G.I Jokers Case File #165 Small Soldiers (1998)

Faces not even a mother could love.

When you filter the pop culture of the past through the prism of the present, as you are now legally and professionally obligated to do, some entertainment benefits and some suffers. For example, the current culture-wide reckoning with the role state-sanctioned violence and murder plays in society, particularly where pop culture is concerned, makes the already toothless military comedy Sgt. Bilko, which I just wrote about for This Looks Mediocre! and Phil Hartman month, even more depressingly gutless. 

That same cultural moment simultaneously makes Hartman’s final film, Joe Dante’s incisive and blisteringly dark 1998 satire Small Soldiers even more prescient and timely. It’s not hard to see why Dante’s Gremlins-styled full frontal attack on our cultural deification of stoic militarism as an insane death cult was not a hit. What’s surprising is that a film this subversive got made in the first place. 

We are, after all, a culture and moviegoing public that made American Sniper, a movie about how a probable pathological liar who claimed to have killed over 250 brown people of all kinds named Chris Kyle is a true hero who represents the best of us, the top-grossing war movie of all time and a six-time Oscar nominee, including best picture and best actor. 

A knee-jerk deference to the inherent rightness of American military might is as hard-wired into our culture as an equally insistent, insidious belief that cops are invariably good guys willing to lay down their lives to protect us from danger, at least among white people who hold wildly disproportionate power in our country. 

So a movie that depicts plastic versions of the kind of stoic, flat-topped, cigar-chomping, gung-ho military men who have long served as the uncomplicated heroes of war films as deranged lunatics willing to destroy and demolish anything that gets in their way, including women and children, contradicts the way we’re taught to see authority. 

That’s part of what makes what’s happening now in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder so fascinating and loaded with potential, both good and bad. We’re finally un-learning some of this conditioning. We’re asking the kinds of questions and exploring the kinds of ideas that would have been dismissed as impossibly radical and impractical even five years ago. 

Small Soldiers explores the incredible psychological and cultural damage wrought by growing up with the omnipresent message that an interventionist, heavily armed and funded military and rule-breaking, authoritarian police force are the cornerstones of a functioning civilized society rather than its antithesis. 

In Small Soldiers, G.I Joe is a blood-thirsty sociopath and Barbie is a mostly naked, undead ghoul/Terminator-like cyborg who spouts inane catchphrases in a chipper voice while trying to main, destroy and kill. In this subversive re-telling, our little plastic friends are now our bitter enemy and the negative messages they impart about the wonders of conformity and the necessity of violence are no longer abstract but matters of life and death. 

The Clinton-era action comedy opens with Gil Mars (Denis Leary), the sinister head of Globotech, a particularly evil international conglomerate with its grubby, greedy, dirty little fingers in all sorts of unsavory pies, putting pressure on the remnants of a radically downsized toy division to create toys that actually do all of the things they appear to do in the commercials. 

Irwin Wayfair (David Cross) designed the whimsical Gorgonites to be noble fantasy heroes but when Gil sees that they look weird he decides that they’re villains instead and the sworn enemies of the true heroes, the Commander Elite, a gaggle of marines created by Irwin’s more ambitious and less ethical colleague Larry Benson (Jay Mohr) in the dead-eyed, bloodthirsty R. Lee Ermey mold led by Chip Hazard, a crazed hawk with a flat top and facial features so sharp you could grate cheese on them. 

In a desperate bid to hold onto his job, Larry steals his co-workers password (Gizmo, an unsubtle ode to Dante’s Gremlins) and procures a military microprocessor invented by prickly scientist Irwin Quist (Dante repertory player Robert Picardo) for both the Gorgonites and the Commando Elites so powerful that it essentially renders them sentient. 

The microprocessor gives life to the Gorgonites and Commando Elite but like us eminently fallible human beings, they are ruled by their programming. The gentle Gorgonites’ programming dictates that they hide and they lose. In our world, people like that are known as “Democrats.“

The Commando Elite’s sole directive is to destroy Gorgonites and anyone and anything that comes in the way of that goal. They do not want to obliterate the Gorgonites for any specific reason: it’s just who they are and what they are programmed to do. It’s also ALL they’re conditioned to do. They have no poetry in their souls. They are not moved by the smile of a baby or the cuteness of a puppy. All they do is kill, kill, kill, which usually makes them heroes we’re expected to root for and identify with. Here, however, internalizing the military ethos in its purest, most unfiltered form renders them monsters.

Gregory Smith stars in Small Soldiers as Alan Abernathy, a teenager who convinces a Globotech employee played by Dick Miller to let him procure some Gorgonite and Elite Commando figures for his family’s toy store despite his pacifist father Stuart’s (Kevin Dunn) hatred of war toys. 

Miller was of course physically incapable of being anything less than wonderful in a Joe Dante movie so his twinkly-eyed cog in the massive Globotech machine is warm and wise and funny and full of avuncular charm and personality. 

Allan befriends Archer, the leader of the Gorgonites. Thanks to a combination of puppeteering, animation and voice acting from a perfectly cast Frank Langella, Archer emerges as a figure of surprising depth, dignity and gravitas considering that he’s a hunk of plastic given life through the dark magic of military technology. Archer is a noble figure of fantasy but the rest of the gorgeously designed Gorgonites resemble a cross between monsters, Looney Tunes-style cartoons and Madballs. 

One of the many elements of Small Soldiers that connect it to the much-loved, endlessly mythologized Steven Spielberg creature features of the 1980s is its genuine sense of wonder; Small Soldiers captures the sense of awe a typical teenager like Allan would experience encountering fantastical creatures beyond his imagination, toys that think and feel and learn and grow and are achingly human in so many ways.

They say that when technology surpasses a certain threshold it becomes magic. That’s true of the Frankenstein science that turns these toys into terrors. 

Tommy Lee Jones is perfectly type-cast as Chip Hazard, a glowering hard-ass who, like the famously cantankerous Oscar-winner playing him, cannot sanction buffoonery. Hazard leads a crew of killers voiced by the surviving cast of 1967’s The Dirty Dozen. Dante understood what a thrill it would be for children to hear the voice of Ernest Borgnine, who they of course knew as Sgt. Fatso Jetson in From Here to Eternity coming out of the mouth of a plastic fascist with murder in his soul. 

The Commando Elite suggest a strangely sinister cross between G.I Joe and the monstrous puppets, doll-men and demonic toys of cult horror studio Full Moon. In Dante’s bold vision, the true demonic toys are the murderous weapons the defense industry and military insists are vital for our survival no matter the cost in dollars or human lives.

The Commando Elite know only war and violence and hatred. When Allan and Christy Fimple (Kirsten Dunst), the gorgeous girl next door that Allan has a crush on stand between the Commando Elite and the Gorgonites they become targets for the small soldiers as well as the war comes home for these terrified teens in ways they never could have imagined. 

Phil Hartman plays Christy’s father as an archetypal suburban dad obsessed with technology, war and appearances but at the first sign of danger he’s waving the white flag of surrender and defeat rather than risk losing his little slice of the American dream. 

To aid The Commando Elite in their unholy quest, Chip Hazard gives the gift of life to Gwendy dolls, Barbie-like exemplars of arch-femininity transformed into monstrous creatures of pure destruction. As voiced by Christina Ricci and Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Gwendys are every bit as aggressive, violent and monomaniacal as the Commando Elite but they’re also programmed to be cheerful, flirtatious, friendly and conventionally feminine. Unleashed and unhinged, the Gwendys combine the very worst of masculinity and femininity.

Small Soldiers boxes itself into a corner plot-wise and thematically in a climax that finds the Gorgonites learning and growing and fighting programming that insists that they must always lose by rising to the challenge and defeating the single-minded and sociopathic Commando Elites by being really good at violence. 

You can’t make an evisceratingly dark satire about the bloodlust without lots of violence. Yet the idea that bloodshed is acceptable as long as the good guys are the one doing it feels disconcertingly close to the rah-rah military boosterism Small Soldiers otherwise satirizes so adroitly. 

During its theatrical release Small Soldiers found itself in a peculiar predicament. Dante’s blistering comic attack on the deification of the military and our  love of violence as entertainment, whether in the form of action movies or war toys, was expected to sell toys itself, whether through Hasbro’s line of Small Soldiers action figures or Burger King Kid’s Meals. 

Burger King claims they thought Small Soldiers would be a PG-rated, family-friendly film when they partnered with Dreamworks to make kid’s meal premiums from Dante’s cult classic but that seems hard to believe considering the film feels much closer to a hard R than a soft PG. Small Soldiers did better at the box-office than its reputation as an unmistakable commercial failure would suggest but it did not realize Dreamworks’ high hopes for it as a potential summer blockbusters for all of the right reasons: it was ultimately too dark, smart and satirical to make a mint with a public that throws money at the Transformers movies, for example, to cite a latter-day take on the 1980s Steven Spielberg creature feature that made a whole lot more money while contributing nothing of value to cinema or our culture, except for Bumblebee, which is great.

Small Soldiers’ disappointing performance at the box-office can be seen as a sign of its creative success. After all, people who have been programmed by society to worship military might are inherently inclined to reject movies that ask them to challenge that programming 

Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success 

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