Paul W.S. Anderson’s Soldier fits within the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 subgenre of movies that presciently suggested that the fall of the Soviet Union would prompt not disarmament but a cementing of the West’s military-industrial complex. The film revolves around Sgt. Todd (Kurt Russell), a soldier conditioned and indoctrinated from birth by a research program designed to produce the ultimate combat machine. But like any machine, Todd is susceptible to obsolescence, and he ends up literally disposed of by his superiors as last year’s model when a new and improved batch of killers shows him up in training.
Todd winds up in an interplanetary garbage barge that dumps him on a landfill planet where he falls in with a community of humans who crashed there years ago. Todd is nearly mute, rarely saying more than “yes” or “no sir,” but compared to Russell’s legendary badass characters, like Snake Plissken from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, Todd has a wounded, childlike quality befitting his status as someone brainwashed from infancy and denied any normal upbringing. Used to a world of cold barracks and chaotic battlegrounds, the soldier tends to look at the makeshift town the people have assembled with engaged curiosity. Todd also forms a bond with a shy child, Nathan (twins Jared and Taylor Thorne), whose parents (Connie Nielsen and Sean Pertwee) treat the warrior like an adoptee.
Anderson’s film shades its characters in crayon, setting up unambiguous heroes and villains between the innocent villagers and the military goons who come to the planet for war game exercises. Jason Isaacs, sporting a pencil-thin mustache, is caught somewhere between an Edwardian dandy and Hitler as the icy Colonel Mekum, who ordered Todd and his comrades killed off, while Nielsen and Pertwee’s characters are almost saintly in the way they dole out care to the taciturn Todd and bravely defend him from suspicious neighbors.
The draw here, as with much of Anderson’s work, is the intricate production design and how cleanly the director frames it in action sequences. The vast metal skeletons of derelict ships, suggesting industrial whale fall, have become archways and buildings, and small details like gardens and decorations show how people have wrung a certain level of homeliness out of the detritus. Anderson slyly establishes each area in the village so that its spatial parameters are immediately clear when the climactic showdown between the community and military erupts.
A final fight between Todd and the super soldier (Jason Scott Lee) who humiliated him in the film’s beginning is suitably raw and nasty, a reminder after the hero’s slow softening that he’s still bred to kill by any means necessary. Less exciting than his later Resident Evil work, Soldier nonetheless shows Anderson consolidating the strengths he first displayed with Event Horizon in launching him as one of the most underrated genre directors of the 2000s and 2010s.
Image/Sound
Arrow’s 4K transfer brings out the best of the film’s rugged, rusted beauty. The oxidized browns and yellows that dominate the color palette show subtle levels of gradation, and the occasional flash of cleaner metallic silvers or bursts of blood red pop with added contrast. The film’s minutely designed sets and miniatures look especially wonderful, with each tactile detail of jagged and broken structures clearly visible. The UHD comes with both a 5.1 and 2.0 soundtrack, and both are robustly mixed to maximize action sound effects of explosions and gunfire, while keeping dialogue clear even in the most chaotic scene.
Extras
Arrow’s release ports over an audio commentary by Paul W.S. Anderson, producer Jeremy Bolt, and actor Jason Isaacs from the 2011 Warner Blu-ray, and it’s heavy on details about the production from Anderson and Bolt, who fascinatingly unpack the film’s extensive effects and design work. There are also EPK clips of cast and crew being interviewed during production.
Otherwise, this release sources a host of new extras that mainly consist of interviews with below-the-line crew like effects supervisor Craig Barron and miniature supervisor Michael Joyce. These interviews give even more information on the impressive craftsmanship brought to bear on the project, and a separate featurette includes footage of workshops where sets and props were assembled. An interview with author and Soldier superfan Danny Stewart errs a bit too much on the side of expressions of personal love for the movie, but a talk with film historian Heath Holland delves a bit deeper into the film’s release and initial poor reception before its gradual reclamation as a cult object. A booklet essay by critic Priscilla Page draws parallels between the film and a host of references ranging from Blade Runner to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Overall
Soldier is more of a preview of great things to come from Paul W.S. Anderson than a triumph in its own right, but Arrow’s UHD gives the film a transfer and extras worthy of a classic.
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