Soldier is a 1998 science fiction action film directed by Paul Anderson, written by David Webb Peoples, and starring Kurt Russell, Jason Scott Lee, Jason Isaacs, Connie Nielsen, Sean Pertwee and Gary Busey.
The film tells the story of an unemotional rigidly disciplined laconic soldier of the future who is left for dead, befriends a group of refugees, then faces his former superiors and soldiers who are determined to achieve their goal by eliminating the refugees.
The film was released worldwide by Warner Bros. on October 23, 1998. Upon its release, Soldier received generally negative reviews, although many praised the action sequences and Russell's performance. The film was a box-office failure, grossing $14.6 million worldwide against a production budget of $60 million. Despite the financial failure, the film has now become a cult film.
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Plot
In 1996, an experimental military program selects and raises a group of orphaned infants to be trained as highly disciplined, ruthless, professional soldiers. Recruits considered physically or mentally underperforming are culled and the survivors are turned into ultimate fighting “machines” with no understanding of the civilian world.
In 2036, Sgt. Todd 3465 is a hardened veteran and one of the original 1996 infants, but his unit is about to be replaced by genetically engineered super soldiers, designed with superior physical attributes and a lack of emotion, except complete aggression. Colonel Mekum, leader of the project, introduces his newest group to Captain Church, the commander of Todd's unit, who insists on testing the new soldiers' abilities against his battle proven soldiers. Mekum suggests pitting three original soldiers against one new soldier, Caine 607, who easily defeats the three. Cain bites down on Todd’s arm so Todd gouges out Caine's eye to break free before falling from a great height. The body of a dead soldier cushions his fall, and he appears to be dead. Mekum orders their bodies disposed, declaring them obsolete, while the remaining older soldiers are demoted to menial support roles. For carelessly losing his eye, Cain is demoted to take point.
Todd is discarded on Arcadia 234, a waste disposal planet. He limps toward a colony whose residents crash-landed there years earlier; as they were believed dead, no rescue missions have been attempted. Todd is sheltered by Mace and his wife Sandra. Though they try to make him welcome, Todd has difficulty adapting to the conflict-free civilian community due to his hyper-vigilant military conditioning. While Todd develops a silent rapport with their mute son, Nathan, who had been traumatized by a snakebite as an infant, he soon begins to experience flashbacks from his time as a soldier and mistakes one of the colonists for an enemy, nearly killing him. To make matters worse, in a later conflict with a snake, Todd forces Nathan to face it down and strike back to protect himself. His parents disapprove of the lesson, unsure of how to deal with Todd.
Fearful, the colonists expel Todd from the community. Experiencing strong emotion for the first time, Todd is confused when, overcome by loss, he cries for the first time. A short time later, Mace and Sandra are almost bitten by a snake while they sleep, but they are saved by Nathan, who uses Todd's lesson. Now understanding the value of Todd's lesson, they seek him to reintegrate him into the community, but the other members resist.
Production
Kurt Russell spoke only 104 words in the entire movie despite being in 85% of the scenes. During the first week of shooting he broke his left ankle, then the top of his right foot four days later, so the entire production needed to be rescheduled. The filmmakers first shot scenes involving Russell lying down, followed by scenes of Russell sitting, Russell standing but not moving, and so on.
Reception
Box office
Soldier grossed $14.6 million in the United States.
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 19% of 54 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "A boring genre film and a waste of a good set." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.
Bruce Westbrook of the Houston Chronicle commented that "the action is handled fairly well, but it's routine, and there's no satisfaction in seeing Todd waste men who are no more bloodthirsty than he is." Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly criticized the film's overuse of genre clichés, saying "any cliché you can dream up for a futuristic action movie, any familiar big-budget epic you can think to rip off, Soldier has gotten there first." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune described the film as "a big, clanging, brutal actioner in which we search the murk in vain for the sparks of humanity the moviemakers keep promising us." Lisa Alspector of the Chicago Reader found the film to be enjoyable, calling Russell's performance "persuasive" and saying "this appealing formulaic action adventure displays a lot of conviction in its not-too-flashy action scenes and a little levity in the gradual socialization of Russell's character." Similarly, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times gave the film a rating of 3.5 out of 5 and called it "a potent comic-book-style action-adventure." Eddie Harrison of film-authority.com wrote "...while humour is sorely lacking in Soldier, the brutalist sci-fi tone holds throughout, and it's easy to get behind Todd's stubborn unwillingness to be thrown out with the trash..." Critic Niall Browne of Movies in Focus wrote "Soldier finally deserves a reappraisal. The Kurt Russell starrer is actually a hugely entertaining and visually arresting piece of science fiction cinema – at the centre of it is a bold performance from Russell – one in which he only speaks 104 words."
Connection with Blade Runner
Soldier was written by David Webb Peoples, who co-wrote the script for the 1982 film Blade Runner. In 1998 he said that he considers Soldier to be a "spin-off sidequel"-spiritual successor to Blade Runner, seeing both films as existing in a shared fictional universe. The film obliquely refers to various elements of stories written by Philip K. Dick (who wrote the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which Blade Runner is based), or film adaptations thereof. A Spinner from Blade Runner can be seen in the wreckage on the junk planet in the film and Russell's character is shown to have fought in the battles referred to in Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) dying monologue: ...the Shoulder of Orion and Tannhäuser Gate. The script was 15 years old at the time of production.
In an interview conducted with Danny Stewart for Stewart's book about the movie, published in 2023, when asked if Soldier was initially conceived as a "side-quel" to Blade Runner that was set in the same universe, Peoples stated "No, I never had any thoughts about that... I wrote Soldier in 1984. Very quickly on my own. I wrote it because I saw the first Terminator in the theater, stunned. And it was such a wonderful movie. I’d always wanted to write a movie in which there was a tough guy who would be seemingly unsympathetic in the lead, and I felt that The Terminator was almost there. Later in the sequel, it was determined he was the hero, but at the time, he was sort of a villain. But the fact is, he was so great. I went off, and I decided to write about this soldier."
Home media
Soldier was released on VHS and DVD on March 2, 1999, and on Blu-ray on July 26, 2011. It was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray on April 28, 2026 from Arrow Video.
