Soldier is a beautifully stripped-down, meat-and-potatoes sci-fi actioner that owes every minute to Kurt Russell’s raw, cast-iron intensity.
He spoke just 104 words in the entire film while appearing in 85% of the scenes. His physical performance literally carried the movie. The rest of the cast, including Jason Isaacs and Gary Busey, seem to be having a great time just orbiting the story.
It’s a fantastic piece of pulpy gunmetal futurism.
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon, Mortal Kombat), Soldier was written by David Peoples, who also co-wrote Blade Runner. Anderson took that connection and ran with it, framing the film as an unofficial sidequel set in the same universe. The keen-eyed observer will note Todd’s service record lists the battles of Tannhäuser Gate and the Shoulder of Orion. There’s even a Spinner buried in a junk pile. But where Blade Runner was noir-ish, existential and lofty, Soldier is elemental and brutal, a Western at heart.
Critics dismissed it at the time, and audiences didn’t show up, but I had an absolute blast. I left the cinema exhilarated, thinking I’d just watched the next big franchise starter. Then again, I also thought that about Deep Rising. I was wrong a lot back then.
But here’s what I think happened: Soldier was an eighties action movie that arrived several years late. This would have sat very well on the shelf next to First Blood, The Road Warrior or Raw Deal, but by 1998, action film were vibing more like stylish music videos. By comparison, this looked and felt positively brutalist and old fashioned. And I mean that in the best way possible.
Plus, Y2K was right around the corner and that anxiety was starting to creep in. Audiences were in a very odd frame of mind, and unless your film was ready to dismantle civilisation, it wasn’t reading the room. No one was in the mood for stoic warriors wrestling with duty. They wanted identity crises, paranoia, and world-ending spectacle.
Turn-of-the-millennium fare was focused on questioning everything (The Matrix, Dark City, The Truman Show), tearing down the system (Fight Club, Office Space), or expecting the collapse of civilization (disaster films, and later the hordes of zombies that would dominate the next decade). The old-school lone-gunman super-commando was being replaced by more introspective disillusionment.
In another era, Soldier might have stood alongside Escape from New York or Predator 2 as bona fide cult classic material. But unfortunately it dropped on us when we were already looking past it, toward a different kind of futurism – one obsessed with digital realities, corporate nightmares, and the creeping feeling that the world was built on lies.
It was the end of one century, the start of another, and Soldier was left behind. -Pop