Cult-Movie Review: Soldier (1998)

Last week, I reviewed First Blood (1982) on the blog.  That film involves a soldier who returns home from Vietnam and learns that, following the war, he is hated by the very people who sent him to fight, and also by the people at home. 

After the war -- after all his training and service to his country -- John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) can’t keep or even get a decent job in America.  He becomes, in a way, the ultimate outsider.

Soldier (1998), starring Kurt Russell, is a space-age variation on the same tale, but without many of the philosophical contradictions that made the Stallone film such a challenging and vital work of art. 

In First Blood, Rambo launched a one man war against a civilian town in the Pacific Northwest, and so the lines between good guy and bad guy were blurred.

In Soldier, Russell’s character, Todd, defends a village of defenseless citizens from rampaging, genetically-engineered soldiers who have rendered him and his kind “obsolete.”  Thus, Todd must never traverse what we could consider difficult ethical or moral boundaries.  On the contrary, Todd proves his mettle to the civilians in battle, which was the very thing that Rambo ultimately found impossible to do.

Soldier was directed by Paul Anderson, who in 1997 gave the world a very effective space-horror film, Event Horizon.  Yet Soldier feels like a step down from that movie, both in terms of complexity and visualization.   There’s a kind of claustrophobia or sound-stage-like feel to Soldier’s exterior scenes, and much footage is recycled (particularly in a musical montage), or slowed down to make it seem more effectively shot…as though not enough good material was captured during production. 

Despite the stage-y feel and botched editing of Soldier, the film boasts a remarkable strength that goes a long way towards repairing the aspects of the drama that don’t work. 

That strength is named Kurt Russell.

Again and again Anderson focuses intently on Russell’s soulful, haunted eyes -- frequently in extreme close-up -- and so a powerful connection is forged between the character, Todd, and the audience. Throughout the film we see Todd involved in horrible violence, and wonder if that means he is an unfeeling monster.  Russell’s eyes tell us that he is not. 

Russell has very few lines of dialogue in Soldier, and yet he is a powerful central presence, and an emotional one.  Russell never gets a “raw” monologue like Stallone’s in First Blood -- an emotional catharsis that explodes off the screen -- but instead he carries that sad, tortured countenance throughout the narrative, and this approach is, broadly-speaking, effective. 

Intriguingly, Todd’s predicament is not that he doesn’t fit in. It’s that he has never known how to live because he has never been anything other than a soldier.  Todd doesn’t know what it means to truly be with other people, to be near children or women.  But he has good instincts (and a good heart…) and the film suggests that these elements of his emotional gestalt represent the starting point of his journey to join, at long last, the human race.

That’s a powerful notion, and occasionally Soldier alights on a strong image to go with it, like soldiers being dumped, literally, in the trash, unwanted by society, amid the flotsam and jetsam of the military-industrial complex, which produces new war machines -- and soldiers -- at a prodigious rate.

Reviews for Soldier were quite savage in 1998, mostly for the flaws I note above, yet director Anderson undeniably makes the most out of Russell’s screen presence, so much that that Soldier proves unexpectedly powerful in spots, and an intriguing if compromised effort to bring the First Blood aesthetic to the final frontier.

“Soldiers deserve soldiers.”

In 1996, the Adam Project is initiated. It is a rigorous military training program in which babies are taken and trained by the Army from birth. The children are exposed to bloody violence at a young age, and then encouraged to show strength -- and no mercy -- even to one another.  They study tactics and train to be physically superior.

The greatest of the Adam Project soldiers is Todd (Russell), a soldier who fights multiple successful campaigns, including the War of the Six Cities, the Moscow Incident and the War of the Argentine Moons.  

After decades in service however, under sympathetic Captain Church (Gary Busey), however, Todd and his comrades are rendered obsolete by a new generation of genetically-engineered soldiers. 

When Colonel Mekum (Jason Isaac’s) new soldiers, led by Caine (Jason Scott Lee) defeat Todd and two others in a training exercise, Todd is left for dead, and transported to Arcadia 234, a disposal planet far out in space.

Alone and without a war to fight, Todd explores the inhospitable planet until he finds a small colony of crash survivors, who have been living on Arcadia in peace for twelve years.  A family, consisting of Mace, Sandra and little Nathan, nurse Todd back to health.  The colonists are wary of Todd because all he can do is wage war, and at one point, resolve to send him away, fearing he represents a threat to their continued survival.

Before long, however, Colonel Mekum, Caine and the new soldiers arrive on the planet for a training exercise, and immediately classify the colony as hostile.  Now Todd has a new war to fight, with the future of his friends at stake.

“Fear and discipline…always.”

Soldier borrows from First Blood (1982) and other 1980s action films, such as Missing in Action (1984), and thus qualifies as a futuristic pastiche. 

For instance, Gary Busey plays likable if stern Captain Church, a surrogate for Richard Crenna’s character, Trautman, in the Rambo saga. In both cases, a sympathetic military officer -- sometimes aligned with a hostile military or law enforcement hierarchy -- offers common-sense counsel about his preferred soldier (John Rambo/Todd), but is routinely ignored. When the military hierarchy, here represented by Mekum, fails to defeat that soldier, Trautman/Church is there to warn that the renegade and “real” soldier has been underestimated, and that his “war” is righteous.

Similarly, Soldier re-stages action moments we’ve seen in a lot of these war films. 

At one point, Todd hides in a river from the enemy soldiers, and rises up, with a machine gun, from the placid water, to open fire on them.  We’ve seen this shot in many, many films, but I remember it specifically from Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action.

Similarly, some folks may see the idea of a soldier without a nation defending a harmless colony as evoking Seven Samurai (1954) or The Magnificent Seven (1960), as well.

But Soldier seems half-formed, or half-conceived, in the sense that it never takes a stance on the fact the opening scenes of the film reveal Todd as a cold-blooded killer (for his country).  We see him in action, doing much the same horrible things that Caine does later, on Arcadia.  Specifically, we see him murdering unarmed civilians.  The idea may be that by being cast-out and ignored by those he once served, Todd gains his “humanity,” but again, Todd never really grapples explicitly with that concept. He never seems to doubt who he is or why he was made, and instead merely uses his skills to kill the soldiers who threaten the colony. 

Yet -- significantly -- the new soldiers like Caine are serving very much as Todd once served: without question. There is only a hint of Todd’s awareness of this fact when he notes that “soldiers deserve soldiers,” an acknowledgement of an unspoken brotherhood, even with the enemy. Even bad soldiers deserve to die, apparently, at the hands of other soldiers.

Oppositely, however, Soldier often does a fine job of explaining Todd’s mind-set as a soldier. “Fear and discipline…always,” he states. 

Those qualities represent the impetus that drives him to fight and kill for a cause that isn’t truly his.   By contrast, Todd’s defense of the colony -- protection of the innocent -- seems to be the thing that spurs his re-birth as a human being.  He fights on this occasion not out of fear or discipline, but out of a desire to protect those that he has come to care about.  He has learned that civilians aren’t merely human shields, but it would be great if we saw how Todd came to that reckoning in more persuasive and explicit terms.

Although some of Soldier’s visuals now seem dated because of the CGI, the alien planet still looks terrific in long shot.  The piles of of trash reaching to the Heavens seem to forecast the post-apocalyptic Earth of Wall-E (2008), and the nature of the “cast-off” garbage is important too.  

We see the Liberty Bell in the garbage heap on the disposal ship, for instance, a suggestion that in this future, freedom and liberty are dead. 

Similarly, we see a giant aircraft carrier dumped on its side, left there on the surface. It is an avatar for military waste and the grinding gears of so-called technological “progress.”  A new machine replaces an old machine, just as a new soldier replaces an old soldier.  Such visuals suggest that the human race is very good and dreaming new, more efficient ways, to kill and destroy

Alas, the scenes involving actors on the ground (and not CGI landscapes) look very stage-bound, and somewhat cheap.  We see again and again the same terrain, where a large steel machine (looking a bit like the up-turned rib cage of a giant dinosaur…) stands.  Even with vehicles and men moving back and forth, the battle scenes seem very limited in terms of scope and grandeur.

This is also true in the opening montage, where we see Todd go on numerous missions throughout his career.  The war zones look very obviously like stage sets, and there is something rudimentary, even slap-dash about the staging, as small groups of soldiers march left-to-right across a short zone, guns blazing.

One more step, and they would walk off the set…

Soldier is also scuttled, to some degree, by the cartoon nature of Colonel Mekum’s villainy.  He demonstrates such consistent bad judgment and such cowardice that one wonders how he ever ascended to his position of authority.  At every chance, Mekum makes the wrong, mean, dumb decision, and then his character is completely undercut by the moment in which Todd grabs him, and he pisses his pants.  Instead of being presented as a clever, dangerous opponent, Mekum is a straw man who is easily brought down so that Todd looks stronger, smarter, and better than those he opposes.  Like Teasle in First Blood, there is no overt or clear-cut motivation for Mekum’s cruelty.  He’s an arrogant jerk, it seems, simply to move the story along from one point to the next.

All these aspects of Soldier diminish the film, and yet, on the other hand, you’ve got Russell. 

Although I grew up in the eighties with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Norris, Seagal, Van Damme, and other “action heroes,” Russell has always been my favorite.  As Snake Plissken, Jack Burton, and R.J. MacReady and Gabriel Cash, Russell projects more than mere physical strength…he projects cunning, humanity, bemusement, and, finally, a sense that he is a real human being, not a super-man impervious to bullets. 

Because he is an actor first, an action hero second, Russell is always able to excavate and convey hidden layers of a character’s psyche, and that’s precisely what he does here.  His Todd thus comes across as both a great soldier and an innocent in terms of human emotions. He is both incredibly strong and incredibly vulnerable.

We see that despite Todd’s strength and power, he is, essentially, a child.  His emotional development is arrested.  He knows nothing of what it means to be human, and his attempts to be human are awkward and not always successful.  Similarly, when he fails in his endeavors, Todd resorts to might…a punching bag that bloodies his knuckles, because that is all he has ever known: resolution through violence.

Anderson proves adroit in his use of Russell in the film, both in terms of the near ubiquitous close-ups (which showcase Russell’s gentle eyes) and his placement in the frame.  There are several times, for instance, in the film, where Todd is blocked in the action as being apart or separated from the rest of the colonists.  At one point, he is framed through a window, cursed to be the outsider, and never a participant.

Later, he sits alone, outside the colony buildings, and is bracketed by machines that have been re-purposed from junk by the colonists.  The implication is that he is too trying to re-purpose himself to be useful in his new environments.

Another nicely-lensed sequence that showcases the essence of Russell’s sensitivity in this role involves his quiet yearning for Sandra (Connie Nielson).  As she speaks to him, folding laundry, Todd’s gaze wanders. 

We see slow, detailed shots of her eyes, her mouth, even her chest, and we realize this is Todd’s point of view.  This may sound lascivious, but it doesn’t play that way.  Instead, it plays out as an extended, almost sensual moment…because Todd is innocent, feeling the first longings of desire.  It’s not rude (as it sounds…), just his first attempts at “exploring” (with his eyes) the beauty of a woman, an aspect of humanity he hasn’t known.

As a pastiche of war movies like First Blood, Soldier resurrects a lot of clichés, but for the space age.  I noted so above, but the movie has a lot of running from explosions, decoys that fool the bad guys, and other familiar set-pieces.  The staging and execution of a lot of the action leaves something to be desired and yet I have returned to watch Soldier (1998) probably three or four times since I saw it in the late 1990s.  For all its flaws, the movie does manage to make us care about Todd, and mourn the fact that he was taken from his family and made to be a killer.

We understand that he could be so much more.

How could Soldier have been better?  Well, I concur with Church’s words to Mekum.  Director Paul Anderson should have made the movie “smarter” instead of “fast.”

The power of Russell’s strong but vulnerable performance drags Soldier over the finish line with a surprising amount of success, but with a little more back-up from the director and screenwriter in terms of execution and originality the movie -- like the film’s hero-- could have transcended expectations for it.