Popular reviews

• 

  Review by David Sims ★★★ 3

  if you like Kurt Russell gazing into the distance (and I do) this movie is basically hardcore porn

• 

  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 6

  Action!: Anderson, Anderson, Anderson.... Andersson? - The Nerdy Paul

  After helming what’s considered by many the best video game movie and one of the low key best Sci fi horror movies, our nerdy boy Paul WS is back with a film that will make you point at your screen and shout “Hey! I’ve seen this movie before! It had Jean Claude Van Damme in it!”, a spiritual sidequel to the iconic Blade Runner that sees Ken Russell pulling his best impersonation of The Terminator, minus the charm.

  The story in this movie has some interesting elements, but it’s buried underneath a pile of tropes and cliches of the genre, and while Russell is great as this silent and broken soldier,…

• 

  Review by comrade_yui 1

  "maybe you should have made them smart instead of fast"

  this has a brilliant 7 minute prologue without any character dialogue that perfectly establishes the plot, themes, visual style and character beats for the rest of the movie. looking at this after the bloated but fun excess of mortal kombat and the editing constraints he dealt with on event horizon, this is anderson for the first time at peak situational control. every light, every edit, every sound effect serves a purpose here. with this control comes the first great elaboration of said purpose; his concerns with human life faced against systems that are explicitly mechanistic and anti-human.

  the fascism in this universe is vague, all-pervasive. churning out 'perfect' soldiers who…

• 

  Review by sydney ★★★½

  Universal Soldier learns how to love, 1950's sci-fi magazine style...something i never knew could exist and don't know how i ever lived without. a beautiful picture. (only one complaint: kurt russell isn't bad as a blank-faced killing machine who almost never talks, but it seems cruel to deprive us of his charms.)

• 

  Review by Bryan Espitia ★★★½ 3

  Surprisingly human story at its core, can totally see the Blade Runner connection beyond some of the minor references. Eventually though it goes full 80s one-man-army where Kurt Russell dons war paint and goes to work with a knife and a minigun. Pretty cool stuff.

• 

  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 3

  pwsa could have made the cobbler or jason bourne after this and just this one movie would have still made him one of the best action filmmakers of all time, it's hard to describe just how tailor made everything about this movie is to me, and he went on to top it like 4 different times, what even are you paul. russell's a beast, exchanging his typical immense charm from extremely rough stoicism and it works, he sells the fragmentation of identity after crisis and post traumatic stress disorder without vocally expressing anything or even changing the fact that he's been trained since birth to fight. by the climax, he's the same person he was at the beginning, but fighting…

• 

  Review by More_Badass ★★★★ 1

  Holy crap, whatever happened to this Paul W.S. Anderson? Not a high bar to clear, not even an average bar, but Soldier is the man’s best movie by miles. A lean mean sci-fi action banger that’s closer to a Pyun flick or rock-solid genre fare like Pitch Black than anything else PWSA has made since (save for perhaps Death Race), ostensibly a minor offshoot of Blade Runner’s universe but really the best Universal Soldier film between the original and John Hyams’ sequels.

  The last thing I expected from Soldier was to see Kurt Russell’s best action performance this side of Snake Plissken, fully committing to a soul-hardened granite glare that speaks volumes depending on the context. Watching the man go…

• 

  Review by Joe ★★★½ 1

  Wasn't really expecting much from this but it's quite sturdy in its military scifi trappings, and refreshingly fat-free in its proportion of action to drama -- this movie is like 80 percent violence, much of it rendered with practical SFX, explosions, and stunts, an unfair advantage for any movie to have in our presently cold and desolate cinematic landscape. I'm also a fan of when movie stars like Kurt Russell work overtime to suppress their God-given charisma and charm, this is almost an experiment in taking that technique as far as it can possibly go, he's like an animal performer in this, no affect at all, you wonder if they got him to cry by doing something horrible to him right before the cameras started rolling.

• 

  Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★★½

  "I'm going to kill them all."

  Somehow the least commercial thing I've seen today (and I watched Cremaster 1 this afternoon), Soldier is a bizarre, pulverized G.I. Joe fever dream of the highest proportions. Feels like Anderson's vision of an action movie with all the fat trimmed off- fat, of course, being characters, motivations, 80% of dialogue, subtlety, conflict/resolution, and exposition (40 years are covered in the opening 5 minutes and that is all the context we get). Valhalla Rising if it had a few more words and was less cagey about the spaceships. Cements Paul W.S. as the finest of the magnificent Andersons.

• 

  Review by Ivica_Pusticki ★★★★½ 9

  SCI-FIx52 [2024]
  11. Watch a science-fiction film with action elements.

  So...after finishing watching this, it got me thinking! SOLDIER is a perfect example of what today's generations would call "a dad movie"; a macho testosterone-filled violent action flick that middle-aged dads can watch a hundred times over and over because it makes them feel better!
  But you know what...I'm perfectly fine with that, because I am a middle-aged dad, and I love bad-ass violent action movies...and SOLDIER is exactly that - a bad-ass violent action movie filled with macho bullshit and testosterone! And I LOVE IT!

  But OK...all "jokes" aside...

  SOLDIER is a simple action movie with a stripped-down narrative that focuses on the journey of its protagonist, Todd, who…

• 

  Review by John Barlow ★★★★½

  I guess because this wasn't directed by Paul Verhoeven, not enough people have pointed out any underlying political themes. Now I understand what people mean by PWSA being critically depoliticized.

• 

  Review by máxieo.re ★★★

  Существует множество теорий о связи фильмов и игр:

  1) Черепашки-ниндзя стали мутантами в тот же день, когда ослеп будущий Сорвиголова.
  По сюжету комикса «Сорвиголова», юный Мердок спасает прохожего от грузовика с химикатами, в результате чего слепнет. А мастер Сплинтер, вспоминая появление черепашек, рассказывает, как при тех же обстоятельствах одна из бочек попала в ребенка с аквариумом, в котором они и были. После аварии они вместе с химикатами угодили в канализацию.

  2) "Один дома" и "Пила"
  Джон Крамер - повзрослевший Кевин

  3) Теория Pixar
  Общеизвестно, что грузовик Pizza Planet появился в каждом проекте от Pixar (кроме «Суперсемейки»). Тем не менее, этот грузовик не единственное, что связывает мультфильмы друг с другом. В «Корпорации монстров» у Бу есть игрушечная девушка-ковбой Джесси из «Истории…