I really enjoy huge, silly, special effects-driven science fiction extravaganzas that may be short on credibility but are long on fun.

For that reason, I’d been looking forward to “Starship Troopers” for a long time. It looked like a movie that had it all. Plenty of spaceships. Lots of action. Giant bugs from space threatening the earth.

Only one very important ingredient is missing — the fun.

The movie starts out with an interesting idea, but quickly disintegrates into tedium. Giant bugs from across the galaxy are hurling asteroids at earth. We don’t like that. So we go to kill them.

During this set-up section the principal characters — and I use that term loosely — are introduced. I can’t even say these characters are shallow because the word shallow indicates some depth, albeit minimal.

What “Starship Troopers” offers instead are a bunch of vacuous pretty young people. That’s all they are, and by the end of the movie I was hoping the bugs would kill them so I wouldn’t have to watch them any more.

There are, of course, the typical who’s-doing-who and who-wants-to-be-doing-who story lines. It’s a bit like “Beverly Hills 90210 Joins the Space Corps.”

The movie follows these uninteresting youths for an hour. They graduate, have a dance, join the military to become citizens, train for combat and then head off to fight the bug threat.

By the end of this first hour, I was practically begging for the action to start. Like the old adage says, though: “Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it.”

The military heads off to the bugs’ home system in an effort to wipe them out. At this point, “Starship Troopers” basically becomes a gung-ho war movie.

Huge swarms of gigantic insects attack the soldiers. The first time this happens it is exciting, and the computer-generated insects are impressive. The soldiers shoot the hell out of the bugs and the bugs bite the soldiers in half.

The second battle like this is a little less exciting. With the third, fourth and fifth battles, the excitement is gone and the whole idea is wearing a bit thin.

The seventh and eighth battles almost induce screaming. By the time the movie gets to the ninth or tenth bug/human face off (I lost count), I wanted to shoot myself.

One of the problems is the humans are fighting the same bugs every time, and the bugs are very short on personality. Granted, they’re just giant bugs, but couldn’t they at least be interesting giant bugs?

Here’s an idea of what the entire second half of the movie is like:

The soldiers land on a planet and a bunch of bugs attack them. The bugs bite lots of people in half and the soldiers machine gun the bugs. Then, more bugs run up and maul more people and the soldiers shoot more bugs.

Then, just to be different, the soldiers will go to another planet (which looks exactly like the first planet) and some bugs will run up and bite people.

The soldiers shoot the bugs. More bugs, more biting and more shooting.

Then, for a change of scenery, the soldiers head into a bug tunnel. You can probably guess what happens next.

Repeat the above scenario for an hour-and-a-half, and that’s what the movie is like.

“Starship Troopers” is not fun. It starts out dull and heads right into tedious and repetitive pure action. By the end, you’ll probably be rooting for the bugs, too.

1 star out of five.

---

Mike Milik is a senior in advertising from West Des Moines.