Paul Verhoeven is the most irritating director I know. He's got talent, and he doesn't use it. If he were completely incompetent, I could write him off, and it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. But Verhoeven has shown, in the past, that he can tell compelling stories. Unfortunately, he gets sidetracked by his obsession with violence. In Starship Troopers, he lays another egg by putting in so many scenes of blood, gore, and gruesome deaths, that he completely forgets about his story, and his characters become nothing more than single characteristic candidates for bodily demolition. Robert A. Heinlein's novel of the same name -- a juvenile novel, I might add -- is scarcely visible. The movie is nothing more than an interminably long sequence of people firing ineffective weapons at giant bugs wrapped in the guise of a parody of World War II propaganda films. Sorry, but the corny gimmick isn't close to enough to redeem this uninsightful, plot-hole-riddled muck.