Small Soldiers (1998)

Joe Dante's Small Soldiers arrives from 1998, a year when a defense contractor buying a toy company counted as a joke instead of a business plan. The film concerns the Commando Elite and the Gorgonites, two lines of action figures implanted with military microprocessors, who proceed to enact their programmed war inside a suburban cul-de-sac. The cast is almost entirely white, and no effort was made to correct this, which we note without alarm. Jim Brown appears as a sniper, and the film treats him as a man with a job, not a statement. There is no romantic subplot beyond the conventional variety, no inquiry into identity, and no characters who exist to educate the audience about themselves. Refreshing, in its way.

The nearest thing to a thesis is the GloboTech acquisition, a weapons manufacturer that swallows a toy company and repurposes smart-munitions hardware for the holiday market. The satire is blunt but present: profit over safety testing, a CEO who arrives by helicopter to praise the carnage, and a closing order to repurpose the surviving Commandos for actual military use. It is a critique of corporate appetite and the military-industrial habit of selling the same technology twice. The Gorgonites, gentle and seeking only their homeland, stand against the Commandos, which supplies a faint anti-war murmur. The film keeps this brief. Explosions are more fun.

Kirsten Dunst's Christy is competent and helps destroy the Gwendy dolls, though she is introduced as a neighbor to be admired and later held hostage, so the empowerment is incidental. No LGBTQ presence, no racial commentary, no environmental concern, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent characters, and no historical revisionism, since the history here is entirely invented and consists of plastic men with rifles. The finished product is a mean little action picture wearing a family film's clothes, which Roger Ebert noticed at the time. The cultural awareness is low, the body count is high, and the toys are merchandise. We classify it accordingly and move on.