Starship Troopers

(Columbia TriStar)

Paul Verhoeven adapts Robert Heinlein's novel about interstellar imperialism, celebrating its futuristic totalitarian society as much as he parodies it. But as the Earth Federation battles the Bugs (the insect alien race who are jostling us for galactic empire), the vicissitudes of interspecies warfare serve merely as a gory device to sort out the tangled romances of the teenage recruits. On this level, it's the ultimate teen-slasher movie.