Soldier

After Event Horizon totally fucking tanked at the box office Anderson made Soldier…which also fucking bombed.  And you know what?  It deserved to.

This one takes place in the near future where babies are raised in a strictly military environment.  When they grow up all they know is how to fight, take orders, endure pain and basically be a robot.  This mystery organization (that I guess is totally legit in society) wanted to remove as many human elements as possible and cast themselves the perfect killing machines.  However, these soldiers are replaced when a new line comes along and Todd (Kurt Russell) finds himself on the scrap heap of a garbage dump planet.  The residents are kind folk though and take him in.  They teach him how to be somewhat human.

I like the initial premise that we’re set up with for the first fifteen minutes or so.  We the see the upbringing that these kids are getting and it’s kinda wild what they’re exposed to.  Like they’re forced to watch dogs slaughter a hog, they go on miles long runs and they do weapons training.  And as a pretty nuts side note if any of these specimens lags behind the military dudes fucking murder them, like when they’re a young teenager.  The montage of when these kids are grown up and fighting in wars is kind of awesome (although it’s very cheap looking).  And in this montage I have to acknowledge the really goofy outer space war with spacesuits and guns firing in slow motion ‘n shit.  That scene comes off so fuckin’ funny that if you only saw that one part you’d swear the film was a satire. You know, for a minute there I was getting very into this movie.  But then in a moment of panic someone grabbed the wheel and drove this thing off a fucking cliff.  It started off as a real offbeat and intriguing idea but when Todd gets dumped on some planet, takes a liking to their people and learns a thing or two about how to live it goes right down the shitter.  The plot turns into the ol’ stranger-comes-to-town-and-the-town-takes-him-in story.  And the end fight with Todd against all the new soldier models isn’t that fun or satisfying because it was so painful to get to that point.  I didn’t fucking care by then. 

To be blunt this movie is a piece of shit.  It tricked me into thinking that it was going to be something new and strange but did a total 180 on me.  Gary Busey and Jason Isaacs (The Patriot) were both doing a real good job too as the leaders of their crazy experimental units.  Shit was looking up.  Oh well.    

With this picture Anderson went from being a kind of interesting filmmaker with lots of potential to the man he would be for the rest of his career.  And by career I mean at least through The Three Musketeers, which by the way was fucking terrible.  Before I checked that one out I only saw this one clip of the Musketeers on a flying ship utterly decimating this room that Orlando Bloom was in.  Like they were firing a machine gun, a flamethrower and tossing bombs.  The film looked like it could be fucking insane but alas it was really only that one scene.  Not that the rest of the movie wasn’t outrageous but it wasn’t outrageous like that clip I saw.  Whatever, fuck that picture.  And fuck Soldier.  There are much better movies out there that have similar plot elements like Universal Soldier and Robocop.  Watch those instead.

I know I’m not breaking any ground here but Paul W.S. Anderson is a shitty fucking filmmaker.  For a minute there it seemed like he took the Mortal Kombat job to break into Hollywood and build up some capital so he could work on shit that he was more interested in.  Event Horizon was a step in that direction and as bad as Soldier is at least it’s an original screenplay and not based off of a comic book or a video game or is a remake.  But it just turns out that Anderson wants to make movies that five year olds dream about, shit that lacks substance or thought.  I’ll tell you what though, at least his first three movies were fun to go through.  Maybe he’ll do something interesting again and not either a Resident Evil or a remake.  Until he does that though he can go fuck himself.