Editor’s Note: Andrew tried and failed to write a successful review of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. Instead, and with our apologies, we give you his scattered notes and musings on the film—which, it seems, messed with his head pretty bad. These notes may contain spoilers.
1. I just watched a movie called Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (USDoR). It was…interesting. I find myself at a loss to describe it.
2. Possible ways to describe USDoR:
2a. The best movie I have ever seen (starring Dolph Lundgren).
2b. The Citizen Kane of B-grade straight-to-video punch-em-ups.
2c. A Lynchian fever dream with scenes of hand-to-hand combat that would make Jason Bourne cry with envy and Nicholas Winding Refn levels of gore.
2b. The result of , where a = Apocalypse Now, b = Memento, c = Blade Runner, x = the Log Lady from Twin Peaks, y = the scene from Rocky IV where the Russian (Dolph again!) says “I must break you,” and z = one of those Charles Bronson revenge flicks with a title like Out for Blood.
2e. An immense heart of darkness lying at the center of the jungle that is the Netflix catalog, the self-reckoning with the dark mirror self that awaits every Netflix subscriber in due time, reachable only by a high-speed Internet connection, that winding river of nightmares and dreams.
3. The plot of USDoR:
3a. We open on our hero (currently nameless) waking up in the middle of the night next to his lovely blonde wife. His (also blonde) daughter stands at the door to their bedroom in pajamas, complaining that there’s a monster in the house. Our hero drags himself from bed and searches the house for monsters—who turn out to be real, flesh-and-blood home invaders, and proceed to beat him senseless and kill his family before his eyes.
3b. One of the villains is revealed to be Jean Claude Van Damme, the muscles from Brussels, looking very much like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, all bald and jowly and sunken-cheeked.
3c. Our hero wakes up from a coma and learns from a government guy that the man who killed his family is a rogue soldier named Devereaux (that must be Brando/Van Damme). The man asks our hero—whose name is revealed to be John—some questions, but he can’t remember anything, what with the multiple blows to the head and all. Then the government guy leaves the room and says into his cellphone, “Activate the Plumber.”
3d. The Plumber is activated. John goes home and tries to remember things about his life. He meets a stripper (because boobs) named Fantasia (because symbolism, I guess?). The Plumber tries to kill them both, at which point John remembers that he’s a Universal Soldier who can kick tons of ass, and proceeds to do so. Eventually he’s led to a cult of rogue Universal Soldiers led by Dolph Lundgren and Brando/Van Damme, and kicks all kind of ass all over their faces in vengeance for killing his wife and child.
3e. Roll credits. (Basically.)
4. Things that USDoR calls into question during its 114-minute runtime:
4a. The reliability of John’s memories.
4b. If John is really John or if he’s actually Devereaux or someone else entirely.
4c. The existence of John’s wife and daughter.
4d. Whether John is himself Good or Evil.
4e. Exactly what the hell is going on.
4f. The stability of personal identity.
4g. The essential existence of a human “self” aside from the arbitrary exigencies of memory and political power.
4h. The nature of truth.
4i. The existence of free will.
4j. The metrics by which we assign aesthetic quality and cultural significance to artifacts of narrative film art.
4k. The sanity of everyone involved in USDoR, including, but not limited to: Jean Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, writer/director John Hyams, and even, finally, the viewer him- or herself.
5. USDoR’s relationship to the rest of the Universal Soldier series.
5a. I don’t know. None? I’ve never seen another Universal Soldier movie and I understood this just fine. The only thing you need to know (and which is easily picked up, really) is that Universal Soldiers are enhanced beings (cyborgs? genetically enhanced humans?) that can both take and dish out tons of punishment, and are used by the government for some dark purpose.
5b. John Hyams appears to have treated the Universal Soldier series as a junked-out car which he used for scrap to construct his own odd, unearthly creation.
6. The parts of USDoR that are the most like a David Lynch movie.
6a. Well, to begin with there’s the nurse at the hospital where John wakes up from his coma. She stares into the camera and speaks her lines just a little too slowly. She’s a bad actress, probably. But there’s something off-kilter about her. Lynch had a way of pulling performances out of decent actors that were, basically, hamfisted and bad—but also deeply unnerving. That’s what’s happening here.
6b. The sparse staging of many of the sets—which may, in fact, be more Kubrickian than Lynchian, per se. But the staging of John’s hospital room, which was almost comically large compared to the small bed and side table it contained, reminded me of the Black Lodge dream sequence in Twin Peaks, and the scenes at John’s large and largely empty house were evocative of similar early scenes in Lost Highway.
6c. The neo-noir plot, particularly the obvious and overly convenient clues like a strip club matchbook with a phone number on it, which is clearly intended less as a real clue to the mystery and more as a trail of breadcrumbs leading John to the next step on his dreamlike journey.
6d. An early scene at a bizarre sex club where the Universal Soldiers have evidently come to engage in sadomasochistic sex acts with prostitutes, the front desk of which is manned by a bored-looking middle-aged woman reading magazines. The banality of this woman combined with the grotesque phantasmagoria taking place in the rooms behind her is definitely Lynchian—as is the subsequent scene in which the Plumber comes on the scene and kills many of the prostitutes and Universal Soldiers, only to be subdued by Dolph Lundgren, injected with something, and then to hallucinate Dolph Lundgren turning into Jean Claude Van Damme.
6e. The strange, menacing drone sound underlying much of the above scene, and indeed many scenes, which is a tool used in Lynch movies to establish the presence of some hidden but pervasive evil (e.g. the opening scene in Blue Velvet).
6f. Devereaux (Van Damme), who for most of the film doesn’t do or say anything, but rather hangs around and appears at random like an apparition, and reminded me of the mysterious and vaguely threatening figures with which Lynch often populates his entertainments: e.g. the Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks, the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive.
7. On the action scenes in USDoR.
7b. They are also crazy violent, full of blood spatter and arterial spray.
7c. Director John Hyams mostly eschews the quick-cutting style of most recent action movies, in favor of longer takes or even single takes.
7d. Toward the end, in particular, there is a sequence of shots in Devereaux’s compound in which John kills many Universal Soldiers in unbroken takes which rival, in their hideous beauty and choreographed violence, similar long action takes in Oldboy and Children of Men. (These takes also call to mind first-person shooter video games like Call of Duty, and raise all sorts of questions about the glorification and gamification of brutal violence in media.)
7e. All this said, sometimes the action sequences seem perfunctory, as if Hyams is more interested in the mystery of John’s identity than in scenes of fighting, and is merely adding action sequences to satisfy the audience’s expectations. (The same might be said of the nudity in the film, which seems entirely gratuitous and designed to please a certain type of male viewer who probably finds the film frustrating and dull anyway.)
8. The symbols in USDoR, and what they might mean.
8a. The stripper’s name is Fantasia.
8a(1). Fantasia, obviously, connotes fantasy—I’m going to posit that she represents male fantasies of sexual and violent fulfillment of which women are the object: both violence against women and violence perpetrated on behalf of women (e.g. John’s revenge against Devereaux on behalf of his dead wife, who may, herself, be a fantasy). Thus, in the film, masculinity is subjected to a Lacanian psychoanalysis/deconstruction: it is constructed around a lack which gives rise to desire for the feminine Other, which is itself revealed to be a lack, a fantasy.
8a(2). Either that, or Hyams just thought that Fantasia was a cool stripper name.
8b. John must ride down a river to finally meet Devereaux, his dark Other.
8b(1). cf. Apocalypse Now, obvi, and also Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, etc.—the subconscious river leading into the darkest corners of society, the self, the void.
8c. When John finally finds Devereaux, his face is painted—half white, half black.
8c(1). This symbolizes the duality living in the heart of every Universal Soldier.
9. Analogies.
9a. If USDoR is Apocalypse Now, then Devereaux is Kurtz, the mad army guy gathering his disciples in the furthest reaches of the wilderness; Dolph Lundgren is Dennis Hopper, his liaison to the world; and John is Willard, the guy who must kill (and by killing, become) Devereaux/Kurtz/VanDamme/Brando.
9b. If USDoR is Blade Runner, then Devereaux is Rutger Hauer; John is both Deckard, the guy hunting him, and Rachel, the replicant with dubious memories and a fabricated past.
9c. If USDoR is Memento, then John is Leonard, the existential antihero who derives ultimate meaning in his life from avenging the death of his wife—even if that meaning is based on a lie.
10. My reactions to USDoR, and possible angles for a review.
10a. It is bonkers and everyone who is even remotely interested in film owes it to themselves to watch it immediately.
10b. It is kind of disgusting, and its extreme violence and needless objectification of women may outweigh its merits. (Though I might argue this is true of any number of more critically acclaimed films, some of which I’ve already mentioned.)
10c. Either way, it’s one of the oddest and most singular viewing experiences I’ve ever had.
10d. The film is also a freakish thing that probably shouldn’t exist: a singular and unique auteur creation arising out of the fetid bilge of VOD franchise action flicks. The fact that it does exist is strange and, on some level, wonderful—that is to say, quite literally an occasion for wonder.
10e. Watching it, I entered, for a time, into a state of mind not unlike John’s—dazed, confused, not knowing quite how or why I had come to this place. Who was I? Why was I here? What was this strange thing blinking on the television screen before me? Had my own memories and emotions been engineered by someone who wanted me to watch USDoR for some strange, dark purpose? These questions persisted. And yet I kept on, a postmodern everyman lost in a sea of signifiers, constructing meanings out of thin air and breathing life upon them, pushing on toward the promise of some understanding, some fulfillment, or some final, irrevocable undoing that lay forever out of reach.
Backwoods Netflix features reviews of obscure, strange, or underappreciated movies in the Netflix back catalog. Click for more in the Backwoods Netflix series.
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