Going into this movie, I was not expecting anything special.
Soldier looked like a pointless attempt to have people
kill each other. It looked like it wouldn''t have any plot. It looked like it was going to be stupid. Oh how my assumptions were correct.
Soldier wasn''t a bad movie... I enjoyed parts of it... but the majority was just plain stupid. The entire sequence where Kurt Russel picked off the soldiers was cool but the rest was a waste of my time. The whole beginning sequence, where Todd''s early years are shown, was not amusing and the series of war scenes were short and unproductive. There was no logic as to why the twenty genetically engineered men would actually replace twenty normal men; who said there had to be a limit at twenty? The civilization on the trash world reminded me of Waterworld, only the people seemed to be in much higher spirits, even though they were surrounded by crap. The entire period of time that Todd spent in the colony was just a lame attempt to develop feelings for the other characters, which ultimately led up to the conclusion, which was the meager plot in itself: He killed everyone.
Besides failing in plot, Soldier was unable to exceed in characterization, as well. It should have been learned long ago that a movie based around a character that said no more than thirty words in the entire story would fail miserably. This is just the case in Soldier... Kurt Russel has no chance of giving a strong performance because all he has to do is stand there, stare, and, at the end, kill people. But then there''s Connie Nielsen''s character. Russel is obviously interested in her and throughout the movie, a relationship is expected to be developed. Unfortunately, even though her husband is killed, the subject is never approached, and Nielsen''s character ends up being just like the rest... page filler.