In the Flesh: Soldier

The ways in which Paul W. S. Anderson’s Soldier sucks are almost as intriguing as the ways in which it rules. The sets and lighting are often cheesy, there’s a definite G. I. Joe-esque “action figures for sale” vibe to the whole thing, and its messaging about fascism and militarism might be politely described as both overcomplicated and as simple as stacking alphabet blocks, but it’s undeniable that there’s something not quite charming but compelling about its weirdness. Those cheesy sets are wildly ambitious, brought to life by flashes of strong design, teetering mountains of refuse, slab-like garbage ships dumping endless torrents of scrap onto a lifeless world studded with the remains of failed civilizations. Curving metal beams like the ribs of some long-dead monstrosity cradle trenches flooded with brackish water. Ships bristling with armaments, rendered disturbingly real by sophisticated miniature work, glide through the void. But beyond the sparks of decent sci-fi world-building, the thing keeping Soldier alive is Kurt Russell.

I’ve scene Russell as a hardass, a wise-cracker, a hateful bastard, a schmuck, and everything else under the sun. He’s good at all of it, the kind of movie star we just don’t make anymore, so it’s funny to think that his best performance might be buried in a Starship Troopers knockoff nobody’s ever seen and in which he displays exactly one facial expression and says maybe fifty words. The incredible subtlety Russell brings to the role of Todd, a soldier conditioned from infancy by a brutal and fascistic American regime in what was at the time of the film’s release the near future, is almost miraculous, so finely calibrated that a few times I started to wonder if I wasn’t just projecting onto an expressionless mask. I wasn’t. What might have been a bog-standard “killing machine with feelings” performance in anyone else’s hands becomes in Russell’s something akin to Karloff’s monster, bottomlessly sad and ill-made for the things that give life meaning. His drooping eyelids and lifeless gash of a mouth recall not just Frankenstein’s creation but its inspiration, the golem of Hebrew myth right down to the name inscribed on his face: not God’s, but the military’s.

Where does this man belong? The film is clearly gesturing toward the problems faced by US veterans attempting to reintegrate into civilian life, and while its thematic concerns are simplistic in other areas, it arrives here at a surprisingly thoughtful conclusion: the function of the veteran in society is to defend the civilian from the government. In return, civilians provide community and healing. Russell’s performance brings this small shred of insight much further than it might have gone alone. His stoicism is so layered, his silences and stillness so total and so delicately infused with real vulnerability, that at times it’s physically painful to watch him. He manages to convey with hardly a word just how incomplete he is, how much of him was chiseled and sanded away in the process of creating a soldier unphased by blasting through hostages to get the enemy, to erode the little boy who once flinched from the sight of a boar’s blood as dogs tore it apart for his edification. Soldier may be silly, but there’s something special buried in that silliness.