“If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing fucking bugs!” — Paul Verhoeven

At first glance, the cast looked like it belonged in a television drama for teenagers. The jingoistic satire didn’t translate well to newspaper ads and 30-second TV spots. The goofy marketing made it look like a straight-to-video movie had somehow wormed its way into a theatrical release. And yet, I still went to see Starship Troopers on opening night, shuffling into the theater with the lowest of expectations. There were maybe six other people there including, I think, a local film critic who occasionally shone a penlight on his notes and impatiently touched the illumination dial on his wristwatch.

In Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, the narrative is frequently interrupted by satirical advertisements and news segments, as if the film has commercial breaks baked right into it. Likewise, Starship Troopers opens with over-the-top war propaganda, simultaneously establishing its irreverent attitude and the premise: in the future, humans really hate bugs: the arachnid alien combatants who’ve thrown a wrench in humanity’s plan to colonize every nook and cranny of the galaxy. In fact, humans hate bugs so much that young men and women everywhere can’t wait to give up everything and fight the bastards.

Enter Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his dimwitted high school friends. Amusingly, the first act plays like a futuristic teenybopper drama before jerking the rug out from under the heroes’ feet. Rico has a hot girlfriend (Denise Richards), a hunky rival (Patrick Muldoon), a dangerously flirty gal pal named Dizzy (Dina Meyer), and an ultra-nerdy best friend played by Neil Patrick Harris, whose appearance in an R-rated romp was mildly scandalous at the time (Verhoeven had employed similar stunt casting with Elizabeth Berkley in his trash-masterpiece Showgirls, two years prior).

Rico’s girlfriend is sent to the space navy, his brainy best friend gets absorbed by the military’s science sector, and Rico ends up in the most elite squad of ground troops in existence. His drill sergeant is played by Clancy Brown, who always takes genre projects seriously and the same can be said of Michael Ironside (Total Recall’s Richter), who plays the lieutenant of Rico’s group. There Rico makes new friends for the first time in his adult life, including Jake Busey, whose maniacal appearance instantly washes away the Dawson’s Creek vibe from the earlier portion of the picture.

Just when Rico’s finally begins to gel with his new life, who of all people will suddenly transfer to his squad? Dizzy, the hot little baddie who’s been pursuing Rico since high school. Here’s something I really love about Starship Troopers: in practically every movie in which the leading character is pursued by two love interests, he or she inevitably ends up with the sickeningly wholesome, less attractive option. Not my boy Rico. Soon after his boring girlfriend dumps him via a video call, Rico hooks up with the considerably more exciting Dizzy.

The score by Basil Poledouris is as rousing as anything he’s ever done while the early CGI is somehow much more convincing than most digital effects today. As for the action, it’s exciting, well-paced, and comically bloody as per Verhoeven’s style. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose my favorite film of Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers, I literally couldn’t do it.

I had friends in high school who were even bigger science fiction readers than I. Two of them were dead-set against the idea of a Hollywood adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s source material. There are still critics who assert Verhoeven “ruined the book” by choosing to parody its values (though a lot fewer of them exist today as the general consensus of the film only seems to improve with time). Yes, Isaac Asimov wrote in his memoirs that Heinlein grew more conservative and militaristic with age. Though this is certainly true, Heinlein has suggested he was merely exploring such a society as a possibility, not necessarily promoting it.

Then you have modern SF writers like John Stalzi, who are about as liberal and anti-war as they come, writing military fiction in nearly the same vein as Heinlein. Long before the Sad Puppies (an extreme right-wing group of close-minded assholes who attempted to manipulate the Hugo Awards) I used to enjoy reading science fiction from a wide swath of political and philosophical backgrounds. To like Heinlein’s version and Verhoeven’s isn’t contradictory, but exemplary of what I loved about the brainy genre in the first place. In fact, Joe Halderman’s The Forever War, itself a direct counter-argument to Heinlein’s novel, is among my favorite SF novels of all time.

Though I wish the movie version had gotten the jet packs that Heinlein imagined in the novel, I’m going with Verhoeven’s version all the way.

Without giving too much away, Millennium is a time travel movie. The year (in one timeline) is 1989. A midair collision causes a jumbo jet to plunge rapidly toward earth. When the flight engineer checks the situation in the back, he discovers the passengers are already dead. Seconds before impact, the black box records the man’s final words: “They’re all burned up!”

The black box is one of several juicy mysteries for the investigators, led by Bill Smith (Kris Kristofferson). Another mystery: all the digital watches which survived the crash are now ticking backwards. I wanted the movie to explain why and how the watches tick backwards, but it never does. When it does explain things, it explains too much, often at the expense of the story. For example, there is absolutely no reason seasoned time travelers should need ideas like paradoxes and nonlinear timelines explained to them in excruciating detail. You’d think that stuff would be taught on the first day of Time Travel 101.

The film imagines a future phenomenon called “timequakes.” Unlike Vonnegut’s terrifying interpretation of the term, the timequakes in Millennium occur in the story’s present (a thousand years from now) whenever one of the time travelers change something in the past (1989). It’s disappointing that the phenomenon has less to do with temporal dimensional stuff and more to do with boring ol’ earthquakes, but after the time travelers experience one, they’re relieved that, “We haven’t changed much.” Which, like much of the movie, doesn’t make a lick of sense. If their actions in the past changed their present selves, how the hell would they know? Look, I’m not knocking a time travel movie for having plot holes. I’m knocking it because better time travel movies know how to skate by the problems all time travel movies have. Millennium is a lot like a magician who hasn’t mastered the art of misdirection yet.

What I like about the movie is the way it plays with perspective. In Back to the Future 2, Marty returns to events depicted in the first movie, but we see them from entirely different viewpoints. In Millennium, and maybe this is due to budget limitations and/or laziness, the movie wraps around to expand on earlier scenes, sometimes using the exact same shots as before. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes it’s mildly interesting how nothing more than additional context could change a scene’s tone. Investigator Bill Smith is the focus for the first half of the movie and then… someone else becomes the main character.

Meanwhile the chemistry between Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd tries too hard to be “future Casablanca.” Anyone who’s ever worked as a real life airline pilot or a safety inspector will scream at the screen frequently. My biggest complaint is the movie would have been a lot more interesting had it explored what happens after its final shot. That climax, by the way, is full of unintentional laughs, but the film is more or less believable as a whole. It’s just one of those movies that’s too odd for me to dislike. For instance, the all-seeing council is a direct descendant of Flash Gordon and Zardoz while the future sets, though utterly unconvincing, have a cyberpunk flair about them.

Here’s what John Varley has to say about the production, according to Wikipedia:

“We had the first meeting on Millennium in 1979. I ended up writing it six times. There were four different directors, and each time a new director came in I went over the whole thing with him and rewrote it. Each new director had his own ideas, and sometimes you’d gain something from that, but each time something’s always lost in the process, so that by the time it went in front of the cameras, a lot of the vision was lost.”

Millennium isn’t great, but it’s a helluva lot better than its 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Do you know how family videos are only funny to people in the family? That’s probably what Red Letter Media’s Space Cop is like. If you’re a fan of these guys, you’ll probably enjoy their movie. When the promotional material suggests it would someday be a contender for RLM’s own Best of the Worst series, they weren’t kidding. It’s a bad movie, but that’s their expertise, isn’t it? Expecting them to make anything else is like asking Mike Tyson to figure skate.

I’m no stranger to crowdfunded films so I knew what I was getting into… in other words, I wasn’t expecting much. Space Cop is A) better than I thought it would be and B) a lot more entertaining than the Angry Video Game Nerd movie, even if that one had a lot more production value (and still looked like shit). Space Cop starts off promising enough and feels like an authentic movie for the first few minutes despite soap opera lighting. Then it quickly descends into the non sequitur jokes and politically incorrect humor which work, if I’m being kind, roughly half of the time.

As for the plot, a gung-ho policeman from the future (Rich Evans) is accidentally transported to 2007 after he chases aliens into some kind of time-space vortex. During a modern day shootout in a cryogenics lab, the future cop accidentally thaws a cop from the past (Mike Stoklasa). They’ll have to team up to save the world from a devious plot involving aliens and a brain in a jar… or something. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter.

The two main characters are only about as good as a memorable Saturday Night Live sketch, stretched to feature length. The actors’ decision to speak in “funny” voices from beginning to end is, at best, easy to look past, while at worst I can see it grating on the uninitiated. When Patton Oswalt makes a cameo, it’s pretty clear the boys were reluctant to trim their only star’s footage because it goes on and on. The length then becomes part of the joke.

My biggest issue with the movie is a complaint RLM have voiced themselves: the best bad movies are the ones that aren’t intentionally bad. Movies that set out to be bad just can’t capture the charm of bad movies trying to be good. Space Cop isn’t a good bad movie, but it’s a decent bad movie, at least when the jokes hit their target. If you’re a veteran of bad movies, and you like RLM—really like them—then you probably want to support them in this venture.