Subject: Review: Soldier (1998)

From: James Brundage <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 Jan 1999 20:05:30 GMT

Soldier (1998)

As reviewed by James Brundage

Just how many times has Paul Anderson seen Dune? I mean, when you find
yourself on a planet with massive wastelands, lots of sandstorms, and one
person who leads the social group that he's not originally from to safety or
some such crap, doesn't that remind you of a certain David Lynch film circa
1984?

Maybe if he was in Lynch's territory it would have turned out better.
Anderson, director of Mortal Kombat, and Event Horizon, set his sights on
making his "sci-fi masterpiece" with a human element this time by setting
himself down to work on a good premise movie, and ended up screwing that up,
which you'd figure would be easy. If he'd made it out of studio, tried the
independent road, the film might just have turned out quasi-semi-decent,
instead of ye load of crap which we see before us now. But he decided to
stay with the high paycheck security of a movie that relies on being blind
and not noticing the plot holes that are large enough to walk through.

The movie has a specific cadre of people drafted at birth and becoming the
perfect soldier, not speaking unless spoken to, and following all orders.
Not speaking is good news, we don't have to listen to Kurt Russell attempt
to utter a line… in fact, we don't hear his voice until about a half hour
into the movie. All of these people watch atrocities, kill civilians, and go
through life without emotion. Good premise.

He's replaced, of course, when they come out with genetic models that were
designed in Japan and made in China, in otherwords, cheaper, better. And of
course he's still alive when they dump him on a waste planet. And, of
course, he finds other inhabitants and isn't quite accepted amongst them,
due to massive war flashbacks and a nice little human element that almost
works… until they put the action in.

In fact, if you took out the action sequences at the end, it'd be a good
movie.

But, no, instead, you have Kurt Russell kicking butt like he always does…
badly. And you end up hating the movie that started out so good, started out
so intriguing. If I could just make a single splice, I'd save it…

But, hey, you know what they say, always the critic, never the criticized.