Cult-Movie Review: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Director Quentin Tarantino may have intentionally mangled the English language with the misspelled title of his cinematic effort Inglourious Basterds (2009), but this prodigious talent speaks the language of film with a perfect accent. 

Although Tarantino's production shares a title (sort of...) with 1978's The Inglorious Bastards (from director Enzo G. Castellari) there's not actually much similarity between the two efforts. Both films are set during World War II, and both films concern an important mission behind enemy lines.

After that, leave your expectations at the door. The 1978 film is a low-budget exploitation actioner (with Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson), but Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino's trademark specialty: art-house exploitation.

In other words, Tarantino doesn't craft anything remotely like an action yarn here. Instead, Inglourious Basterds is an almost sedentary, deliberately-paced film about personal warfare, not the international, global variety we've come to expect from the WWII film. 

This isn't Saving Private Ryan (1998). No beaches are stormed. No wartime platitudes are reinforced.

"Looks like the shoe's on the other foot," The Powerful and the Powerless in Inglourious Basterds

The backdrop for this 2009 drama is indeed the war effort in general, and a group of American soldiers behind enemy lines, but the guts of the narrative involve feelings of personal disquiet: the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness engendered by the Nazi Regime, and the Basterds' dedicated attempts to give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine.

Some scholars and pundits have suggested that the film is morally facile, a simple revenge picture that makes the American Basterds (Jewish-American soldiers...) as reprehensible as the Nazis they fight in Europe; but that doesn't seem legitimately the case.

Tarantino's focus isn't necessarily on brutal, bloody violence, but on power, and how it feels to be the party without it. 

The Basterds in the film, as well as a Jewish cinema owner named Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), exact violent retribution against the Nazis, it is true. But, oddly -- in almost every situation -- it feels not like eye-for-an-eye Draconian violence, but rather an assertion or re-assertion of self, or self-actualization, if that's possible.

This is why, I suspect, the film's fiery final sequence quotes extensively from De Palma's Carrie (1976) and the famous sequence at the high school prom. Both movies concern the victimized pushed too far, taking back the power for themselves in an apocalyptic showdown.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, however. Inglourious Basterds is a film consisting of five separate or episodic chapters. The first chapter "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France" goes a long way towards establishing the feelings of personal powerlessness the Nazis so ruthlessly exploit.

A dairy farmer who is hiding Jewish refugees in his house is visited on his remote farm by Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who is nicknamed "The Jew Hunter." Landa gains entry to the house, enjoys a glass of milk, switches the conversation from French to English, and then -- without even verbally leveling much of a threat -- makes the weeping farmer, LaPadite, surrender his hidden wards. The refugees are then brutally shot down, and only 18-year old Shoshanna escapes the massacre.

The conversation between Landa and LaPadite is lengthy. It goes on and on, and Tarantino holds the scene for a duration approaching twenty minutes. 

The aspect of this scene that makes it work so splendidly and which makes it increasingly suspenseful as it continues is the very thing that remains determinedly unspoken: Landa's total and complete domination of the poor farmer. LaPadite has no options; no recourse; nowhere even to lodge a complaint. He can't fight, or he will sacrifice his family. He can't bargain, either. There's absolutely nothing to be done. Landa comes into his home, is unfailingly polite and courteous...and is completely in control. The Nazi has no need to flex his muscles (or twirl his metaphorical mustache), to assert his authority. His authority simply...goes without saying.

This powerful and frightening idea recurs in Chapter Three, "German Night in Paris." Shoshanna -- now a cinema owner in France hiding under the name Emmanuelle Mimieux (think Yvette Mimieux) -- unexpectedly meets Nazi sniper and war hero Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). He is starring in Goebbel's latest propaganda film, Nation's Pride, and he quickly devises the notion that Shoshanna's cinema should host the film's premiere.

Again: she is not asked about this. Her counsel is not sought. Shoshanna is not given an out so she can politely demure. Instead, she is escorted to a nearby restaurant and introduced to Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who immediately and unquestioningly assumes her total and complete cooperation. 

Like Landa in Chapter One, the Nazis here are not over-the-top schemers or brutal torturers for us to sneer at. Instead, they are so confident in their total authority that there's no need for showy demonstrations, as we would no doubt see in lesser films.

In the most dramatic example of Shoshanna's utter powerlessness in the face of the Nazi domination, Hans Landa even gets to dictate to the cinema owner when she should eat her strudel. She is about to take a bite, but he has forgotten to order whip cream. 

"Wait for the cream," he utters with a wolfish smile.

It isn't a request. It's an order.

Thus -- in albeit strange and unconventional fashion -- the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are more frightening than almost any you've seen depicted in a movie before. They appear courteous and civil, but that's only because their domination is unchallenged; unquestioned. These men walk the Earth as Gods: every demand met, every order followed, every desire sated.

From the predicaments of the farmer and Shosanna in their respective chapters, the audience quickly detects how the basic human freedom of choice (even the choice when to eat your dessert) has been removed from those living in territory occupied by the Germans.

Tarantino's selections (in actors; in tone; in holding on a particular scene) all play this idea out adroitly. The scene set in the Tavern is not much different: an S.S. officer strides onto the scene and expects to have his demands for attention met, without question.

The eminently just punchline comes in the film's valedictory scene and composition. The leader of the Basterds, Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) has been forced to cede authority to Landa. Landa thinks that -- as usual -- he is totally in command. 

He has become used to his unlimited, unspoken power. And with one powerful, if small act, Raines questions that assumption....with a knife. It's not just revenge for the sake of revenge; it's not bloody for the sake of gore. It's a lesson, actually, in what freedom represents; and the fear that people feel when that freedom is stolen from them. 

When Aldo carves swastikas on the foreheads of his enemies, he is questioning what the Nazis believe is unquestionable; their total authority and superiority. Aldo does not kill, but he makes the Nazis experience fear -- and powerlessness -- for the first time.

"We're going to make a film. Just for the Nazis." Homage and Tribute in Tarantino's Film

Inglourious Basterds also proves intriguing in much the same the fashion as Tarantino's other films do. In other words, the movie functions as a dedicated homage to other war films, and as a tribute to the culture of movies itself.  We see this in Death Proof (2007) as well: the notion of a universe built from other movies, and allusions to other movies.

In ways simple (Aldo Raines = Aldo Ray) and ways complex, Tarantino gets in some edgy commentary here about the power of images; about the power of the medium itself.

Even casting is vitally important. For instance, horror director Eli Roth plays the "golem" nicknamed "The Bear Jew," the Basterd who brandishes a baseball bat against recalcitrant Nazis.

We already associate Roth with scenes of extreme violence and gore thanks to his role directing (the masterpiece...) Hostel (2005), and so the actor's participation in what promises to be the film's most violent scene works commendably to the movie's advantage. 

Here comes Eli Roth doing what Eli Roth does best...or so we think.

But Inglourious Basterds is a movie about movies in deeper, more meaningful ways too. 

A propaganda film, like Goebbel's "Nation's Pride," could conceivably galvanize a demoralized nation, we are meant to understand. It could literally turn around the war, and that's something that can't be allowed to happen. How Shoshanna subverts Zoller's film is one of the film's highlights; especially since her "phantom edit" plays to what is literally a captive audience.

Likewise, a movie critic like Hicox (Michael Fassbender) could conceivably boast the knowledge to make for an effective undercover agent in France, although a hand signal (not entirely unlike "thumbs up" or "thumbs down") could also doom him.

And finally, as Inglourious Basterds trenchantly reminds us, a film can be an instrument of propaganda or an instrument of justice. Film might even be, literally, a weapon. Film reels  literally double as the bomb that kills Hitler in the film's denouement.

And there's another thing about movies that Tarantino tells us here.

Movies  have no overriding responsibility to be true to the historical record. I mean...we all know how World War II ended, but Tarantino provides us a more satisfying, fairy tale, movie ending: one in which the powerful are given a lesson in powerlessness, and those without freedom find -- even for an instant -- liberty's power.

Inglorious Basterds is not the place to seek historical accuracy; it's a place to ponder the ways that movies -- as propaganda or vehicles of justice/vengeance -- can satisfy and offer emotional closure regarding a whole variety of issues. 

Isn't it better than history, really, that a Jewish woman victimized by the Third Reich should bring it down?

If we could write our own endings, isn't this the dramatic, poetic one we would desire? The underdog has her day, and the scales of justice are righted. 

Since this isn't real life, why not?

"I think this just might be my masterpiece." Or "That's a Bingo."

Given the importance of movie history and film in Inglorious Basterds, I find it fascinating that the last act in the film quotes so heavily from the work of my all-time favorite director: Brian De Palma.

I mentioned Carrie at the Prom vs. Shoshanna at the Premiere, but it's much more than that too.

Notice, for instance, that the interior of Shoshanna's cinema is colored and designed to resemble the palatial interior of Tony Montana's Miami home in Scarface. There are staircases bracketing both sides of the central hall, with a ledge above -- on the second floor -- and, finally, a room (in the center of the frame...) leading back to a private domain (office or auditorium).

In Scarface, this grand hall is where Tony goes out in a blaze of glory ("Say Hello to My Little Friend..."). In a very real way, that's also Shoshanna's fate.

Both characters also share something else in common: they went from being powerless, to possessing all the power. 

Only in Tony's case, he misused and abused that power (through a drug haze). By contrast, our sympathies remain with Shoshanna throughout Inglourious Basterds. She is setting things right (and ending the war...), not committing a cocaine-addled suicide.

Why quote De Palma so extensively here? 

Well, we know that Carrie is in Tarantino's top five favorite film list (at least last time I checked). But the images and compositions that recall De Palma are well picked for reasons of theme and recognition too. 

Both Carrie at the Prom -- the victim taking out the victimizers -- and Tony's last stand -- a staccato suicide by machine gun -- embody an important part of our contemporary pop culture lexicon. 

Carrie is about the effect that cruelty has on a person, even a good person. And Scarface is about power corrupting, absolutely. So Shoshanna may be Carrie; and Hitler may be Tony Montana, in some sense..

One of the qualities that I admire most about Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's manner of making the intimate seem epic. This movie is about a big topic indeed (World War II) but it features almost no scenes of battle or any traditional war scenes, for that matter. 

The film consists mostly of a scene in a farm, in a tavern basement, and, finally, in a cinema. We see no tanks, no infantries on the move, and no impending air strikes.

Instead, Tarantino hammers home his theme of the powerful versus the powerless, and does so with just a handful of very intriguing, very human characters. The drama is entirely intimate though, in typical Tarantino fashion, the human behavior is also a bit exaggerated in some cases. In the case of Aldo Raines, I would argue it's almost cartoonish. But even he reflects something vitally important.

Sometimes you need bravado in the face of a powerful enemy. Inglourious Basterds reveals that Raines has that bravado in spades, but even more so, that the film's director does.  

Cult-Movie Trailer: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Pop Art: Independence Day (1996) Video Game

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At Anorak: The Day of the Animals - The Five Strangest Revenge of Nature Movies of the 1970s

My latest article is posted at Anorak, and it remembers the revenge of nature horror cycle of the 1970s.

Here's a snippet (and the url: http://www.anorak.co.uk/402579/news/flashback/the-day-of-the-animals-the-5-strangest-revenge-of-nature-movies-of-the-1970s.html/  ):

IT’S not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

In the seventies, science fiction and horror filmmakers were certain that mankind was going to soon face his comeuppance for polluting and over-populating Mother Earth. And more so, that this comeuppance was going to be delivered at the paws, claws, talons, webbed fingers, and teeth of our former friends: the animals.

Call it the Circle of Death.

Between 1970 and 1979, more than a dozen genre films involved Mother Nature striking back against man for his mis-use of pesticides, his damage of the ozone layer, and for polluting previously unspoiled terrain.

Among these movies were titles such as The Bug (1975), Food of the Gods (1976), Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), and Empire of the Ants (1977).

From a certain perspective, even blockbuster films such as Jaws (1975) — which saw a great white shark attack a beach town’s economy virtually forty years to the day that atom bombs were dropped on Japan — and Dino De Laurentiis’s King Kong (1976) — in which the noble ape was exploited by an Exxon-like oil company — tread into this then-popular “revenge-of-nature” territory.

So with that prologue in mind, here is a look back at five of the most bizarre Revenge of Nature films of the 1970s.

The Visitors are Coming: V: The Series: "The Betrayal" (January 18, 1985)

In “The Betrayal,” Willie (Robert Englund) is wounded while attempting to contact another Fifth Columnist, Simon, and Diana (Jane Badler) presses her case for John (Bruce Davison) to impregnate Robin Mawell (Blair Tefkin) for the purpose of creating a second Star Child.

While the Resistance attempts to abduct a Visitor doctor to help Willie, Kyle (Jeff Yagher) learns that Chiang (Aki Aleong) is the real power in Los Angeles now, standing-in for his terminally-wounded father, Nathan Bates (Lane Smith). 

After Nathan is killed in a confrontation at Science Frontiers, and Robin learns she is not pregnant, all-out war comes to the once “Open City.”  

Accordingly, Ham (Michael Ironsides) and Robin makes plans to leave Los Angeles.

The cast massacre that commenced with Elias (Michael Wright) in “The Hero” culminates in “The Betrayal,” as the series loses three main characters and actors: Lane Smith’s Nathan Bates, Blair Tefkin’s Robin Maxwell, and most devastating of all, Michael Ironside’s Ham Tyler.

It’s fascinating that all the “pain” lands on the human side of the equation, but it would have been unthinkable to remove Diana, or Lydia from the format.  Badler's Diana is a series lynchpin (and the break-out character).  And without Lydia (and June Chadwick) the great Jane Badler would have had no one of consequence to play against.

It’s not difficult, perhaps, to see why Tefkin’s Robin gets cut.  She is not a fighter or a doctor, like Julie, and does not possess a unique set of abilities like Elizabeth.  Furthermore, she is not involved in any sort of romantic duo.  

Furthermore, writers have done her character no favors, especially in her last, brutal space in the spotlight.  She is nearly impregnated by a Visitor for a second time in "The Betrayal, and there’s an old saying: fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice…shame on me.  Robin doesn't transmit as either especially likable or especially smart.  She is no longer fits the "Anne Frank" character-type of the mini-series.

The loss of Nathan Bates occurs, I suspect, for pure cost-cutting reasons. I wonder if the producers knew the series was going to be canceled at this point, and so it was necessary to prune the cast.  If the Open City concept was done, there is simply no reason for the unaligned Nathan Bates to be involved in the series.  

The most grievous loss here, is, of course, Ham Tyler: one of the most popular and beloved characters in the V franchise.  

For me, Ham is a dramatic necessity because he often adds a sense of realism to the episode conflicts.  He’s not an idealist, he’s not a hero, and he's not a romantic lead.  He’s just a guy getting things done the best way he can, and trying to avoid layers of moral conflict.

I suspect Tyler was cut loose at this juncture because if you just look at the characters from a distance, he and Kyle serve what could be mistaken for the same purpose.  They each play the role of the guy reluctant to join the group.  If this is your viewpoint then Ham is redundant, especially given Kyle’s importance to Elizabeth.

What’s missed, largely, by the brutal cast/crew massacre of V’s mid-season is that every-time you remove a character of interest, like the morally-ambiguous but dedicated Ham, or the suburban girl grown up and trying to make her way, or the businessman just looking out for his bottom line, you start to subtract from the reality of the program, and often substantially.  Since we also lose Howard K. Smith of the "Freedom Network" in this episode as well, that's another net-minus.  His short news briefs made it feel that there was more to the world war than the action in Los Angeles.

So now -- suddenly -- you have two male action leads, a female lead, the resident alien, and the comic relief…and that’s it.  You don’t even have a person of color, anymore, among the human resistance.  

And so V’s resistance looks a lot less like real America, and more like a traditional Hollywood B-movie.

By subtracting these characters, the producers also removed the sources of almost all inter-character conflict.  Although the Robin-Kyle-Elizabeth love triangle was dropped long before “The Hero” and “The Betrayal,” losing morally ambiguous characters like Nathan Bates, Ham Tyler, and even to a degree Elias, means suddenly that the surviving characters have no one to rub up against, or chafe against.  Kyle can''t battle -- for form alliances with his father.  And Mike and Julie can''t argue a course of action with Ham.

At this point in V: The Series, the dramatic interest and initiative clearly moves to The Visitors, especially in terms of the next several episodes (“The Rescue,” and “The Champion,” especially).  Now the conflicts on the Mothership involving Diana’s ousting from power and (arranged) marriage to Charles become far more compelling than anything that happens on Earth, where everything is sort of…vanilla.

Other than the scenes involving Diana, Lydia and the Visitors, the final episodes of V are generally poor.  The L.A. Resistance seems to consist of five characters riding around Southern California in a van, and that’s it.  It’s just very underwhelming.

In a sense “The Betrayal” is really a betrayal because what V: The Series gains in terms of economy (and in terms of cut-throat drama…) it loses in terms of realism and interesting characters.

And yet this is undeniably a strong episode in context, and one followed by an even stronger one: “The Rescue.”  

The series has short term success here for the next few weeks, and then all the cast/character/budget cuts start to really hurt V in a dramatic fashion.

Next week: The unforgettable marriage of Charles and Diana in “The Rescue."

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.

Movie Trailer: Soldier (1998)