Universal Soldier starts out in 1968 with Van Damme playing the good guy, standing up for some innocent Vietnamese people in a village during the war. Dolph Lundgren plays an embittered American soldier, consumed with anger about his fellow soldiers who have been killed in the war, and intent on taking it out on any Vietnamese people he can find. Luc (Van Damme) insists that the village has been cleared and those people have done nothing wrong, and the ensuing conflict leads to both of them killing each other before the opening credits are even over. The dead soldiers are declared M.I.A., not because their having killed each other would be a little difficult to explain, but because they are needed for a new kind of military technology.
Now here's where I get a little lost. We cut to the "Present Day Nevada Desert," 25 years later. You'll notice that 25 years after 1968 you'll find 1993, the year after this movie was released. I supposed the original audiences were left in complete terror about what was going to take place around the following Spring. The rest of us may wonder why the movie markets itself as being a story about futuristic military technology, when it takes place about 5-6 months after the release date.
At any rate, we are immediately taken to a tense hostage situation that is taking place, if I'm not mistaken, on the Hoover Dam, so that the new cyborg-soldiers could be put to the test (a full quarter of a century after they were made). Truly they are impressive pieces of machinery (or whatever they are), and the situation is soon under control. The local news outlets gleefully report that the situation has been taken care of, and with "no casualties or injuries." Maybe they forgot about the dozen or so innocent people that had been machine gunned right there in the middle of the road in broad daylight. Or maybe they just don't count.
The movie plays around a lot with what Luc and Andrew Scott (Lundgren) have become. There's a scene where, after Luc begins having flashbacks of Vietnam and escapes with an attractive reporter (who was fired for being late to the scene), he walks outside naked as the day he was born, explaining that he's hot. You see, one of the symptoms of the new soldiers is that their body temperature runs hot, so they have to sleep in refrigerated compartments to avoid overheating. Soon after that, they are discovered, so Luc (now named GR-44) asks Veronica, the reporter, to examine his naked, chiseled body and look for where they have hidden the tracking device. "Look for something unusual," he tells her. "Something hard."
Clearly, the ideas lifted by the boatload from the Terminator movies need not be named. I have only room for 1,000 words here, and to list the borrowed ideas would take more than that. But even though there are literally scenes lifted directly from the Terminators (like the café scene where GR-44 casually beats the crap out of everyone in sight), the movie never feels like a rip-off. Maybe that's because, for all the bad rap he gets, Van Damme has a definite, undeniable on screen charm. At one point, not long after they've met, Veronica asks him where he's from.
"I figured you gotta be French or something," she says, "because of your accent."
"What accent?" he asks. He seems genuinely confused.
The movie sort of descends into routine action clichés by the time GR's 13 (Lundgren) and 44 start having flashbacks, and start to remember that they killed each other and hence have unfinished business. It seems that they revert to the emotion that they had at the time they died, so GR-13 wants vengeance of anyone within shooting distance, while GR-44 just wants to go home. Thus we get the government-made super-soldiers trying to kill each other. This leads to a half amusing and half disturbing scene where GR-13 terrorizes some astonished civilians in a supermarket (while another GR mindlessly gnaws on a raw steak), and then ultimately to the obligatory final showdown.
I found the "explanation" for the transformation particularly interesting. I feel like, in science fiction movies, how the 'fiction' is explained is where most of the creativity lies. Sadly, there's not much here. A scientist explains to Veronica how it all worked. "By hyper-accelerating the bodies, we discovered that we could turn dead flesh into living tissue." Hyper-accelerating? Is that how they got the soldiers to age super-slow? Or not at all, and for 25 years? Sadly, we may never know. When Veronica replies, "What are you saying, doctor?" there is a knock at the door, so he doesn't really have time to explain. Too bad.
There's not much to be said about the ending. It's the worst part of the movie, by far. An enormous copout the likes of which is rarely seen even in bad b-movies. But I should also mention that the movie is not as bad as the ending, or even as bad as many people say. It's not a science fiction classic, but it's a fun action popcorn movie, like many of Van Damme's films. If nothing else, the movie teaches us a valuable lesson - don't throw a beer can at a man wearing a necklace made out of human ears.
Note: At the Cannes Film Festival when Universal Soldier was released, Van Damme and Lundgren got into an argument and then a shoving match right there on the red carpet in front of the world's cameras (you can check it out on YouTube). Many lament that we may never know if it was real or just a publicity stunt. It definitely looked real to me, but if it wasn't, then all the mystery around it must mean that they really CAN act!
