No genre demonstrates this better than the disaster films that Hollywood churned out from the late 1990s, beginning with the unprecedented success of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 sci-fi actioner Independence Day, through the late 2000s, with the genre’s latest big break being 2012’s End of Days
Universal Soldier (1992), made decade-defining blockbusters, and eventually faded from popular consciousness after making a handful of flops in the genre that helped cement their initial success. To say that Universal Soldier is a good film by any traditional metric would be to engage in an exercise in the elasticity of adjectives. The claim can be made, however, that the film is one of the most entertaining pieces of mainstream
action filmmaking to come out in the past 30 years, a blank-and-squib bonanza presented with zero pretension. If Robocop is Coca-Cola, Universal Soldier is RC Cola.
The pairing of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren – the first in a series of collaborations that continue on into this year’s Minions: The Rise of Gru – is an inspired choice, especially when considered against Emmerich’s mise-en-scène. If this same script were directed just half a decade prior, the frame would focus on the bodies of our Herculean protagonists, juxtaposing the machinery of the pair’s UniSol gear with the glimmer of their sweat-riddled flesh. As men and as machines, their bodies are tools to commit state violence.
n the film’s opening Vietnam War sequence, it’s revealed to neither Luc (Jean-Claude Van Damme) nor, by extension, the audience, who the antagonist of the sequence is. Emmerich instead chooses to focus his camera on the looming threat of the natural world. Lightening crashes. Rain pours. The ground swells as the mud consumes the remains of the dead. Luc traverses the jungle, taken aback by the barren landscape of a vengeful earth.
The choice to set the rest of the film in the Arizona desert codifies Emmerich’s thesis that the actions of violent men shall bring with them a terrestrial wrath.
RELATED:
Every Universal Soldier Movie From Worst To Best
Universal Soldier still succumbs to the casual authoritarianism that proliferated the films of the decade, where the solution to any problem is dependent on who can draw a firearm the fastest.
But the film is also littered with a post-Watergate distrust of American authority, specifically the military industrial complex, that wouldn’t be out-of-place in an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone vehicle. These artifacts lend themselves to making the film a fascinating cultural object, the last vestiges of a decade in decline.
Regardless of whether one likes the film, it must be acknowledged that Universal Soldier’s existence is responsible for nearly two decades worth of mainstream blockbuster filmmaking. Without it, the world would never have been graced with the creative pairing of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, the force that would act as the progenitors of the new wave of disaster films that would go on to dominate box offices.
Whether Emmerich will ever again join the pantheon of the tastemakers has yet to be seen – if Moonfall, his latest, is any indication, he’ll
stay firmly planted in that special realm dedicated to hacks subsumed by the sands of time and good taste – but someone will come and perform the same magic trick that Emmerich pulled off with Independence Day. Whether this means the dial turns towards another decade of high-concept disaster films is a matter that will only become clearer with time. However, one thing is for certain. Whatever art comes out of that genre transition, we’ll never get anything as fun as Universal Soldier.