It's not every composer who can find the human element in a movie overrun with thousands of computer-generated, murderous alien insects. If you need such a man, who better to turn to than the composer who found the humanity inside the titanium shell of ROBOCOP and behind the might sword of CONAN? Basil Poledouris has always brought a majesty and a richness of emotion to his subjects that stands him apart from many of his contemporaries.

STARSHIP TROOPERS is the composer's third collaboration with director Paul Verhoeven, following the medieval FLESH & BLOOD (1985) and runaway hit ROBOCOP (1987), and it may well be their most ambitious project yet. The film's ground-breaking special effects resulted in an extended post-production period which afforded Poledouris an unprecedented opportunity to develop his themes and approaches over a period that stretched from March until September 1997. That's about six times longer than most film composers have to write and record their scores.

Poledouris worked out his material for the score in close collaboration with the director: "It was Paul who pointed out what became kind of the main theme of the movie very early when I was experimenting with different themes, and we found something that I think represented the struggle, the camaraderie, the heroism, with a sense of fate attached to it. Paul's requirements are very thematic and emotional, to humanize what's happening in the middle of all this violence and technology."

STARSHIP TROOPERS stands as one ofe the most varied and ambitious works in Poledouris' career. Jagged, pulsating brass and string figures based on an octatonic scale characterize the different "bugs" encountered in the film with savage intensity. The militaristic human society and its space marines blend a tough, no-nonsense rhythm of low brass and strings with the kind of sweeping, gutsy emotional writing that has long been a hallmark of the composer's style.

"Every cue in this movie is like a main title, because Paul approaches everything differently", Poledouris explains. "Every scene takes you somewhere else; it's been so unlike a normal film where you develop your motifs and you basically do variations of those motifs in different tempi and that's your cue. The devices become more textural and harmonic, associative things."

The genius of STARSHIP TROOPERS, both film and score, is the way it whips the audience and the listener into a heroic frenzy with its story of a group of young men and women caught up in an interstellar war four hundred years in the future. Johnny Rico and his fellow space marines are earnest and sincere, and the composer's military themes blend hard-edged toughness with winning patriotic fanfares. Yet Verhoeven's ingenious use of propagandistic and fascist imagery suggests that all may not be as it seems: the "Fed-Net" media broadcasts, which bookend the film, raise fascinating questions of interpretation, and the composer's music perfectly delineates their tone of wartime hysteria. The finale of the score is a brilliant call to arms set to a Fed-Net recruiting film, but there's an underlying menace in the descending tones of his military clarion call that hints at greater dangers than those posed by alien insects.

The hypnotic power of Basil Poledouris' music is such that you may feel more like joining up than weighing the consequences.