’s a guy whose gimmick is that he’s a martial artist, so later in the movie he kicks a bug to death, but then he’s immediately killed by a bug behind him, and I’m behind this kind of goofy bullshit one hundred percent. The problem is, you’re not really given a reason to care about any of these people. They keep getting killed in sudden, brutal fashion, but none of them really leave an impact on the story or your emotions. Throughout the entire movie, there’s only one character whose death I felt sad about, and if you’ve seen it, you can probably guess who it was. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of suspense, and every single human loss represents a step forward for the enemy of humanity on a grand scale, but individually, they're just cannon fodder.

I don’t care what happen to shock jock in Starship Troopers, just like I don’t care what happens to The Hunter in The Savior’s Champion or 5555 in The Clone Wars. Thankfully, I can call The Hunter Orion, and 5555 Fives, but I’m pretty much stuck with Shock Jock. Fuck Shock Jock, there’s about a million middle schoolers waiting to enlist and earn that nickname. Actually, going back to Clone Wars, isn’t that why The Bad Batch was a flop? Cool nicknames first, characters second? And don’t even get me started on Ice Blonde, what the fuck does that even mean? What the fuck is an ICE Blond? What is that, the color of Kristi Noem’s highlights? But more importantly, this all leads to the movie’s biggest and most crippling weakness, the fact that it doesn’t have a main character. Sure, the three legacy characters do feel kind of important, but the narrative doesn’t start treating them that way until deep into the second act. Everyone else is just another interchangeable, and ultimately expendable perspective that we haphazardly alternate between. Don’t get me wrong, I like this movie overall, but when you tally up who dies vs. who survives, I’d be lying if I called the note it goes out on anything other than empty.

Starship Troopers Invasion is out of print, along with most of the franchise, although pretty much all of it is easy to find online for cheap. The first movie gets released occasionally by Sony. The original novel by Robert Heinlein is available both physically and in audio format from Amazon. There’s a new video game that I just learned about, but haven’t played yet.

As much as I like Starship Troopers: Invasion, I don’t think I can really give it a strong recommendation. It is paced fine... It’s an hour and a half long, and it only feels slightly longer than that. It doesn’t waste too much time on the stuff that overtly doesn’t work, we spend maybe fifteen to twenty minutes on the ship between the two main missions of the story, but the lame stuff does stick in your memory. Scenes between the soldiers that don’t involve action, more often than not, feel so derivative that if someone told me that this movie came into it’s existence with the Starship Troopers branding being slapped onto a generic science fiction space marine script that nobody wanted to produce, I’d believe you in a heartbeat. But it’s still fun. The action is incredible, as long as you’re not being asked to actually care about anybody, and I do personally consider it a worthwhile entry in the franchise.

I give Starship Troopers: Invasion a 6/10