- Also Known As:
- Version:
- Language:
- Length:
- 95 minutes: Uncut
- Review Format:
- DVD
- Year:
- 1998
- Countries:
-
- Predominant Genre:
- Science-Fiction
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- Premiss:
- A soldier is dumped on a waste-disposal planet and lives among a community of crash survivors. He defends his new home when genetically-engineered soldiers attack.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Coming-of-age | Compassion | Communism | Corporate Power | Courage | Curative | Destiny | Emotional repression | Family | Identity | Individualism | Loneliness | Love | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Personal change | Political | Redemption | Republicanism | Role modeling | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Self-Esteem | Solipsism | The State | Stereotyping | White culture | White supremacy
- Similar to:
Fighting for Love
Summary: Elite soldier has difficulty coming-to-terms with his humanity when left for dead by his commanders.
Despite the unlikely premise, this is a carefully-constructed and well thought-out drama about the deleterious affects of colonialism at-all-costs - both on the colonizers as well as on the intended victims. There are also nods to environmentalism and unsuccessful waste-management, with entire planets used as gigantic waste dispose-alls.
The critique of US Foreign Policy that turns its soldiers into unthinking beasts and its victims into guerrillas is well-taken. Along with the desire to escape such self-destructive ways to form families and communities of value and meaning so that life, itself, can possess value and meaning.
Violent and unaffectionate White upbringings and the resultant inability to love and experience fulfilling personal relationships is well-presented in military training that turns carefully-selected - and then genetically-engineered - young men into merciless killing machines. Such a superficial culture must defend itself from its inevitable, self-created enemies while busying itself creating new ones to somehow justify the resulting and ever-increasing military expenditure.
A movie with a real heart and a real soul using (non-gratuitous) violence to express its themes - rather than merely to entertain a bloodthirsty audience. Much of this is due to the superb performance of the almost-mute Kurt RUSSELL, whose only feelings and thoughts center around fear and military discipline. His expressionless but powerful screen presence says it all; contrasting nicely with the fully-human characters he meets on the trash-planet Arcadia - as he pines for the excellent, but married, Connie NIELSEN. In fact, the great peculiarity of this movie is that so much of it is wordless; recalling the glory days of silent cinema, in general, and the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns
, in particular; and being no less emotionally-moving for it.
The movie’s only failing is an unwillingness to confront the reasons Whites would create such soldiers in the first place - since this would then denude them of the very humanity it is implied they wish to militarily-defend.
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