10 Things You Didn’t Know About Soldier

Movies taking place in the near future are a dime a dozen but when they’re done really well they stand the test of time. No one would have guessed at the time that movies like Alien or Blade Runner would have been so dearly loved all these years later but here we stand; loving the hell out of them. Soldier is a film that could very easily fit into that same narrative as the other two I mentioned but normally doesn’t. It has its fans, of course. But there aren’t a legion of fans claiming that it deserves to be alongside films like Aliens or Robocop. I can’t say with a straight face if Soldier is as well made as those other movies but there is no doubt that I had one hell of a time re-watching it. Here are 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Soldier.

1: Just like Dad. Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt plays him as an 11 year old in training. He’s the boy you see running with the flag in formation. Speaking of that, imagine the first time that folks so the scene where the boy who fell behind got shot.

2: Blade Runner 2. David Webb Peoples wrote Soldier. He also wrote Blade Runner and says this is a quasi-sequel to that film. If Todd had made it to Earth he would have run into Deckard.

3: Toughness. Kurt Russell broke his ankle during the first week of a 15 week shoot. It was broken during the gardening scene and not one of the insane action scenes he did. He got a week off and then they came back and shot all the scenes of him lying down. Then they shot the scenes of him sitting. Then the scenes of him standing. Later they got to scenes of him walking and running by the end.

4: Gettin’ jacked. Kurt didn’t film anything after Breakdown in 1997. He spent 18 months preparing physically for this film.

5: Don’t get bitten. The snakes were real Thai tree snakes. They were poisonous and unable to be de-fanged. In the scenes where the snakes mouths are closed they are forced closed.

6: Lost and found. They had 350 snakes on set. They would lose about 30 every time they used them for a shot. The handlers were never worried though and they did find them eventually.

7: Not real. The implications made in the film and by the writer are that the replacements for Todd and his fellow soldiers are replicants. It’s backed up if you look at the dates in which the major incidents happen in the two films.

8: My guy. Kurt Russell was always the first choice to play Todd.

9: Todd the hero. If you look at Todd’s current status it says “between wars”. If you see his war credentials, the battles correspond with the ones from Blade Runner. He also has a ton of medals listed under his name and you’ll notice that many of them are named for some of his characters from past movies.

10: Blame El Niño. Director Paul W.S. Anderson admitted that the film did not turn out the way he had originally intended. He and screenwriter David Webb Peoples had always envisioned the movie as a classic western, a sort-of Shane (1953) set in space, and wanted to film in wide open environments and existing locations as much as possible, as opposed to using studio sets. However, Kurt Russell insisted on bulking up for the role naturally, without use of steroids, which pushed the production schedule of the movie back by several months. By the time that his lengthy training was finished and filming was about to commence, the ‘El Niño’ hurricane caused such adverse weather conditions that filming on the selected locations was no longer possible. There was no other option than scaling back the picture and shooting inside a studio, with all its limitations. Anderson stated that it sadly compromised the entire look of the picture; he named the shot where Todd arrives on the planet and walks through the abandoned spaceship as an example of “the kind of imagery I wanted to put onscreen and get more of.”