Well here's another unhappy customer with SOLDIER, bummer. Now you do need to realize that this is a rough cut and that it is not the finished product. We'll continue to monitor the film. Personally both Glen and I loved the script to this project. I love both Jason Scott Lee and Kurt Russell. I haven't cared that much for Paul Anderson because his films do nothing beyond a visual level for me, and at that level it feel manufactured. I was really hoping this was his breakthrough. Oh, and for everyone on the TALK BACK yesterday. THE AVENGERS script was pretty dang good, but the film was butchered beyond all belief. When the film was in editing at Pinewood, the editors were instructed to 'Remove all those British parts, audiences just aren't getting it'. According to sources at Pinewood the nearly 45 minute longer print was far better than the butchered print that came out of the test screening process. Oh well, perhaps we'll get a look at the complete cut someday.
Booster Gold checking in here from the Burbank test screening of SOLDIER.
Overall, the movie is NOT the total piece if shit described by Hallenbeck, but it does have substantial problems.
The basic Plot: in some quasi-fascist future, babies are taken from the womb and inundated with military training for 18 years, turning them into remorseless jarhead robots capable of anything in the name of bringing their superiors victory (this is outlined in a rather gripping opening sequence in which we see Kurt Russell's character as a boy being subjected to Clockwork Orange-style brainwashing designed to program his mind to respond positively to violence). We are shown a rather herky-jerky series of jump cuts as Russell's character, Todd (now adult and played by Kurt) blasts his way through a series of fictional future wars, presumably all won by Kurt's side. Finally, we see Kurt's "trained-from-birth" platoon compared against a new breed of soldiers, those "genetically contructed before birth", personified by Jason Scott Lee as Caine. Gary Busey, Kurt's CO, is proud of "his boys" and winds up having to pit three of his older soldiers against one Jason Scott Lee. In this fight, a pretty original set piece in which all four soldiers battle mano-a-mano while trying to hang on to vertical chains, all three of Busey's soldiers lose to Lee (and are believed dead, except Kurt is still alive, barely).
Jason Scott Lee's character exhibits tremendous menace in this scene, and I remember thinking that I couldn't wait to see these two mix it up in the finale. More on this later.
Kurt winds up in a garbage dumper and is deposited on Arcadia 234, a "garbage dumping planet", where he soon encounters the survivors of a crash who have built a community based on recycling the trash they find on the planet. There are periodic windstorms that are part of the village's everyday life, and Kurt manages to win their trust when he saves a villager (Michael Chiklis) from the windstorms (in a scene that is both unsuspenseful and, unforgivably, difficult to follow).
Eventually, Kurt's soldier programming starts to short circuit and he is haunted by the women and children he has seen caught in the hell of warfare (some of whom he'd disposed of himself), visions and memories that prevent him from effectively assimilating into the commune on the trash planet.
He is banned from the village in a well-written scene, but after a young mute boy shows heretofore unknown courage against a deadly serpent (presumably from modeling himself after Russell), one of the villagers goes out into the trash wilderness to find Russell and bring him back. "We were wrong". This is NOT a well written transition, and I failed to see the reason for the change of heart.
Just as this occurs, the military arrives to do a "security sweep" and arbitrarily murder any trespassers on the garbage planet (the thinnest of reasons to bring Russell into conflict with Jason Scott Lee again, admittedly).
What follows is a third act of almost pure action, but except for 2 very minor moments of action invention, it's all machine guns and spark hits. There is NO EVIDENCE in this sequence that Russell is any more capable than, say, Indiana Jones at taking down a team of soldiers...and for "genetically constructed super soldiers", the forces led by Jason Scott Lee don't seem much more deadly than a squad of "really good" Imperial Stormtroopers.
Consequently, by the time Russell and Lee face off for the aforementioned final battle, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Kurt's got a gun, Jason doesn't. Why doesn't he just shoot him?" That's how disinterested I was in their "battle" by the time it was about to occur.
Of course, all ends happily, and we are left with the impression that Kurt's "killing machine" may have found his inner-child. Fine by me.
Russell, to his credit, does it YET AGAIN. He is second only to Harrison Ford when it comes to movie "alchemy" (namely, turning lead to gold just by being there), but this skimpy, 94-minute action exercise is below his talents. The FX (not the temp frame fillers, but the more final ones) are the best special effects of 1983 (nuff said about that).
There you have it. Should make for a kick ass night in front of your DVD player, but for $20 a head (with parking and concessions), this is NOT a great value, folks. Sorry WB, please try again.
