Soldier

Soldier makes an awful first impression. The audience is immediately assaulted with disconnected gun sounds: cannon reports so stock and overused that they instantly register as redundant rather than foreboding or exciting. The opening credits font goes one better, with a Stencil type on loan from television's The A-Team. Desperate to position itself as Blade Runner adjacent - mainly via winking data read-outs - Soldier fumbles its own intrigue with a graceless presentation and an initial editing dynamic utterly at odds with the esoteric end of speculative science fiction. Eventually though, Paul WS Anderson's film develops a steady but intense rhythm, one largely thanks to the choices Kurt Russell makes describing his lonely mamluk.

Dumped on top of an intergalactic refuse heap after an unsuccessful run-in with his replacement (Jason Scott Lee's genetically engineered infantryman, Caine), Russell's square, toyetic Sergeant Todd is rescued by the inhabitants of this junk planet. These scrounger Samaritans nurse Todd back to health, attempting to integrate this displaced muscle monster into their bric-a-brac society. The soldier struggles to connect with these nuclear families though. Raised from birth to win and kill, Todd cannot seem to grasp anything else. Anderson, Russell, and screenwriter David Webb Peoples balance their film on this premise, reducing the majority of Todd's arc to sweeping action rather than stuttering insight. We don't see emotional walls come tumbling down then, Todd taking very little from his new community other than it meets the criteria of an objective. One that he now wants to protect from the kitbash drop ships, bearing down.

Although Soldier obviously terminates in extreme conflict, the film does, fleetingly, entertain themes of arrested emotional development. Connie Nielsen's Sandra would, in a lesser piece, be eager to assume the role of love interest for the very strong and very silent Sergeant Todd. Here his sexless fascination with the contents of her hemp sweater seems closer to a child's innate yearning for maternal, skin-to-skin connection. Sandra's husband, Sean Pertwee's Mace, is never subordinated or positioned as physically weak either. On the contrary, Mace is closer to a patient step-father, one trying to puzzle out the bad-wiring in his new charge's head. Similarly, there's no hate in the climactic head-to-head battle between Todd and Caine. The fight's assembly even features a couple of incredulous glances between the two, as if both men recognise some deeper, unspoken connection that they are unable to interpret. Possessed of a real sadness, Soldier is, essentially, The Remains of the Day for cheery meat heads.