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#686 - Soldier
Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998
A man who has been bred since birth to be an unthinking super-soldier is incapacitated by a superior model and is subsequently discarded on a planet dedicated to waste disposal.
Before Paul W.S. Anderson got caught up in spawning trashy franchises that would lead to his name being mentioned in the same breath as Uwe Boll or Michael Bay, he actually did seem to have a somewhat promising (if not too ambitious) filmmaking career. His break-out film Mortal Kombat is hardly a masterpiece, but it's actually fairly fun if taken as the lightweight kung-fu fantasy that it's intended to be. Event Horizon is often considered his best film because it does create a solid blend of sci-fi and horror with its vaguely Lovecraftian tale of a haunted spaceship. At the very least, those two films had enough quality between them to make his next film seem promising. The screenplay for Soldier is by David Webb Peoples, whose credits include some of my favourite films such as Blade Runner, Unforgiven, and Twelve Monkeys. That alone proved intriguing, and also I'm pretty sure that Kurt Russell is one of those actors who I'll watch in anything. Nothing that Anderson's done since then seems to seriously interest me, but Soldier looked like it might have had some untapped X-factor beneath its seemingly unimpressive surface.
Soldier takes place several decades in the future (and possibly within the same universe as Blade Runner, if the odd throwaway reference is to be believed) and centres on the idea that the government has bred their own army of super-soldiers. The opening montage follows one of the program's soldiers from infancy through an incredibly grueling period of training where only the strong survive and eventually concludes by revealing the eponymous soldier (Russell) as a battle-hardened veteran. The plot kicks in when a smug colonel (Jason Isaacs) reveals that a new breed of super-soldier has been created that promises to surpass soldiers like Russell in terms of efficiency. When an exercise intended to demonstrate the new soldiers' power goes horribly wrong, Russell is assumed dead and is transported to a planet reserved for waste disposal. After he recovers, he soon comes into contact with a group of dispossessed colonists who have been forced to make new lives for themselves on the planet's garbage-strewn surface without any hope of rescue. Russell, who has known nothing but fighting for his entire life, naturally struggles to fit in with the peaceful community, but that's not the worst of his problems...
I can definitely see why others might be willing to give Soldier the benefit of the doubt. Russell's character seems like a well-developed one as he must come to terms with the fact that he has effectively been rendered obsolete and, once he is kicked out of the only life he's ever known, doesn't know what it means to be a human being. That same questioning of one's nature and what difference it makes is definitely at the heart of the more well-known films that Peoples scripted, and here Russell isn't given over to speaking at length about his inner demons. The conditioning leads to him going without speaking except when it is absolutely necessary, and even then he still acts like he's addressing a superior instead of an equal. It becomes a very physical performance as Russell must subtly express his existential crisis through body language instead of verbal communication, and in that regard his performance definitely works. However, there's not that much more to the film's plot than that and so the whole thing ends up being quite the chore. The first act teases out some promising action scenes but only delivers on a fairly slight fight between Russell and his aggressive opponent (Jason Scott Lee). The second act then starts to drag as he must try to fit in with the peaceful community of colonists, which should be promising but doesn't exactly expand too well on that potential. As a result, things just shuffle along towards the inevitably action-packed third act,which is handled well enough but not well enough to make the film work as a whole.
Soldier seems like a good idea in theory but less so in practice. One could easily lay a lot of the blame on Anderson and his weaknesses as a director, but one could just as easily see the script as an example of diminishing returns on the part of Peoples. Though the cast is stacked with some capable performers including Isaacs, Gary Busey, Connie Nielsen, and Sean Pertwee, they all seem to be rather wasted in a film that provides a weak examination of themes that have arguably been covered better before and since. That also serves to scupper the action side of things a bit as the film reserves the bulk of its action for its third act, so it's extremely uneven as well. It's kind of the same problem that plagued the slightly similar Universal Soldier, which didn't quite seem to be able to deliver either weighty science-fiction or bombastic action thrills. At least the van Damme film was redeemed somewhat by the most recent pair of sequels that actually built on the wasted potential of the original - Soldier, on the other hand, gets no such luck and must live and die as a film that, much like its protagonist, seems to live only for utilitarian acts of violence and little else.
Paul W.S. Anderson, 1998
A man who has been bred since birth to be an unthinking super-soldier is incapacitated by a superior model and is subsequently discarded on a planet dedicated to waste disposal.
Before Paul W.S. Anderson got caught up in spawning trashy franchises that would lead to his name being mentioned in the same breath as Uwe Boll or Michael Bay, he actually did seem to have a somewhat promising (if not too ambitious) filmmaking career. His break-out film Mortal Kombat is hardly a masterpiece, but it's actually fairly fun if taken as the lightweight kung-fu fantasy that it's intended to be. Event Horizon is often considered his best film because it does create a solid blend of sci-fi and horror with its vaguely Lovecraftian tale of a haunted spaceship. At the very least, those two films had enough quality between them to make his next film seem promising. The screenplay for Soldier is by David Webb Peoples, whose credits include some of my favourite films such as Blade Runner, Unforgiven, and Twelve Monkeys. That alone proved intriguing, and also I'm pretty sure that Kurt Russell is one of those actors who I'll watch in anything. Nothing that Anderson's done since then seems to seriously interest me, but Soldier looked like it might have had some untapped X-factor beneath its seemingly unimpressive surface.
Soldier takes place several decades in the future (and possibly within the same universe as Blade Runner, if the odd throwaway reference is to be believed) and centres on the idea that the government has bred their own army of super-soldiers. The opening montage follows one of the program's soldiers from infancy through an incredibly grueling period of training where only the strong survive and eventually concludes by revealing the eponymous soldier (Russell) as a battle-hardened veteran. The plot kicks in when a smug colonel (Jason Isaacs) reveals that a new breed of super-soldier has been created that promises to surpass soldiers like Russell in terms of efficiency. When an exercise intended to demonstrate the new soldiers' power goes horribly wrong, Russell is assumed dead and is transported to a planet reserved for waste disposal. After he recovers, he soon comes into contact with a group of dispossessed colonists who have been forced to make new lives for themselves on the planet's garbage-strewn surface without any hope of rescue. Russell, who has known nothing but fighting for his entire life, naturally struggles to fit in with the peaceful community, but that's not the worst of his problems...
I can definitely see why others might be willing to give Soldier the benefit of the doubt. Russell's character seems like a well-developed one as he must come to terms with the fact that he has effectively been rendered obsolete and, once he is kicked out of the only life he's ever known, doesn't know what it means to be a human being. That same questioning of one's nature and what difference it makes is definitely at the heart of the more well-known films that Peoples scripted, and here Russell isn't given over to speaking at length about his inner demons. The conditioning leads to him going without speaking except when it is absolutely necessary, and even then he still acts like he's addressing a superior instead of an equal. It becomes a very physical performance as Russell must subtly express his existential crisis through body language instead of verbal communication, and in that regard his performance definitely works. However, there's not that much more to the film's plot than that and so the whole thing ends up being quite the chore. The first act teases out some promising action scenes but only delivers on a fairly slight fight between Russell and his aggressive opponent (Jason Scott Lee). The second act then starts to drag as he must try to fit in with the peaceful community of colonists, which should be promising but doesn't exactly expand too well on that potential. As a result, things just shuffle along towards the inevitably action-packed third act,which is handled well enough but not well enough to make the film work as a whole.
Soldier seems like a good idea in theory but less so in practice. One could easily lay a lot of the blame on Anderson and his weaknesses as a director, but one could just as easily see the script as an example of diminishing returns on the part of Peoples. Though the cast is stacked with some capable performers including Isaacs, Gary Busey, Connie Nielsen, and Sean Pertwee, they all seem to be rather wasted in a film that provides a weak examination of themes that have arguably been covered better before and since. That also serves to scupper the action side of things a bit as the film reserves the bulk of its action for its third act, so it's extremely uneven as well. It's kind of the same problem that plagued the slightly similar Universal Soldier, which didn't quite seem to be able to deliver either weighty science-fiction or bombastic action thrills. At least the van Damme film was redeemed somewhat by the most recent pair of sequels that actually built on the wasted potential of the original - Soldier, on the other hand, gets no such luck and must live and die as a film that, much like its protagonist, seems to live only for utilitarian acts of violence and little else.