Roughnecks - The Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Tesca Campaign

Roughnecks - The Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Tesca Campaign
by Andre Clavel

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Movie Reviews of Roughnecks - The Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Tesca Campaign

Movie Review: Ultimately much better than the Verhoeven film.
Summary: 5 Stars

I had seen and liked the film for what it was, but to be honest the film didn't engage the original Heinlein story that much. The spirit of kids becoming adults through their military experience wasn't really there, and Heinlein's imagined military society was treated in only the most facile and jokey way.

This series takes Heinlein's spirit seriously. It's all summed up for me in the last episode that was produced (there are still a few more that haven't been produced yet... please check out the fan website and sign the petition!) that has a moment when one character who has been thrust into a position of authority expresses his doubts about his own ability by saying his mentor, who believed in him, must have been mistaken. The answer he is given is, "If you respected him as much as you say, then you wouldn't try so hard to prove him wrong". That, although I don't think it came from the novel, is in it's spirit pure Heinlein. It's the kind of deep lesson that American animated series rarely reach for so wholeheartedly. This series, in targeting a younger audience but not writing down to it, in fact in writing more maturely than many series written for adults, achieves exactly the effect that the Heinlein juvenile novels did in their day. It challenges with concepts and moral dilemas at the same time as entertaining with pyrotechnics and spectacle.

The first episode I lucked into of Roughnecks is one that hasn't been collected on one of these discs yet. It was one in which an experimental combat robot is assigned to the Roughnecks, and they all resent it, but it ends up sacrificing itself in a jaw-droppingly spectacular sequence of combat to save the squad. The episode's narrator, Higgins, sums up the story at the end saying the military command has decided not to use robot soldiers as they are too expensive. Higgins' final comment floored me as much as the great cgi battle, something I would have never expected from a weekday morning animated series... "Good thing troopers come cheap."

The writing and the character development are far superior to anything I've seen series wise in the states. I remember these things as though they were live action shows. I'd rate them up with such shows as Babylon 5 and some of the better Star Treks, except that the Roughnecks storyline is more riveting than anything I've seen over the last couple of seasons or Star Trek, and the acting, between the voice actors and the wonderful facial animation, much much better than most of the acting on Babylon 5.

So please, if you're on the fence and reading this review, give the Roughnecks a try. And get your friends to watch it too. And buy lots of DVDs, so they'll keep bringing them out. There are 40 episodes out there, but only 10 are collected between 2 discs so far. Each disc of 5 episodes can be viewed as one film, and the two discs that have been released so far can be viewed independently if neccissary. There are nuances of character that grow as the show progresses, but you can watch this second disc without having seen the first, you'll still get what's going on.

Summary of Roughnecks - The Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Tesca Campaign