Paul W S Anderson’s Soldier has links to Blade Runner and Event Horizon – and also inspired a not-particularly-truthful press statement. The 1998 movie Soldier might not have set the box office alight – far from it, in fact – but there’s much more to it than it often gets credit for. For one thing, ... Soldier: Kurt Russell, a major injury, and an ornamental cabbage
Paul W S Anderson’s Soldier has links to Blade Runner and Event Horizon – and also inspired a not-particularly-truthful press statement.
The 1998 movie Soldier might not have set the box office alight – far from it, in fact – but there’s much more to it than it often gets credit for.
For one thing, it effectively exists in the same world as Blade Runner. Way before the cinematic universe became a thing, writer David Webb Peoples admitted to the crossover between the two films. He wrote them roughly around the same time in the early 1980s (scribbling Soldier in earnest once Blade Runner was before the cameras).
Crucially, the idea – about a soldier facing off against a genetically-enhanced foe – had a direct Blade Runner link.
The story goes that Soldier spun out of an abandoned opening scene from Blade Runner, which would have seen Replicants abandoned on an off-world colony. What’s more, at one stage Clint Eastwood – who took a different David Webb Peoples script, Unforgiven, and waited a decade to film it – was linked to the movie.
Later on, Soldier was planned to be a real upscaling of Kurt Russell and director Paul W S Anderson’s respective careers, too. Russell has been slowly accruing a collection of hit movies (Breakdown, Stargate, Tombstone, Unlawful Entry among others), and his films were regularly crossing the $50m mark at the US box office – at a point in Hollywood history when that was still a lot of money. Anderson was on the climb too, with the success of Mortal Kombat in particular getting Hollywood’s attention.
It was a deal that Soldier saw Russell break into megastar salary levels. This was his big payday: a $20m paycheque, a big Warner Bros science fiction action movie, and headlining a sizeable studio tentpole picture as the only name above the title on the poster.
He took it seriously, too. Russell knew that his character needed to be in strong physical shape, and committed to an 18-month regimen of workouts, up to four hours of day. This had a knock-on effect of delaying the movie’s start of production, and in turn, it’s the reason we ultimately got the film Event Horizon in 1997.
Anderson, rather than sitting around and twiddling his thumbs, opted to go and make another movie, and was able to get Event Horizon completed while Russell was beefing himself up. We covered that particular film in a previous podcast.
There was a further ramification to the delay which proved to be to the movie’s ultimate detriment. Anderson and Peoples wanted the film to be a western in space, yet in the time it took Russell to prepare, a hurricane had caused substantial damage to planned locations for the movie, rendering them unusable. Instead, the production was scaled to be more studio-based – something Anderson would later regret.
The film nonetheless remains an exercise in how to cover up an injured leading star. At one stage, Russell sustained a broken ankle on the set – just one week into production. It led to a hurried change of the schedule, with scenes that could be shot with him lying down going before the cameras first, and the running sequences saved for the end.
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What was interesting, though, was that when Russell was injured, a statement was put out to the press that announced he’d broken his ankle during filming of a stunt for the movie. This wasn’t the truth.
On the commentary track for the Alien Vs Predator DVD, Anderson finally admitted the real reason behind Russell’s accident. What had actually happened was that the actor, during a break in filming, had taken a stumble. Not only was there no stunt involved, but Russell had actually fallen over an ornamental cabbage.
True story.
The rest of the shoot would inevitably be testing for Russell, given that he was carrying a major injury. It didn’t help that a week after filming began, Russell sustained a second injury to his right foot. Not as severe, certainly, but still not without impact.
Yet Russell was determined to get to the end of it, and duly did. There was, too, the prospect of a sequel were the film to hit big. Presumably with another sizeable paycheque attached.
But Soldier wasn’t a hit. Instead, it found itself on the wrong side of some negative reviews, and its box office was deflated too. An opening weekend of just over $6m was a crushing disappointment, and the movie went on to gross just $14m in the US.
In the UK, I barely remember it even getting a cinema release. But still: there’s more to the film than it’s often given credit for, and I’ve seen much worse films do far better. Certainly, none of them had an ornamental cabbage to watch out for, capable of nearly defeating their lead actor.
An earlier version of this story was previously published on Film Stories in 2020.
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