Toy Soldier
The wittiest conceit in Soldier is that each trained-from-birth bred-in-the-bone infantryman is literally a item in a collector’s set. Director Paul Anderson plays on this idea in the shot where you see Todd (Kurt Russell sporting a crewcut) sitting alone on his bunk; the camera shifts position and only then do you see the long row of exactly identical men sitting in exactly identical bunks behind him. When these robotlike men (manlike robots?) are confronted by a platoon of new and improved soldiers (unlike Todd and company these newer models are genetically engineered), they eye each other, silently sizing each other up. Their superior officers proudly show them off and then, like wanton boys, pit one against another in a series of pointlessly brutal tests. Obsolete Todd loses and is tossed in the garbage bin; victorious Kane (a shaven-pate Jason Scott Lee) is reprimanded for allowing the loser to rip a good-sized new one round his eye socket.
Todd ends up on the planet Arcadia--ironic name, because it’s an interplanetary dumping ground. He’s taken in by a community of castaways, on their way to a better world when their ship crashlanded into this one; later he’s sent away because they feel they can’t trust his silences and unpredictably deadly reflexes. When the planet is assaulted by the same troops that rejected Todd he defends the community, despite their treatment of him.
Russell as Todd (a play on 'tod,' German word for death?) is remarkable in this film, in an essentially non-speaking part. A “soldier does not speak unless spoken to” he’s told during training and as everyone around him is too intimidated to address him he has nothing to respond to. His face suggests a surprising number of emotions, from cool assessment of a potential enemy to dumbfounded desire for an attractive woman to a touchingly childlike bewilderment at being mistrusted by lesser folk. He’s not afraid to let his face be naked to the camera, yet goes about his business in so simple and unfussy a manner you can’t help being charmed--this big silent brute with big babyblues. He’s perfectly matched by Jason Scott Lee, who looks just as deadly with his streamlined eyes set deep against a bulletshaped head. Gary Busey puts crusty life into his role as Russell’s superior officer.
The director Paul Anderson stages the fight scenes with clarity and verve--basic requirement for a good action director. But he should have shown more of the tactics used--the way for example the soldiers are grouped in threes, each armed with rocket launcher, flamethrower, Gatling gun; and he should have come up with a better rationale as to why Todd is able to take on the supposedly superior newer models. The homesteaders could have helped at some crucial moment perhaps, or taught him (while he lived with them) how to improvise, how to use his imagination--the final confrontation might have been more persuasive (and more satisfying) that way.
David Webb Peoples who wrote Unforgiven seems to know his Westerns: he’s taken Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” crossed it with Shane, set it in the far future (castoff warrior wanders into a town of helpless sodbusters, defends them against invading army). He adapted the screenplay of Blade Runner from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? but seems less at home with science fiction--his script toys with terms like 'transgenic engineering;' but they sound like mere catchphrases to get the story going. He isn’t really using science fiction concepts as concepts to be explored imaginatively (in Blade Runner he reduced Dick’s complex novel about the difference between humans and non-humans into run-of-the-mill film noir, with Harrison Ford as an unemotional Sam Spade).
Soldier sags in the middle: problem is Todd gets to know the townspeople’s drab and dreary lives and it’s a drab dreary affair, all pointless picking through mountainous garbage heaps and getting soused at the local bar. Even Shane failed to make the homesteaders interesting but did spice things up by having the gunslinger (Alan Ladd) make moony eyes at a homesteader’s wife (Jean Arthur) while the husband (Van Helsing) watched uneasily. Soldier shortchanges us on these people's inner lives, so when Kurt Russell stares at a young woman’s bosom you don’t feel much in the way of violation of a domestic household’s bliss--sometimes the gal looks married sometimes she doesn’t. Anyway, the husband is too much of a wimp to object (he’s definitely no Van Helsing, who landed a few flinchworthy bruises on Ladd in Shane’s climactic fight). David Webb Peoples could have taken a hint from Dick, whose novels enjoy strong characterization, and who has a knack (as shown in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Confessions Of A Crap Artist, and Martian Time-Slip) for turning drab downtrodden lives into hardscrabble poetry. Also, Dick has a wonderful sense of humor, a keen eye for the ironic and the absurd--abilities that might have been perfect for a science-fiction satire on the military.
That’s what Soldier sorely lacks--a sense of irony. We get hints of the process that turns Todd into a fighting machine--the early childhood training, the constant indoctrination, the loneliness and pain; we see on Todd’s face the cost of this training, how it sets him apart from ordinary people leading ordinary lives (or we would have if we had a sharper picture of those people's lives). Todd’s training ultimately stands him in good stead against the genetically and numerically superior enemy; by film’s end Todd functions as the classic military hero, leading the helpless homesteaders in an unplanned resistance against the military. All that suffering you think you see on Todd’s face, all the emotions suggested when he’s tortured betrayed abandoned--all that counts as little more than motivation for him to get payback. And payback, as folks who watch war movies like to tell you, is a bitch.
First published in Businessworld 12.4.98 (approximate date)
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