Invasion takes a distinctly anime feel to both its visual style and its story, and as a result, this movie has a drastically different feel to it, but it offers enough tidbits so that any fan of the films, if you happen to still be following them, that is, will be happy with the treatment.
Starship Troopers: Invasion takes place many years after the first movie. Rico is now a scared and one-eyed general in control of a space station on the outskirts of Earth space, while Carl has risen in the ranks and is the head of one of the more mysterious branches of the military and Carmen captains the fleet's flagship. While all of these characters have a familiar feel to them, they aren't really the focus of this particular adventure.
Instead, the movie centers on a group of grunts who were sent on a mission by Jenkins, and that mission apparently went bad. When Carmen's ship is sent to rescue the squad, they find that their commanding officer has been relieved of duty and no one on the team is willing to say why. To make matters more interesting, the station that the team is being rescued from seems to have an infestation. While trying to stop the waves of bugs from overtaking the small force, someone hijacks Carmen's ship and starts taking it to Earth. Carmen enlists the help of the troopers to get her ship back and find out exactly what is happening.
Invasion's visual style is very fitting. All of the classic imagery like the bugs and the ships look like what you've seen in the other movies. Meanwhile, new elements like the long-anticipated (at least by fans of the books) power suits and marauders look good, while the humans in the film have the standard CG anime flair to them.
As for the acting and characters, the new batch of troopers like Ratzass (Leraldo Anzaldua), Ice (Melissa Davis), Trig (Emily Neves) and Hero (David Wald) all feel right and all have interesting backstories to fill up the time between the firefights. Meanwhile the voice actors used for the older characters seemed to do a good job. While it would have been fun to have Neil Patrick Harris, Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien reprise their roles as Carl, Carmen and Rico (respectively), their replacements in Justin Doran, Luci Christian and David Matranga seem to do a good job in their stead.
Special features range from the typical deleted scenes and commentary as well as a gag reel of the voice actors goofing up, but the extra that really sells the release, at least for those interested in the behind-the-scenes information, is a massive documentary on pretty much every aspect of the movie.
If you are a big enough Starship Troopers fan to have watched the other releases that have come out over the years, then you will definitely want to pick up Invasion. It's a new story that has a good mix of fighting and character development, plus it tries to bring in some of the forgotten technology from the books. Granted, Starship Troopers 3 had the marauders in it, but those didn't turn out all that well.
