Director: Joe Dante
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Gregory Smith, Jay Mohr, Phil Hartman
Have I Seen it Before: Ahem. So, here’s the thing. I’m about a month away from what I hope to be a peak movie experience. Circle Cinema will be running Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). This would be enough to get me there with bells on. That it will be projected in 35mm is enough to make it worth a trek of many miles, to say nothing of going across town. That film alone gains more than perhaps any other by being projected on film, as the film infamously breaks by design. What’s more? Joe Dante himself will be there in person. June of 2023 will be a peak month of movies for me.
I’m stalling. You’re wanting to know if I’ve ever seen Small Soldiers. I did go see it in the fall of ‘98 at a second run theater, and the friends I went with got bored pretty quickly. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly not bored by the whole thing. They wanted to leave. I thought the movie would get better, but bowed to peer pressure and went with them.
So, yes. It’s with supreme shame I admit that the one film I’ve ever walked out of in the theater was one directed by Joe Dante. Is it possible to feel guilty about not thinking much of a movie several decades later.
Did I Like It: I’m comforted by the realization, after a little bit of further reading, that Dante never felt particularly thrilled with the film, as he was initially hired on to make a Dante film, with subversive and demented being the guiding words. Then, the studio decided that this had the potential (or market research) to be a big summer movie for kids, and the whole thing got smoothed out.
That’s why it will never be among the great Dante films. But that doesn’t make it uniquely unfortunate. As long as Dante kept making big studio films after Matinee (1993), or probably after Gremlins 2, those studios tried to reign him in. That’s okay. You can only get away with absolute heists of movies so many times before the powers that be get wise.
But he still manages to fit in some singularly Danteian things. The fundamental construction of the piece is a little subversive, with the monstrous creatures the heroes and the soldiers being (without much modification) the villains. References to movies like Bride of Frankenstein (1935) abound to let us big kids know that the man is still trying to show us all as good a time as possible.