You Are Obsolete

The legacy of Blade Runner is interesting. Despite the film being a commercial failure when it was released in 1982, it very quickly garnered a cult following that helped to keep it in the public consciousness for years after. Novels based on the movie were written, sequels that kept the original story going. Video games were made. Sequels were proposed. Eventually a proper continuation was made in 2017, Blade Runner 2049, so that fans could see the world again from a proper perspective. Of course, that film was also a financial failure, but you have to credit the creators for trying.

And yet, in the midst of all that another film came along that loosely tied itself to the franchise. Written in 1984 but not produced until 1998, Soldier is sort of a spin-off, sort of a spiritual sequel to Blade Runner, at least as per script writer David Webb Peoples, who also co-wrote Blade Runner. There are little mentions and allusions to Ridley Scott’s film in this 1998 work, and the whole film plays in the same field as Blade Runner. What does it mean to be human? Is it right for corporations (or, in this case, the military) to breed and engineer humans to use as drones. You can understand how the films are connected if you look at them just right.

With all that said, Solder wasn’t marketed as a Blade Runner spin-off. In fact, it’s hard to say that Solder was marketed at all well. It’s possible production studio Warner Bros. expected the film to do really well, but if they’d wanted that they wouldn’t have hired (perennial Asteroid G punching bag) Paul W.S. Anderson. This film came out early in Anderson’s career, but by then it was already clear that the director had a certain style he shot for. Fast, loose, dirty, and very video game-like, he was probably the worst choice to direct a serious sci-fi drama about a lost soldier trying to find their way in an unfamiliar world. When it comes to action, this film manages to pop, but when the film tries to focus on story and characters it feels as lost as its main character.

Todd (Kurt Russel) was a soldier bred to be the best. Picked by the military, along with a crew of nineteen other babies, Todd was raised in military life under the watchful eye of Captain Church (Gary Busey). Daily lessons, daily training, all so he could be the best soldier possible. He served his whole life, from his first deployment to his last, a loyal soldier to the end. But when a new commanding officer, Colonel Mekum (Jason Isaacs), takes over the unit, he says that the old squad of soldiers are to be retired, replaced by a new breed (quite literally) of soldiers.

In a battle against one of these new soldiers, Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee), Todd falls, failing to prove he was still the best of the best. Thought dead, he and some of the other dead soldiers were dumped into a garbage scow which then deposited them on the trash planet of Arcadia 234. Todd wakes up in unfamiliar territory, but when the locals find him, they bring him in and nurse him back to health. He bonds with Sandra (Connie Nielsen) and Mace (Sean Pertwee), as well as their mute little boy, Nathan (Jared and Taylor Thorne), and Todd eventually realizes he’s found a home of sorts here among those cast aside by society. But when Mekum and his band of soldiers come to Arcadia to clean house, Todd has to pick up his weapons and fight, one last time.

Soldier is not a very deep movie. In fact I’d say it’s probably about as shallow and simple as any other blasted out 1990s action film. Peoples may have wanted to tell the story of a hollowed out, PTSD-suffering soldier, but it’s pretty clear that Anderson really only saw an action movie in the bones of this script. The character study is still there, in the words said (and unsaid) by the characters, but that all gets cast aside pretty quickly whenever Anderson needs to throw in an action beat to keep the film moving.

Part of the reason why the film struggles is because its main character, Todd, is a very hard character to like or understand. The way he was raised, how he was made, left him nearly mute and unable to form bonds or really discuss how he’s feeling. Understandable, sure, but under the direction of Anderson, this amounts to a mute character that stands around and watches people without really engaging at all. You want the character to do something, say anything, but he never does.

I’m not sure if it was Anderson’s decision to have Kurt Russell act stoic the whole time, or if that was the actor’s choice, but it was the wrong one. Russell is a fantastic, charismatic actor who can do a lot with a little, but even he struggles to make Todd into a character you care about here. Despite being a soldier, Todd is too passive, too reserved. He doesn’t say much in the film (Russell only has 104 words of dialogue total) but there’s more that could have been done with his face, with his body language, with anything, and Russell doesn’t do it. It says a lot that you want to care about Todd in this film, but by the end of it you really don’t.

Of course, the standard, threadbare story doesn’t help matters. You can see how the plot machinations are going to work before the film even gets going. A good soldier is replaced by a better soldier, cast aside and thrown away. He’s defeated and has nothing to live for until people take him in and accept him for who he is. Naturally, then, he will have to battle against those who defeated him before to prove he is the best and save his friends. Swap this out for any other kind of activity, like football or karate, and you can apply this to just about any other generic action film from the 1980s or 1990s (in this case, The Replacements and The Karate Kid). There’s nothing special or interesting about the story, and when coupled with the blank of a character at the center of it all, it leaves the film feeling very rote and empty.

Plus, because it’s not really a Blade Runner sequel it also doesn’t have the solid world building of that film. Everything on set looks cheap and thrown together, which is surprising considering this film cost $60 Mil to make. Twice as much as Blade Runner for much poorer results. We went from awe-inspiring cityscapes to a few piles of trash on a poorly rendered CGI world. That feels like a real downgrade in all respects. I’m not saying better effects and world building would have saved this movie, but it at least would have kept it from feeling like a third-rate high school production of a sci-fi film.

All around this film is an absolute mess. I’ve seen it a couple of times now (the first soon after it came out on video) and I’ve been unimpressed each time. I want to like this film because it does have some interesting ideas it tries to tackle. But between bad direction, boring action, stoic characters, and a complete lack of narrative momentum, it’s hard to find anything good to say about the movie. It’s a real snoozefest of a film, which may be why all connection to Blade Runner is generally ignored. About the only part of the legacy Solder got right is that it, too, bombed at the Box Office. But then, was that really a surprise?