anhed-nia:

This is at least the second time this year that I’ve rewatched this beast, and I think I previously opened by saying something like “I have nothing new to say about this”, and then picking out some minutiae that I felt like highlighting at the time. I’m just going to do that again today, because I don’t have any new Big Ideas still, but I do have an urgent need to call attention to something I had never really noticed before, which is now driving me insane. In the first leg of the movie, Denise Richards shows up for her first day of pilot training, and they show her and a female classmate running excitedly through the ship toward the cockpit. It’s a fun, cartoony, Betty & Veronica-feeling sequence with a lot of wacky maneuvers and near-spills, and at the end of it…like…oh my god…they make Denise Richards do this stunt where *supposedly* she leaps through the air and slides down a banister on her ass, facing forward, hands free and legs akimbo, and it is just completely insane that anyone would ask me to believe that this is possible. I mean, just try to picture jumping into the air, and landing with your coccyx perfectly centered on a narrow rail, with no part of your body making contact with anything else, and you somehow just slide down in a straight line, sticking your landing precisely. When she does it, you can kind of see that someone must be holding her thighs and helping her balance and pulling her along while she pretends to be achieving this absolutely ludicrous feat, and she’s kind of waving her arms around in this unnatural way to try to make it look “real”, and I just can’t believe this is in the movie. Like it would have been very easy to NOT have this in the movie, or to have it be the more rational sidesaddle technique that many of us have actually experienced in real life, and it’s not even as if very much attention is called to this fleeting moment between scenes, but I guess Verhoeven just felt really strongly that the hands-free banister slide was the only acceptable way to express how vivacious and dynamic Denise Richards is. I keep picturing them setting up the shot and trying different ways of making it look authentic, keeping her balanced while not slowing her trajectory too much, and it feels like it must have just taken an enormous amount of time just to lock in a few frames of one of the least convincing stunts I have ever seen. Denise Richards’ full-frontal ass-only rail grind is my current most insane thing about STARSHIP TROOPERS.