Why Small Soldiers is one of the deepest kids’… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Small Sol­diers is one of the deep­est kids’ movies ever made

21 Jul 2018

Words by Nadine Smith

Muscular humanoid figure in close combat with a large white cat.
Muscular humanoid figure in close combat with a large white cat.
There’s a sly satir­ic mes­sage at the heart of Joe Dante’s 1998 tale of action fig­ures run­ning amuck.

In 1998, Chica­go Read­er crit­ic Jonathan Rosen­baum com­pared two new releas­es by two film­mak­ers of rough­ly the same gen­er­a­tion: Steven Spielberg’s Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan and Joe Dante’s Small Sol­diers. One is a pres­ti­gious and patri­ot­ic war pic­ture that took home five Oscars, the oth­er is a sil­ly movie for kids. Though Spielberg’s film is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be the supe­ri­or and more seri­ous of the two, Rosen­baum pre­ferred the lat­ter, prais­ing Dante’s crit­i­cism of not just cul­ture and vio­lence but also every­day cul­tur­al violence.”

Both films are now 20 years old, but his­to­ry sided against Rosen­baum: Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan is con­sid­ered one of the great mod­ern war epics while Small Sol­diers has been large­ly for­got­ten, except per­haps as an object of nos­tal­gia. But per­haps the argu­ment made two decades ago is wor­thy of revis­it­ing. What if an often-over­looked children’s movie is actu­al­ly one of the great Amer­i­can anti-war films?

The hero of Dante’s film is Alan Aber­nathy (Gre­go­ry Smith), a trou­bled teen who acci­den­tal­ly acquires a set of state-of-the-art play­things devel­oped by Heart­land Toy Com­pa­ny, a new divi­sion of defence con­trac­tor GloboTech. Heartland’s new toy lines, the Gor­gonites and their sworn ene­mies the Com­man­do Elite, have been inad­ver­tent­ly installed with microchips intend­ed for bal­lis­tic mis­siles and pro­grammed to wage very real war against each oth­er. This con­flict explodes in the back­yard of Alan’s home, where toys and humans alike are tor­tured and trau­ma­tised. As the tagline for the Com­man­do Elite prophet­i­cal­ly reads, Every­thing else is just a toy.”

Small Sol­diers is two things at once; as Roger Ebert not­ed in his review, it’s a fam­i­ly pic­ture on the out­side and a mean, vio­lent action pic­ture on the inside.” Dante him­self acknowl­edged this ten­sion in a 2008 inter­view, claim­ing “[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.”

Though many crit­ics at the time con­sid­ered Dante’s fusion of fam­i­ly fun and hor­ror vio­lence a fail­ure, this syn­the­sis is actu­al­ly to the movie’s ben­e­fit: Small Sol­diers is about how vio­lence is sold to us. As the defen­sive com­pa­ny exec­u­tive played by Denis Leary remarks, Don’t call it vio­lence. Call it action. Kids love action.” The most effec­tive way to sell con­flict to the vot­ing pub­lic is to make it attrac­tive to chil­dren. Then par­ents have to buy it.

A num­ber of crit­ics, includ­ing both Ebert and Rosen­baum, com­pared Small Sol­diers to the ear­li­er Toy Sto­ry. A more use­ful par­al­lel might be Juras­sic Park, both in its nar­ra­tive about a sci­ence exper­i­ment gone wild and the ten­sion that exists between its onscreen pol­i­tics and off-screen mer­chan­dis­ing. Juras­sic Park might have crit­i­cised those who would exploit nature for prof­it, but it attempt­ed to do the very same thing through its vora­cious mar­ket­ing cam­paign, which stamped the franchise’s tyran­nosaurus logo on every­thing from fast food to lunch­box­es, inside and out­side the movie.

Small Sol­diers, the sixth film pro­duced by Spielberg’s Dream­Works Pic­tures, attempt­ed to pitch a sim­i­lar mul­ti­me­dia tent­pole. The VHS for Small Sol­diers includ­ed a pro­mo for the Small Sol­diers Total Expe­ri­ence”, adver­tis­ing a sound­track album, video game, and action toys with names like Ground Assault Vehi­cle” and Buz­z­saw Tank”, all set to the iron­ic tune of Edwin Starr’s War’. Major Chip Haz­zard (voice by Tom­my Lee Jones), the film’s pri­ma­ry plas­tic antag­o­nist, is more promi­nent­ly empha­sised in art­work and adver­tis­ing copy than the gen­tle Gorgonites.

This might seem to con­tra­dict the point Dante makes about how action” toys nor­malise our culture’s thirst for war­fare, but it only empha­sis­es his mes­sage fur­ther. Denis Leary’s defence exec­u­tive uses the toy divi­sion of his com­pa­ny to cre­ate a need for the weapons wing of his multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion. Images of strong sol­diers and heavy artillery are pushed on chil­dren and their par­ents in order to reaf­firm America’s orig­i­nal pas­time: armed con­flict. See­ing that Small Sol­diers exists inside the same cul­ture Dante seeks to crit­i­cise, it only makes sense that the movie’s adver­tis­ing cam­paign would mim­ic its diegetic equiv­a­lent, adver­tis­ing aggres­sion over peace­ful understanding.

Small Sol­diers goes beyond Juras­sic Park in its diegetic cri­tique too: the film’s real vil­lain isn’t a mis­un­der­stand grand­pa with an over­am­bi­tious dream like John Ham­mond, but the entire mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. In a world where Ama­zon works with the Pen­ta­gon and Dis­ney wants to own every pop cul­ture icon it can, Dante’s cri­tique of multi­na­tion­al monop­o­li­sa­tion res­onates even more today than it did in 1998.

While Small Sol­diers may not be includ­ed in the con­ver­sa­tion about the great war movies, maybe it’s time we change that con­ver­sa­tion. Small Sol­diers crit­i­cis­es the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary appa­ra­tus by mov­ing the front­lines from his­tor­i­cal bat­tle­fields to the sub­ur­ban home, focus­ing on the cul­tur­al nor­mal­i­sa­tion of war instead of war itself. Just as he did in Grem­lins, Dante reveals the com­bat zone hid­den inside the Amer­i­can house­hold. Poten­tial weapons, from garbage dis­pos­als to chain­saws to Bar­bie dolls, lurk in every cor­ner. Dad’s tool chest can become a tor­ture cham­ber. A Spice Girls CD can be an instru­ment of psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare. Every plow­share is a sword in disguise.

Small Sol­diers avoids mak­ing war look glam­orous by mak­ing it look unfa­mil­iar, reveal­ing the hor­rors hid­den in our own homes. So maybe it’s time we took this par­tic­u­lar kids’ movie seri­ous­ly. Every­thing else is, after all, just a toy.

You might like