Doomsday Reels: Soldier

Soldier (1998)

The Director

Paul W.S. Anderson

The Actors

Kurt Russell (Todd 3465), Connie Nielsen (Sandra), Sean Pertwee (Mace), Jason Scott Lee (Cain 607), Jason Isaacs (Colonel Mekum), Gary Busey (Church)

The Trailer

The Cause

Pollution/War

The Story

" Galactic wars of the near-future are fought by soldiers trained as merciless, obedient warriors. But times change. New bioengineered combatants make veterans like Sgt. Todd (Kurt Russell) obsolete. But don’t expect to toss Todd on the scrap heap without a fight." - Amazon summary

The Rundown

Well, since I dove into the well of various cuts of Blade Runner I felt it was only fair that I tackle the film's kind-a-sorta sidequel. You see, David Webb Peoples (writer of Ladyhawke, Leviathan, Unforgiven, Twelve Monkeys, and the writer/director of past Doomsday Reels feature The Blood of Heroes) is one of the writers of the screenplay to Blade Runner and he wrote Soldier as a film that takes place in a different corner of the same universe.

The actual proof that Soldier and Blade Runner are connected is pretty slim. There's a blink-and-you'll miss it cameo from a spinner (in fairness the wreckage of the plane from Executive Decision is also featured in a scene) and there are a handful of references to the battle of Tanhauser Gate where Roy Batty saw things you people wouldn't believe.

The plot is that Todd (Kurt Russell) the best of his class of soldiers (orphans raised from birth to be lethal and follow orders) is defeated by Cain, a new type of genetically engineered (probably replicant) soldier. Todd is presumed dead and is dumped on a garbage planet and his squadron are bumped down to an unarmed recon outfit.

On the junk planet, Todd hooks up with a group of shipwrecked settlers eking out a living on the planet-sized landfill. Todd tries to acclimate himself to this new society whilst Cain's group prepares to survey the supposedly uninhabited planet and shoot anything that lives.

Now I've been a Paul W.S. Anderson apologist in the past because as willfully dumb as his movies tend to be he knows how to shoot a coherent action scene (a greater rarity with each passing day) and the man is clearly earnest about his movies, however flawed.

And two films I will take no disrespect for are 1997's Event Horizon and 1998's Soldier. At the time this movie received a solid critical trouncing, flopped hard, and was buried in obscurity. it might have gotten revisited had its director not grown to be infamous for making bad action movies. But Anderson's film-making abilities aside (and he hadn't discovered bullet time or Milla Jovovich yet, so some of his more exploited muses are not in evidence here), Soldier is a damn solid film and I will stand by that.

I fear the connection to Blade Runner hampers this movie because it's a much more simple story. While Blade Runner was a film noir detective movie, Soldier is an old Hollywood-style western. Westerns have always been more populist than noir and Soldier is a much more populist movie than Blade Runner, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any depth or an edge.

While the movie is ostensibly an action film that's really only relegated to a long extended section of the third act. At the heart of the movie is Kurt Russell as Todd, a man who was raised to kill from earliest childhood and is having trouble adjusting to a world where he is expected to do something other than follow orders or kill people. Todd is a scared child in a man's body, dealing with a lifetime's worth of repressed emotions and a hefty dose of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a soldier-returns-from war movie fit through a Doomsday Western set-up and while it tends to be a bit heavy handed at times it works.

A large part of the reason this movie works is because of Kurt Russell. Russell was the but of many a joke at the time because Paul W. S. Anderson took one of the most charismatic and verbose actors of all time and gave him a part with barely any lines. I've heard many a person say that Kurt Russell was wasted in the lead role of this movie but me and Michael McDonald know that that's what a fool believes. I can't say for certain but this may in fact be the best performance of Kurt Russell's entire career. With very few lines read in a near monotone and a very rigid and still body language, Kurt Russell has to sell the emotional turmoil in Todd's head through nothing more than his eyes and he nails it every single time.

Similarly, Todd's ersatz nemesis, Cain is not asked to do quite as much but still serves as a perfect "dark" version of Todd. Jason Scott Lee puts menace in every moment of the film he's in even if his character is behaving in a placid manner. The only really weak performance in the film is Jason Isaacs and that's mostly because he's written as a sort of sniveling bastard military officer.

I'm sure it seems very quaint now but post-traumatic stress and the toll that military training takes on a soldier were not really things people talked a lot about in 1998. Action movies were at the highest level of bro-toxicity (Steven Seagal's career was just past its zenith and hadn't yet begun to plummet) and the concept of an action movie where one of the key moments of the movie is the lead character crying was not a thing to win hearts and minds.

There's an emotional core that a lot of 90s action movies lacked, that a lot of contemporary action movies still lack, at the center of Soldier. Sure there are some gloriously violent moments in the movie but the really significant plot-beats are all moments of tenderness, very small but significant emotional beats. You didn't really see this sort of machismo-deconstruction in action movies that didn't have Patrick Swayze. Hell, this movie is basically Shane so that makes Soldier the good version of Steel Dawn. Whatever meat-headed qualities you can attribute to this movie (and there certainly are a few) it doesn't change the fact that the big moment the movie leaves us on is this burly action hero showing affection for a child.

Aside from the story, the movie is visually arresting and features some great set design and special effects work. Even most of the early CG used in the film holds up fairly well. It's a shame that Anderson never quite reached this height of film-making again and that this movie wasn't rewarded for being something different. It's especially disappointing that Kurt Russell never really got his due for his work here.

I also want to address something that nearly every review I've read of this movie has brought up. Yes, this pseudo action movie has a Loreena McKennit song in it. I get that Loreena McKennit is to white middle-aged new-agey ladies as Toris Amos is to manic reformed gen-x mall goths but the song featured (Night Ride Across the Caucasus) is one of McKennit's better songs and it fits the tone of the scene in which the song appears. Thankfully W.S. Anderson saves the shitty late-90s rock music for the end credits.