This anti-war, anti-corporate America action flick toys with tone but is anything but antiquated.
“Don’t call it violence. Call it action. Kids love action,” Denis Leary’s defence company executive declares early in Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers. The idea of packaging up one thing and selling it as something else entirely, a central theme of the Gremlins director’s criminally underrated 1998 flick, might just as easily be applied to the film itself. The largely lukewarm critical reception upon initial release took particular aim at what many saw as an uneasy blend of family-friendly tropes and rather extreme toy-on-toy carnage.
In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called the film “too absurd to be frightening and too creepy for lighthearted fun”. Roger Ebert similarly claimed that “if the characters were human the movie would be a hard ‘R’”. They had a point. Arriving just three years after Toy Story, Dante’s film quickly establishes itself as the antithesis of Pixar’s feel-good crowd pleaser. A far cry from the charming, good-natured toys that inhabit young Andy’s bedroom, many of the plastic players in Small Soldiers are ruthless, merciless agents of chaos intent on waging war on the sleepy streets of suburban America. Figurines are dismembered, electrocuted, and sliced into tiny pieces by a lawn mower. The human characters, meanwhile, are kidnapped, tortured, and set upon with custom-made nail guns.
Dante himself acknowledged this tonal conflict in 2008 when he revealed that “[he] was told to make an edgy picture for teenagers, but when the sponsor tie-ins came in the new mandate was to soften it up as a kiddie movie. Too late, as it turned out, and there are elements of both approaches in there.” It is, however, this very tension that makes Small Soldiers one of the most intriguing and effective anti-war films of the last 30 years.
The movie’s satirical trenches are dug from the outset. GloboTech, a major contractor for the US armed forces, acquires the modest Heartland Toy Company and immediately commissions the production of the ‘Commando Elite’, a line of implausibly buffed-up army caricatures inadvertently fitted with military-grade microprocessors and the prophetic tagline: “Everything else is just a toy.” Marshalled by the aptly named Major Chip Hazard (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones), the Commando dolls are programmed with a single, unwavering genocidal impulse: to eliminate their sworn enemies, the ‘Gorgonites’, a band of strange, inquisitive beings led by the gentle Archer (Frank Langella).
From the off, Dante’s film weaves a neat subversion of the traditional Hollywood war movie formula. Here, the audience is encouraged to side with the homesick creatures from a distant land while scoffing at the ridiculousness of the hyper-masculine, all-American soldier. And so by the time the sparring plastic playthings find themselves in the possession of the film’s hero, troubled teenager Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith), Small Soldiers’ rather scathing stance on the US’s military legacy seems abundantly clear.
What follows is a deluge of entertaining if not entirely kid-appropriate battle scenes playing out in the living rooms and backyards of consumerist America. Several of these sequences are shrewdly constructed, with Dante, like he did so effectively with Gremlins, neatly turning ostensibly harmless, everyday household items into deadly weapons of war. Tennis balls become flaming tools of destruction. Barbie dolls are turned into deformed, indoctrinated recruits. A Spice Girls song is adopted as a means of psychological warfare.
Tongues might be firmly lodged in cheeks throughout – “I think World War Two was my favourite war,” the late Phil Hartman’s self-absorbed, tech-obsessed neighbour casually announces – but that the conflict appears to transition so effortlessly from the front line to the front lawn is telling. Ultimately, Small Soldiers is a story about the cultural normalisation of war; about how violence is sold to us, quietly infiltrating our homes often via the most impressionable minds of all: children.
As such, the excessive, child-unfriendly battle scenes feel, in many ways, entirely appropriate, serving the film’s wider critique of the true villains of the piece: corporate America. The warring toys, in a most literal sense, are heavy-handed but no less striking metaphors for the weapons used by mega-wealthy conglomerates to relentlessly push brand image, increase profit margins, and attempt to monopolise the market with little consideration for the disastrous fallout that arises.
It is a searing criticism of the forces propelling the dark facets of popular culture in the late ‘90s as well as an alarming foresight that only feels more pertinent a quarter of a century on. While we might not yet have reached the point of action figures re-purposing kitchenware into deadly weapons or commandeering entire truck-loads of stock, the fight for our attention, and indeed our money, has not stopped waging. It has simply moved to a more digital terrain. In an age of algorithms, streaming wars, tailored ads, and social media platforms rife with companies plugging their products, the battle has merely shifted from the home to the home page.
George Nash is a freelance film journalist. Follow him on Twitter via @_GeorgeNash for more movie musings.
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