Soldier: Mostly typical violence vehicle

   Review by MC5
   
   MIM attended the Hollywood movie "Soldier" at its debut in theaters in
   October. The premise of the movie is the high-tech future of
   militarism in which soldiers run amok killing defenseless wimmin and
   children throughout the galaxy as part of "training."
   
   The premise of such an unmitigated evil allows the movie producers to
   come up with many excuses for gory action scenes. One retired soldier
   takes on 23 of the latest in high-tech soldiers and officers and wins
   thus saving the lives of refugee children on a planet used as a
   galactic dumping ground.
   
   In the movie we learn that the future equivalent of the Pentagon has
   untrammeled power including the right to kill or abduct anyone on the
   spot. We do not learn any of the motivations for the creation of ever
   more scientifically perfect fighting machines and soldiers in the
   future.
   
   Although such movies will be relatively clear even to the decadent
   thinking of imperialist country parasites because of the stark
   opposition of good and bad, the violence of the movie will not
   contribute in a straight-forward way toward the militarist climate in
   the United $tates. While the U.$. public is able to identify with the
   "rebels" against the "empire" in movies such as Star Wars, often the
   effect of violent movies is to justify violence in the minds of
   viewers.
   
   Certainly in "Soldier" the main character is justified in his
   violence, but by seeing so many movies where violence is justified in
   so many contexts, the U.$. public is bound to ad-lib its own
   justifications for violence and see them as equally righteous as what
   happened in the movies. Since Amerikan movies in particular glorify
   the individual hero against the rest of society, Hollywood ends up
   contributing to the climate of serial killers and militarism.
   
   The dialectical benefit of "Soldier" is that the only persyn capable
   of stopping the ultimate evil of the soldiers unleashed by the
   militarists was another soldier, in this case, an ex-soldier.
   "Soldiers deserve other soldiers" is one of the few things that the
   killing machine turned hero says.
   
   After decades of brain-washing and after his retirement, a soldier
   ends up fighting for his own life against the militarist machine that
   he himself belonged to that is running amok in the galaxy. This
   conflict within the soldier's life is a redeeming benefit to a movie
   otherwise typical in a country where action-violence movies are so
   popular.