RiffTrax recently put together a Kickstarter to try and get the rights to riff on a major theatrical motion picture, specifically Twilight. Well, they didn’t get the rights. Instead they got the rights to something arguably about a thousand times better. Yes, we will see a RiffTrax of Starship Troopers.
Mike Nelson related the good news via Kickstarter. Try not to read the following in his comforting Midwestern voice:
We’re excited about this for a number of reasons: It’s big. It’s goofy. It’s got giant bug aliens. Folks have been asking us to do this movie ever since we riffed excerpts of it on the 1998 MST3K Blockbuster Special. And IT’S FREAKING STARSHIP TROOPERS! It’s basically a cheesy 50s sci-fi flick, the kind we know and “love”, but made in 1997 with a massive Hollywood budget! NEIL PATRICK HARRIS as a psychic who talks to giant bugs! DENISE RICHARDS as a brilliant starship pilot, before she was a brilliant nuclear scientist in that Bond movie! MICHAEL IRONSIDE, because it’s a war movie, so of course Michael Ironside! JAKE BUSEY, hanging out and making it weird! This movie’s got it all!
In a way this promises to be a lot more fun than Twilight. Twilight is a pretty easy target, but Starship Troopers is something a lot more fun, a straight-faced parody that leaves a lot of room for send-up. Paul Verhoeven has admitted that he worked the satire in it essentially to make the movie palatable to modern audiences. Of course, Heinlein’s celebration of the soldier and the glories of war didn’t play well to audiences at the time, either; it’s easy to forget Heinlein’s book advocates that only soldiers and veterans should be allowed to vote.
So the movie itself is funny, and now we’re going to have RiffTrax layered over it? This promises to be great. The show will be simulcast live from the Belcourt Theater in Nashville August 15th; tickets will likely be available through Fathom Events.