The 1998 science fiction comedy Small Soldiers had a negligible impact upon the box office and popular culture, but 27 years after its debut, the movie is very deserving of a revival in the public consciousness. In Small Soldiers, a toy company launches a new set of action figures, the Commando Elite, along with their monstrous but peaceful enemies, the Gorgonites. Unbeknownst to the world, both sets of toys have been fitted with a top secret military microprocessor chip that causes the toys to come to life. When a set of Commandos and Gorgonites are shipped out a little early to local mom and pop toy store, Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith) finds himself doing everything he can to protect his family and new friend Christy Fimple (Kirsten Dunst) from the Commandos, along with protecting the peaceful set of Gorgonites, who simply want to return to their home world of Gorgon.
Almost three deacdes after its debut, Small Soldiers has an endearing, ’80s-esque kids movie quality to it, under the direction of Gremlins director Joe Dante. With the voice performances of Tommy Lee Jones as Commando Elite leader Chip Hazard and Frank Langella as Gorgonite emissary Archer, Small Soldiers is quite earnest, gripping, and comedic in the small scale toy war it delivers. While not a massive hit upon its release, Small Soldiers nonetheless stands out all these years later due to its aforementioned Amblin Entertainment-style charm and a few other key assets it its toy box.
Small Soldiers Is Chucky For Younger Audiences
When one thinks of the term “scary story,” it doesn’t take long for the tale of toys gaining sentience and turning on their human masters to spring to mind. The Child’s Play franchise is arguably the most famous killer toy horror movie franchise, terrifying audiences with the tale of serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) transferring his soul into a Good Guy doll, and continuing his killing spree as the not-so-good-guy plastic slasher movie villain Chucky. While the Child’s Play franchise is R-rated to its core, Small Soldiers delivers the same killer toy experience on a more palpable PG-13 level.
Small Soldiers most definitely presents the Commando Elite as a force to be reckoned with, but also keeps the mayhem they unleash much more tame than Chucky’s vicious, blood-soaked killings. The Commandos kidnap and restrain numerous unsuspecting people and even put a bottle of sleeping pills to use to knock out the parents of Christy and Timmy (Jacob Smith), but not a single human character actually dies at the hands of the Commandos in Small Soldiers. From that angle, Small Soldiers works well as a kid-friendly take on the Chucky-template with toys coming to life to wreak havoc, with the movie keeping their mayhem restrained enough to give PG-13-level thrills and chills.
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Small Soldiers Is Toy Story For Older Audiences
On the flip side, Small Soldiers also has a different kind of appeal for teenagers and adults as a somewhat more mature take on the Toy Story formula. The Disney-Pixar Toy Story franchise also focuses on living toys as its main characters, but works with a family-friendly and very G-rated framework. While the villainous Sid Phillips (Erik von Detten) blows up his toys with cartoonish glee, the Toy Story franchise never presents anything overtly scary or intense in the adventures of Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and their fellow toys. That’s obviously been a great tool in the Toy Story franchise building a four-quadrant audience and amassing billions at the box office, but Small Soldiers adds something that Toy Story franchise largely avoids with real peril to humans and toys alike.
In Small Soldiers, the Commando Elite have no goal but to wipe out the Gorgonites, and they’ll step on the toes of anyone who gets in their way. That puts the human and Gorgonite characters alike in real danger, even if Small Soldiers, as stated above, only takes its carnage just up to the line of fatality without crossing it, save for the often brutal deaths experienced by the Commandos themselves in everything from garbage disposals to power transformers.
The rivalry of the Commandos and the Gorgonites also mirrors the toy rivalry of Woody and Buzz in the first Toy Story along with other toy-based conflicts in the Toy Story franchise, with the added danger of the Commandos really being out for Gorgonite blood. In the end, while Toy Story‘s method of family and kid-friendly storytelling was clearly the right for it to make, Small Soldiers dials the living toys formula up just enough to entice adolescents and adults with something in the same vein with slightly more intensity.
Small Soldiers Feels More Relevant Today Thanks To A.I.
In the past few years, it seems impossible to turn one’s head in any direction without seeing some kind of story about the rise of A.I. (artificial intelligence) as factor of modern life and technology. Whether framed through a “sky is falling” doom and gloom lens or with a more optimistic perspective that A.I. can be harnessed into being a useful tool, it’s impossible to escape in the modern news landscape. That also makes Small Soldiers feel shockingly ahead of its time with the role A.I. itself plays in bringing the Commando Elite and Gorgonites to life.
The pitch meeting scene alone feels like something that happens in board meetings with regularity, with Mars’ insistence on developing toys “that are so smart that when kids play with them, they play back. Toys, in short, gentlemen, that actually do what they do in the commercials.” Small Soldiers focuses upon the idea of A.I. as a tool for profit no matter the cost, with Larry’s hasty decision to put military-grade microprocessor chips into the Commandos and Gorgonites unleashing A.I.-powered mini-Terminators and driven by a corporate mandate to maximize the bottom line without looking at the bigger picture. While bringing toys to life is probably well-beyond the capabilities of modern A.I., it’s fun to watch Small Soldiers today with the hindsight of the advancements A.I. has made in the 21st century, both as a cautionary tale and as a kid and adult-friendly sci-fi adventure.
Small Soldiers may have been only a small hit in 1998, but watching it over a quarter century later, it isn’t just an endearing popcorn movie, but one bizarrely ahead of its time in what it has to say about the possibilities of A.I. and the importance of being careful of where and how it is implemented. Moreover, embodying a PG-13 Chucky and a PG-13 Toy Story simultaneously is quite an impressive trick that Small Soldiers never got the credit it deserves for pulling off. 27 years later, Small Soldiers really is a surprisingly big achievement among movies about toys unexpectedly coming to life.
Small Soldiers is available to stream on MGM+.
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