Subject: Review: Soldier (1998)

From: "Allan Woodward" <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Oct 1998 05:54:46 GMT

Obedience.  Strength.  Conviction.

These are virtues prized by peoples around the world.

Determination.  Skill.  Bravery.

These are the qualities we wish to possess ourselves.

But what happens when these behaviors, these positive traits, are instilled
through a process that robs their owner of the common satisfaction of their
possession?  By what means could we relate to a person whose entire
existence has been turned toward a single focus at the exclusion of
everything else that makes up the totality of life?  What can we learn from
such a person?  What would we see?

Soldier, the latest film from Brit director Paul Anderson (Event Horizon),
attempts in some small way to answer these questions.  Working from a script
by legendary screenwriter David Web Peoples (Blade Runner), Anderson has
enlisted the acting power of Kurt Russell to tell the story of Sergeant
Todd, a warrior of our future, who has never known anything except the
pursuit of soldierly perfection.

The story is fairly straightforward.  Todd is one of a group of men selected
through a grueling eugenics program to be a band of more-or-less super
soldiers.  They do not take pleasure in anything, do not feel anything
except a relentless drive to perform their tasks and are, as such, ideally
suited to their role.  Until the next generation of their kind comes around.

Todd and his fellow "obsolete" soldiers are replaced.  Todd himself, thought
dead, is dumped onto a desolation of a planet to rot.  Here, bereft of his
primary function, he finds new purpose among the ranks of a scavenger
community, especially when this community comes under grave threat.

Anderson describes Soldier as a futuristic version of Shane, but that's
incorrect.  Shane was the story of a
gunfighter who turns away from his past and then learns to put it to
constructive use in the service of a higher calling (helping the powerless).
Shane was a decent man with upright motives.  Kurt Russell's Sergeant Todd
is a far more complex piece of work.

Todd is a difficult character, both for Russell and for the audience.
During the course of the movie Todd speaks perhaps 100 words, not enough to
reveal character through the words themselves.  Consequently, everything
that is known about Todd grows from the way, and the circumstances under
which, he speaks.  This doesn't make getting to know the man any easier.
And when Todd, who has been raised literally from birth to be a soldier and
nothing else, behaves in a sometimes brutal and unpleasantly realistic way,
he can be downright hard to identify with.

It could be said that Todd is humanized through his contact with the
scavenger people.  Taken in by the kindly Mace (Sean Pertwee), Todd
experiences contact with a beautiful woman for the first time (Mace's wife,
played by Connie Nielsen) and also comes face-to-face with children, most
notably Mace's silent son, Nathan.  It's in the bowels of this interstellar
junkyard that Todd interacts with "normal people" and sees what a "normal
life" is like.

However, Todd is 40 years old during the events of Soldier.  He has fought
and killed for his entire adult life and his childhood, viewed in harrowing
flashbacks, was a wasteland of indoctrination and violence.  Realistically,
it would take a lot more than a few smiles and a friendly hand to change a
man like Todd.  And in Soldier, that holds true.

Kurt Russell plays Todd from the inside-out, using his body language to
convey emotion, his delivery of Todd's terse language to hint at greater
intricacy beneath the surface.  When he kills, he kills with a calm,
satisfied demeanor that is far removed from the blood-lust of most
contemporary action heroes.  He literally is a soldier.  Anything else, any
emotion or action, that falls outside that purview is unnatural.  Just watch
the scene where Todd finally interacts with young Nathan directly for the
first time.  Is it a tender moment?  No.  Todd tries to teach Nathan how to
kill something.

Russell's performance is bracing, primal and deserves attention when award
season comes around.  Since it's in a SF action movie, however, it won't.
Overlooked classics like Tequila Sunrise have already shown that Kurt
Russell is a fine actor.  Soldier simply hammers the point home.

The direction is the film's weakest area.  Perhaps Anderson, whose big
breakthrough in the US was the pretty good Mortal Kombat, is not the best
director for this sort of material.  Soldier is a very pretty movie, though
at times the unreality of sound-stage shooting makes it seem a little
cheesy.  Combat scenes are handled with verve and flash.  However, the focus
of Peoples' script is more intimate and this kind of stürm und drang
filmmaking can disrupt that.

It's Anderson's direction that keeps Soldier from being a classic.  The
flaws in the screenplay (underwritten "bad guy" roles, for example) are
magnified by some of the bombastic staging, but Soldier is filled with so
many other, more subtle, moments thanks to Kurt Russell's characterization
of Todd, that the film becomes more than a simple action-fest.

Grade: B

Just Rent It This Week:  Primary Colors; Starring John Travolta and Emma
Thompson, et al.  Grade: B.