Soldier is a 1998 American science fiction action film directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, written by David Webb Peoples, and starring Kurt Russell, Jason Scott Lee, Jason Isaacs, Connie Nielsen, Sean Pertwee and Gary Busey. The film tells the story of a highly skilled and emotionally distant soldier who is left for dead, befriends a group of refugees, then faces his former superiors who are determined to eliminate them.

In 1996, as part of a new military training program, a group of orphaned infants are selected shortly after birth and raised as highly disciplined soldiers with no understanding of anything but military routine. They are trained to be ruthless professionals, and anyone considered physically or mentally unworthy is executed. The survivors are turned into ultimate fighting machines, but have no understanding of the outside world.

Captain Church, the commander of Todd’s unit, insists on testing the new soldiers’ abilities against his own. One new soldier, Caine 607, easily defeats three of the original soldiers, but Todd gouges out Caine’s eye before falling from a great height; the body of a dead soldier cushions his fall, and he is knocked unconscious. Mekum orders their bodies disposed of like garbage, declaring them obsolete, while the remaining older soldiers are demoted to menial support roles.

Dumped on Arcadia 234, a waste disposal planet, Todd limps toward a colony whose residents crash-landed there years earlier; as they were believed dead, no rescue missions have been attempted. Todd is sheltered by Mace and his wife Sandra. Though they try to make him welcome, Todd has difficulty adapting to the community due to his extreme conditioning and their conflict-free lives. While Todd develops a silent rapport with their mute son, Nathan, who had been traumatized by a snakebite as an infant, he soon begins to experience flashbacks from his time as a soldier and mistakes one of the colonists for an enemy, nearly killing him. To make matters worse, in a later conflict with a coiled snake, Todd forces Nathan to face it down and strike back to protect himself. His parents disapprove of the lesson, unsure of how to deal with Todd.