Sony Pictures has inaugurated a new website for its upcoming CGI feature Starship Troopers: Invasion.
Movieweb was lucky enough to get a first look at the poster (shown left), which offers a pretty clear picture of the type of action we should be expecting.
Space Marines v. giant bugs: in some ways it’s one of the oldest stories in science fiction, but we seem to always be willing to see more giant bug fights.
Insects are about as removed from ourselves as possible while still being familiar (we don’t really have a good concept of paramecia), and so sentient versions make particularly good symbols for ‘the other’ in literature.
Starship Troopers, the novel, is a classic of science fiction, and can be credited as a huge influence on space war stories ever since, including other now-classics, like Ender’s Game and Halo.
The story is thus: a young man goes off to war against his father’s wishes. That war is fought against giant bugs in space, a common enemy threatening humans everywhere. The young man spends the war training up and becoming a hero, all the while worrying about the approval of his father. At the end, the young man find his father has joined the war effort also, having been inspired by his son.
In the film adaptation, which came out in the nineties, the father/son thing was dropped in favor of a focus on friends and teamwork. The young man gets split up from his friends upon entering the military and taking a series of aptitude tests. In the end, the friends come together on the battlefield in victory.
This new adaptation is a sort of sequel to the film, as it does not feature the same young man, but brings in characters from the film to tie the stories together. Invasion takes place on a distant outpost, where a ‘Fast Attack Ship’ has been dispatched to deal with a bug attack. Their mission is to escort survivors away from the infiltrated base. Before they can, however, Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris’ character from the first film) takes the ship off course on another mission.
No word if Harris will be reprising his role, but we know that the whole film will be CGI, so any actors we do get will be voices and mo-cap at most. Starship Troopers: Invasion will hit theaters during the 2012 summer blockbuster season.
