There have been many low-budget and low-rent sci-fi movies that have followed the template of the Terminator movies, and arguably the best one is 1996’s sci-fi actioner Solo. Based upon Robert Mason’s 1989 novel Weapon, Solo stars Mario Van Peebles as the title character, a cybernetic soldier created as the U.S. military’s weapon of the future. Despite Solo’s cybernetic strength and abilities, his programming to prevent harm to both team members and civilians lead him to disobey orders on his first mission. As Solo starts questions his orders, he ends up going AWOL, with his creators in hot pursuit and Solo eventually coming to the aid of a small Latin American village caught in the middle of a military conflict.
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Solo petered out at the box office upon its release, with many dismissing it as a Terminator rip-off with no substance. While Solo shares the DNA of cyborg-centric sci-fi classics like The Terminator and Robocop, it also tells its own story of the tale of a machine gradually becoming human. Nearly three decades after its release, Solo stands as a very underrated action movie and sci-fi film alike.
Solo Is a Low-Budget but Effective Sci-Fi Action Movie
On every level from budget to scale, Solo is very much a B-movie, but also one with a great deal of mileage. Packed with great stunt work, explosives, and fight scenes, Solo gets the job done as a summer action movie with a sci-fi angle. In turn, Solo‘s sci-fi side is also one not inherently hampered by its low budget, with the movie’s POV shots from Solo’s perspective and early look at Solo’s endoskeleton before his human likeness was added selling its sci-fi bonafides with casual but effective minimalism.
In the modern era of streaming platforms and social media, Solo is the exact kind of sci-fi action movie that would thrive in a straight-to-video or straight-to-streaming action movie marketplace. Despite its comparatively small scale, Solo‘s effectiveness as a low-budget action movie would easily see it become a sizeable hit in the vein of the 21st century Universal Soldier movies. In that sense, Solo‘s low box office yield may have been less an instance of audiences rejecting it as it was a case of a movie being released years before the ideal conditions for it had materialized. As a low-budget but high-octane sci-fi actioner, Solo is also something of a proto straight-to-video action movie made years before Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White, and others made that into a flourishing action movie sub-culture.
Solo Has a Surprising Amount of Heart (& Strong Performances by Van Peebles, Sadler, & Brody)
Far from being strictly a meat-headed shoot ’em up, Solo also operates on the same thematic foundation as The Terminator, Universal Soldier, Aliens, and other sci-fi movies with major cyborg characters. Like its predecessors and Robert Mason’s novel, Solo asks the question of what it really means to be human and whether a purely synthetically produced man can truly become human. Mario Van Peebles really shines in his performance as Solo, initially a purely programmed soldier who begins to understand humans on a deeper level than his creators ever could have expected. Solo struggling to simply learn how to laugh is a particular bookmark of his growing humanity, and one handled with arguably even more effectiveness as Arnold’s T-800 learning to smile in Terminator 2‘s extended cut. Van Peebles also gives Solo real humanity in other moments, like Solo learning the difference between lying and bluffing, and turning the adolescent taunt of “Sike!” into a Terminator-worthy one-liner.
Solo also includes a then-unknown Adrien Brody as Solo’s creator, Dr. Bill Stewart, whose combination of scientific knowledge with a friendly but conflicted human personality presents him as a kind of flipped version of Victor Frankenstein in his relationship with Solo. Additionally, Solo also serves up two William Sadler villain performances for the price of one. Sadler has a sinister, psychotic, scene-chewing blast as the cyborg-hating Colonel Frank Madden. He then flips on a dime to a colder but subtly sneering cybernetic villain as the second Solo prototype designed in Madden’s likeness; Sadler in his own way presenting two sides of the same human vs. machine personality coin as Van Peebles in their respective hero and villain performances.
Why Solo Holds Up So Well (& Feels More Relevant) After Its Quiet 1996 Release
Despite making little impact in its own time, Solo has aged well and is an arguably much more engaging and even relevant movie in the 21st century. The rise of AI as an increasing presence in more and more technological facets of life makes Solo feel as ahead its time as The Terminator movies, while the greater use of drone warfare in modern military operations adds to Solo‘s renewed topicality. What is Solo himself, after all, if not an AI-powered drone in the likeness of a man? In turn, Solo’s character arc plays upon the age-old story of machines gaining humanity, with Solo’s arc coming from his evolution from refusing to kill simply out of a program directive override to eventually learning to see the truly precious and irreplaceable value of life.
Wrapped in all of Solo‘s philosophical and existential questions is an effective and engaging action movie that was tailor-made to thrive in the streaming and straight-to-video action movie age. Solo might have failed the mission at the box office in 1996, but that was result not of faulty programming, but the movie’s targeting and mission intel being off. Viewed in the 21st century as an hard-hitting sci-fi actioner with strong performances and a tender philosophical tale of a machine becoming a man, Solo truly is the best Terminator cousin sci-fi and action fans could ask for.
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Image Courtesy of Warner Bros.
