Soldier

Writer David Webb Peoples has shown a gift for turning genre films--including Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys and Unforgiven--into films of ideas, offering hope that Soldier might be something more than this week's disposable bit of whoop-it-up mayhem. Instead, Soldier shows what happens when that writer meets the director of Mortal Kombat and Event Horizon: the director wins, and we lose. The story sends us to the near future, where soldiers like Todd 3465 (Kurt Russell) are trained from birth to serve as perfect warriors. Unfortunately, a new genetically-engineered wave of soldiers renders Todd obsolete, and he is left for dead on the scrap-heap of a waste-disposal planet inhabited by marooned humans. I suspect the original script focused on how the functionally anti-social Todd begins to explore human interactions for the first time, launching from an effective set-up about the psychology of warfare and the challenges of re-adjusting to civillian life. That's not the story director Paul Anderson insists on telling, which is more like Rambo in outer space. The final half-hour generally finds Todd picking off his faceless adversaries like red-shirts in a "Star Trek" episode, occasionally interrupted by immense explosions and flying bodies. There's nothing inherently wrong with black hat/white hat action adventures; the problem is the pretense that Soldier is anything more than that. Ironically, Soldier revels in dehumanizing violence instead of showing how dehumanizing violence created Todd, proving that smart ideas can't survive directors determined to make dumb movies. Not recommended. (S. Renshaw)