Here’s What Spaceships Look Like in Starship Troopers: Invasion

Yes, they look a lot like the ships from the big slice of satirical cheese that is Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers movie. The designers for the new animated film, Starship Troopers: Invasion, started with the older ships and added new details and weapons.

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One such weapon, a multi-directional cannon, is show on the lower-right, though at first glance I assumed it was a little pointing robot surrounded by hearts. That might seem out of place, but this does have anime creators working on it. Shinji Aramaki of the Appleseed films is directing, though it’s produced by Edward Neumeier (who wrote Verhoeven’s film) and Casper Van Diem (who starred in it). It’s also written by Flint Dille, who many a nerd remembers for working on cartoons back in the 1980s: G.I. Joe, Transformers, Visionaries, and Inhumanoids. Based solely on that episode of Inhumanoids where a cyclops monster eats people and digests them in its transparent stomach, I think Dille’s more than qualified to write Starship Troopers.

You can see more designs on the film’s production blog, which also drops news about the story: it centers on two ships, the Alesia and the John A. Warden, that break off from the main fleet and presumably run smack-dab into some bugs. This likely makes the whole thing a side-story instead of a firm adaptation of Heinlein’s novel or Verhoeven’s film, which allows for a more creative take on the franchise. I doubt that we’ll see starships that transform into robots like in Macross Robotech, but I expect we’ll see something better than the six-part 1988 StarshipTroopers anime that people either don’t remember or just don’t want to remember.