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New Century of Cinema
DOWSE Guide to the
Movies
by Tony Lee editor of
Pigasus
Press
Soldier
95 minutes (18) Warner widescreen 2.35:1
Director: Paul Anderson
review by Tony Lee
From the maker of Event Horizon, this bleakly imagined SF war movie takes the
premise of Universal Soldier into deep space. Set on a battle ravaged Earth
where campaign hardened veteran Todd (Kurt Russell) earns his stripes fighting with a
wide variety of implausibly large guns against unnamed enemies, before transferring
to a junkyard planet where dumper ships rain surplus aircraft carriers and car wrecks
to a surface prone to lethal dust storms, Soldier is a strongly moral fable
about the role of the military, and a lesson in how practical experience beats mere
training and whiz bang technology every time. Laconic to the point of robotic stupor,
interplanetary superhero Russell should be no match for the new genetically modeified
breed of warrior epitomised by Jason Scott Lee (no relation, I assure you!), but he
is of course. And he also manages to knobble a whole squad of 20 like Lee along the
way to his assured victory, and farewell-to-all-that nuking of the trash planet,
while leading the motley of castaway survivors to a galactic version of the 'promised
land'. As a piece of film design this just about passes muster, but as brain-food-SF
it contains about the same amount of meat as a tin of vegetable soup, any variety.
DVD extras: Warner's bog-standard scene access, subtitles & Dolby 5.1 sound.
But also the unusual offering of 2 different formats; side A has the film in full
screen 1.33:1 while side B is 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The point of this is rather more
intriguing an exercise in marketing than the film itself.
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