Too many people wrote off the first Starship Troopers as a mindless festival of violence galore, but its tongue-in-cheek look at a militaristic future made it a bit smarter than the average space opera. Unfortunately, such is definitely not the case with Starship Troopers 3: Marauder -- the latest straight-to-DVD sequel I don't recall anyone asking for --which apes its predecessor to awkward effect, creating a mishmash of misguided satire and special effects terrible enough to make the Sci-Fi Channel cringe in disgust.

Years after mankind first declared war on the Bugs, a seemingly invincible race of interstellar beasties, humans are no closer to finishing the fight than when they started. The military seems more concerned with maintaining troop morale and constantly boosting the ranks of those being sent off to the slaughter on a daily basis than with actually developing the weaponry needed to quash the Bugs once and for all. Still, that hasn't stopped soldiers like Col. Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien, ominously resembling a bulked-up Ryan Seacrest) from pressing onward, spending each day battling the Bugs and their ever-increasing ranks. But the monstrous fiends gain the upper hand on the night Rico has been assigned to help protect Sky Marshall Anoke (Stephen Hogan), a military bigwig serving as the poster boy for supporting the war effort. In the ensuing carnage, Anoke, along with a handful of soldiers, including a former love of Rico's (Jolene Blalock), flee to another planet that ends up being infested with Bugs. But as it turns out, there's more than just those pesky monsters to battle, as forces within the human Federation are conspiring to turn the tide of war against the humans from the inside out.

One of the many ways Starship Troopers 3: Marauder hampers -- nay, cripples -- itself involves use of its relatively small budget. This movie needed  to go all-out, to be as big and bloody as possible. The original Starship Troopers understood this, and its first sequel, underwhelming as it was, at least tailored the story to fit the lack of finances. Marauder, on the other hand, is ambitious as all get-out, yet comes across looking incredibly cheap and sloppily slapped together, even by direct-to-DVD standards. Just watch how extras fall and get trampled by computer-generated Bugs with no noticable effect, and you'll know Marauder was the product of some executive who wanted to cash in on a cult franchise without putting forth the effort to actually make it look good.

Besides those chintzy effects, Marauder contains many other flaws. For example, it features horrendous acting, and whenever characters aren't shouting such stirring lines of dialogue as "KILL 'EM ALL!" or "GO! GO! GO!", they're going through the motions of a story too complex for its own good and yet extraordinarily predictable every step of the way. Watching Marauder is exhausting, the experience of following it from aimless subplot to aimless subplot, with a couple of plot twists you can see coming a mile away thrown in for good measure, is as tiring and joyless as can be. Even worse, when the movie injects some political commentary into the mix, it tries to play both sides of the coin, simultaneously condemning and praising the same subject, to the point that whether it's supporting or lampooning its more over-the-top moments becomes annoyingly blurred. 

For as little as the studio brass seemed to care about the quality of Starship Troopers 3: Marauder,  they might as well have shifted the budget to an  independent slice of greatness with the potential to rake in some awards and good will. Sadly, until that happens, pointless B-movies such as this will continue to support the image of movies released straight to video store shelves as dead zones of creativity.

MY RATING: * (out of ****)

(Released by Sony Pictures and rated "R" for violence, language and some nudity.)