Soldier (1998) on Netflix
Todd 3465 was raised in a military program that turns orphans into soldiers. When engineered replacements defeat him, he is left on a waste planet, where crash survivors take him in.
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- Rotten Tomatoes13%
Trailer
Plot summary
A military program takes in orphaned infants and raises them into disciplined soldiers who know nothing of civilian life. Todd 3465 is a hardened veteran of that program, and in 2036 his unit is set to be replaced by a new breed of genetically engineered fighters. Colonel Mekum, who leads the project, has one of the new soldiers, Caine 607, fight three of the older men, and Caine defeats them. Todd falls from a height during the fight and appears to be dead. Mekum orders the bodies thrown away, calling the older soldiers obsolete. Todd is left on Arcadia 234, a waste disposal planet, and makes his way to a colony of crash survivors, where Mace and Sandra shelter him. He has trouble adapting to their conflict-free community.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Soldier (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- During the first week of shooting Kurt Russell broke his left ankle, then broke the top of his right foot four days later, so the entire production needed to be rescheduled.
- To work around the injuries, the filmmakers first shot scenes involving Russell lying down, followed by scenes of Russell sitting, then Russell standing but not moving, and so on.
- Although Kurt Russell is in 85% of the scenes in Soldier, he speaks only 104 words in the entire movie.
- A Spinner from Blade Runner can be seen in the wreckage on the junk planet, and Russell's character is shown to have fought in the battles named in Roy Batty's dying monologue: the Shoulder of Orion and Tannhäuser Gate.
- Soldier was written by David Webb Peoples, who co-wrote Blade Runner, and in 1998 he said he considered Soldier a "spin-off sidequel" and spiritual successor to that film, seeing both as existing in a shared fictional universe.
- In an interview for Danny Stewart's 2023 book about the movie, Peoples said he wrote Soldier in 1984, very quickly and on his own, because he had seen the first Terminator in the theater and was stunned.
- The film was a box-office failure, grossing $14.6 million worldwide against a production budget of $60 million, but it has since become a cult film.
