‘Gremlins’ director Joe Dante made a few interesting movies in the ’90s, and one of them was working for DreamWorks, a live-action “parody” of a blockbuster from its rivals at Pixar, ‘Toy Story’. Now, his forgotten ‘Little Warriors’ (Small Sodiers, 1998) is leaving Netflix in 3 days and it’s a good time to recover one of the author’s best works.
Dante, a stupendous analyst of the American psyche versus pop culture uses a charming adventure about war toys running amok in a midtown suburban United States to make a synthesis of most of his previous films. The story revolves around a boy named Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith), who is a misunderstood young teenager, and his next-door neighbor, Christy Fimple (Kirsten Dunst).
Battlefield: the living room
When Alan runs his father’s toy store, he convinces the delivery man, Dante veteran Dick Miller, to send him a shipment of new voice-activated action figures. But the toy developer used super-sophisticated surplus military AI chips capable of making you think independently, so the action figures will follow their primary goal of creating war.
Commando Elite, led by Tommy Lee Jones, as the voice of Major Chip Hazard, who They seem inspired by Stephen King’s story ‘Battlefield’, wants to eradicate the Gorgonites, led by Frank Langella as the voice of Archer, a race of monstrous yet gentle creatures seeking their homeland. It’s quite possible that James Cameron took a look at the film before he wrote ‘Avatar’.
After a five-year hiatus during which Joe Dante worked exclusively on television, ‘Little Warriors’ was his return to the style for which he was known in the 1980s, but it was not very successful at the box office, perhaps because despite Aside from the tremendous special effects, there was something almost anachronistic about his work. The small town that the toy soldiers invade is reminiscent of Kingston Falls, the quarrels are similar to the conflicts in ‘You will not kill your neighbour’, the laboratory scenes are reminiscent of ‘The Wonder Chip’ etc… the turn of the century was around the corner and the public had changed.
The Amblin spirit in the Clinton era
However, the nostalgic tone of Dante and his system of values marks a break with the public consciously reflected at all times in the film, from Alan’s father’s toy store, called “The Inner Child”, to its contents, wooden and vintage toys that no child wants to buy anymore. Dante chooses the Gorgonites as his heroes, conceived by his inventor as an educational toy. The director touches on his themes of the artificial and short-term paradigm, the predominance of “financial profit” and how it eats up the world of small towns, where now the neighbor’s tree is cut down to have better satellite reception.
All of these themes reflect the same consequences of the neoliberal/consumerist technological madness that Dante criticized in ‘Gremlins 2’, but it takes him into a cinema spectacle full of digital effects, still astonishing today, from ILM that were rare in his filmography, although replicates the usual cinephilia even in the choice of actors who voiced the characters, with the Commando Elites made up of none other than cast members from ‘The Dirty Dozen’, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, George Kennedy, with Lee Jones and Bruce Dern.
They were joined Clint Walker, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christina Ricci. ‘Little Warriors’ is a perfect film to check the transition of two types of entertainment cinema in Hollywood, already almost a relic at the time, it serves as summary of the aggressive commercial culture of the 90s and it is less naive than it seemsproving how the fantastic has defined the mainstream in the following years, also serving as a sketch for the remake of ‘Muñeco diabolico’ in 2019.