Starship Troopers

Tag Archive: Starship Troopers

Halo’s second episode–Has the next great benchmark in sci-fi futurism arrived?

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April 5, 2022

Review by C.J. Bunce

If you agree with us that the biggest landmark in the visual representation of futurism in science fiction over the last several years was Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and Netflix’s Altered Carbon, then you might also see something similarly new and refreshing–and yet new and different–happening with the new Paramount+ series Halo. As I described it last month here at borg, Halo’s first episode was a dense set-up of a series opener, establishing the world building, the opposing factions and key characters in this new universe extracted from the video game franchise. But the series’ second episode, titled “Unbound,” doesn’t miss a beat in showing viewers an even more layered science fiction story is in play, with plenty of visual surprises.

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Long-awaited Halo live-action TV series gets a promising start

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March 25, 2022

Review by C.J. Bunce

At $6.5 billion in sales, Halo, the 77th biggest media franchise, is nothing to sneeze at. So what took the video game franchise so long to make it to a major live-action production? It was just stuck in development stages. But for both those who never played the games and those who have, Halo is now a live-action series joining sci-fi’s Star Trek franchise on Paramount+. The series opener is full of all the pew-pew action you’d expect of a first-person shooter game. Neither a continuation, adaptation, or prequel to the games, the show is meant to be a standalone world. It’s Lost in Space meets Ender’s Game and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, with similar plotting to Dune and Gears of War, a non-human threat like Ender’s Game and Starship Troopers, a 26th century mad scientist’s super squad with Edge of Tomorrow armor and guys in them that talk and stomp around like Jayne in Firefly.

Fortunately the pilot comes together like the short mini-series that touched off the successful Battlestar Galactica reboot. Yes, this is a military sci-fi genre series to check out, and one you’ll likely return for next week.

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Ephyra Rising–Military sci-fi reaches the next level in latest Gears of War novel

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February 10, 2022

Review by C.J. Bunce

In Michael A. Stackpole’s first venture into the Gears of War universe, the author puts the franchise’s military sci-fi storytelling into the realm of Aliens, Predator, Starship Troopers, and Edge of Tomorrow. Focused on the same elite military squad of “Gears” as in the video games and previous novels in the series, Gears of War: Ephyra Rising takes a surprising turn into the gritty, real-life aftermath of soldiers returning after the war is over. Focusing on the toll that battling the Locust and Lambent threat has taken on Sgt. Marcus Fenix and Lt. Anya Stroud, Stackpole infuses an adjustment to life narrative that is believable and real, while also creating a love letter to one of the franchise’s most beloved characters.

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Boba Fett returns–A New Year, bacta tank jacuzzis, the 25th anniversary of the Special Edition, and more

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January 1, 2022

Review by C.J. Bunce

Happy New Year! My wish for everyone is they get their own bacta tank jacuzzi to help recover from last year… and the year before that, and…

It’s been 38.5 years since I first saw Boba Fett die, at the sneak preview of Return of the Jedi. It was the low point of the movie–I’d rather they’d kill off Han Solo. Let the mysterious bounty hunter drift off into the sunsets. Practically speaking it meant decades of no Boba Fett, and nothing but minor appearances of Boba Fett in the Marvel comic books. So we’ve all had a long time to picture how Boba Fett survives bumbling into the Great Pit of Carkoon, nesting place of the all-powerful Sarlacc, to be slowly digested over 1,000 years, which was as baffling as making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Now thanks to Jon Favreau, we get to see the vision in his head, in the first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, now streaming on Disney Plus. (Moderate episode highlights and a revisit to 1983 and 1997 follow).

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Now streaming–Latest Chris Pratt movie The Tomorrow War arrives on Amazon

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July 8, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

Chris Pratt movies are a thing now just like Tom Cruise movies and Mark Wahlberg movies. The latest Chris Pratt movie is The Tomorrow War, which just arrived this past weekend on Amazon Prime. It’s every bit a vehicle for Pratt and could star nobody else. Like the Jurassic World movies, Passengers, and even The Magnificent Seven remake, Pratt is a unique casting decision but evidently studio execs keep going for his “aw, shucks” brand of characters. In The Tomorrow War, Pratt plays a biology teacher dad turned rescuer of mankind named Dan Forester. Forester is nearly impossible to distinguish from Pratt’s dinosaur confronting character in Jurassic World. Pratt plays that bit of a dope you can’t imagine actually doing any of the things his character encounters, so you may need to be a Pratt fan or simply be grateful it’s a free action movie and not mind you’re getting what you paid for. Either way, there are worse direct-to-TV movies out there, but as the alien invasion genre goes, don’t expect to count The Tomorrow War high on your list.

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Now streaming–Milla Jovovich faces off against big beasties in Monster Hunter

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June 27, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

Possibly the biggest surprise of Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest action spectacle Monster Hunter is that Milla Jovovich isn’t the title character. That role goes to Furious 7’s Tony Jaa, a Mandalorian-meets-Bone Tomahawk or Predators brand of survivor and monster hunter, who Jovovich and a band of soldiers in our time meet after they get sucked into a portal to a very different place. The plot of this latest adaptation of a video game series is like Planet of the Apes, with a team falling into a world of beasts that are a cross of Jurassic Park and Starship Troopers. It has a Ray Harryhausen look, which is good for those who like vintage monster nostalgia, but perhaps not so good for those after impeccable, cutting-edge visual effects. In the opening scenes we meet Jovovich as Captain Artemis, a believable unit commander leading soldiers in Humvees looking for a missing squad. For the most part this is a showcase of the Resident Evil heroine in action mode with bits of goofy humor, with Jaa’s Hunter showing off his stealth survival. But really it’s about framing the star actress in increasingly cooler action shots. Monster Hunter is now streaming on Starz, Hulu, and other platforms, and you might want to check it out.

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Book review–Ender’s Game-inspired series wraps in Engines of Oblivion

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April 24, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

In Architects of Memory, first-time sci-fi writer Karen Osborne created a corporate sci-fi story, similar to Alien’s Weyland-Yutani, where corporations compete for weapons and power. In this futuristic realm, humans have been de-humanized to almost unrecognizable, something like in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. In a world so vile, why fight to survive? Is living enough when there’s nothing to live for, and if there is something worth living for, then what is it? Osborne doesn’t answer that question in either the original book or its sequel, Engines of Oblivion, the second and last book in her “Memory War” duology. Fans of the first book will be interested in this next novel, as it revisits the world of human bombs and a bleak dystopia, only this time moving from lead protagonist Ash to Natalie, as Natalie is manipulated into returning to find those she left behind after stumbling into a major military success for her board of directors. Strong women on the brink of hopelessness struggle to understand their roles, their relationships, and a world bogged down in Avatar-esque designs in this wind-up to the Memory War story.

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Tags: Alien franchise, Altered Carbon novel, Annihilation, Architects of Memory, Architects of Memory book review, Avatar world, Ender's Game, Engines of Oblivion, Engines of Oblivion book review, Karen Osborne, military sci-fi, Starship Troopers, Tor Books, women sci-fi characters

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Colonyside–Michael Mammay sci-fi sequel takes retired military hero once more unto the breach

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March 1, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

In Colonyside, the third novel of Michael Mammay’s Planetside series, battle-hardened mastermind hero and retired marine colonel Carl Butler is “getting too old for this kind of thing.” With his notorious reputation and knack for getting people close to him killed–and getting alien inhabitants killed, too–his era’s equivalent of the prime directive is even named after him. Lucky for fans of Planetside (reviewed here) and Spaceside (reviewed here), Colonel Butler, now really just Carl, has a methodical approach to military, politics, and life that shows no signs of waning. But where Planetside was a military conspiracy-thriller in sci-fi dress, and Spaceside was a future noir mystery, Colonyside is more office politics and low-level squabbling power plays. The Aliens franchise Colonial Marines vibe of the first two books takes a shift here in a surprising direction. What begins as something like Predator, an intriguing story of a team going in to re-evaluate a prior action–here a mission gone bad resulting in the death of the daughter of an influential executive–ultimately doesn’t catch the intrigue of the earlier books.

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Tags: 2021 borg Hall of Fame, Aliens, colonial marines, Colonyside, Colonyside book review, Ender's Game, Harper Voyager Books, homniverts, Michael Crichton, Michael Mammay, military novels, military sci-fi, Orson Scott Card, Planetside, Robert Heinlein, Spaceside, Starship Troopers, The Phantom Menace, Total Recall

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Retro fix–Tor Essentials re-issues Robert Charles Wilson’s science fiction thriller Spin

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January 29, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

Tor Essentials is a new library of backlist science fiction and fantasy novels from Macmillan Publishing’s Tor imprint, so far featuring 15 novels plucked from the past few decades. One of those 21st century titles is a well-constructed gem, Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. A broad, epic story that traverses literally billions of years from the vantage of a doctor living on Earth, the novel packs a lot of ideas into 300 pages. The sub-genres covered are a mix of apocalypse, speculative fiction, and Martians, but not quite the aliens of H.G. Wells or Robert Heinlein. Like the inexplicable monolith of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a giant black barrier has blocked the atmosphere so we no longer see the Sun, the Moon, or the Stars, but some secret force is protecting the Earth from the effects of such an occurrence. Somehow Wilson connects the dots between the absurd and the improbable with the realities of the human condition to arrive at a story similar to Daniel H. Wilson’s The Andromeda Evolution, another intriguing, creative tale that made readers believe the unlikely was possible.

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The Mandalorian–Three Season 2 episodes are the third greatest Star Wars movie

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December 5, 2020

Review by C.J. Bunce

With the second season opener “The Marshall,” I thought the new season would be more of the same (see my review here). A bit light on plot, and so similar to a few episodes from the first season, I figured Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, & Co. were going to deliver some more good entertainment, but not take too many risks. Not one week later I had to take that back, as the episode “The Passenger” delivered a spectacular single-story episode reminiscent of Alien and The Thing. The fourth episode of the season, “The Siege,” was a return of characters from season one and more of the single most important, far-reaching draw for any age group or other demographic, Baby Yoda, given the name Grogu in last week’s episode. But if you take a look at this season, especially episodes 11, 13, and 14, what you may find is the third greatest Star Wars movie. Or at least your third favorite. I’ll avoid spoilers for yesterday’s new episode “The Tragedy” below except to mention the director and that the episode blew me away, but let’s dig into this season so far.

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