CINEMA: ALL BUGGED OUT, AGAIN

Welcome to the retrofuture. It's a time when they're fighting a high-tech intergalactic war but talking about it in the kind of lowbrow rhetoric--hysterical jingoism--we haven't heard issuing from movie screens since World War II.

Besides the weaponry and the enemy--monstrous, profoundly malevolent bugs--a few other things have changed. There's a world government now, and the combat troops are fully gender integrated--to the point where they take showers together. This implies, of course, that more saltpeter than ever is being dumped into their rations.

Essentially, however, it's business as usual in Starship Troopers. Basic training is still brutal. The platoon we...