The most surprising thing about Soldier is that the words “A Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie” don’t appear after the title. Nearly every element is cribbed from the public domain of science fiction clichés: the emotionless hero who learns to feel, the genetically engineered nemesis, the ragtag settlers on a forgotten planet who wear torn cowl-neck sweaters and live in cave dwellings decorated in Neo-Salvage.

In fact, the violent Gattaca-meets-Terminator ambience is the only aspect of Soldier that would be out of place on Stargate SG-1. Kurt Russell plays Sgt. Todd, raised since birth in a Pentagon operation designed to produce perfect killing machines, who are led by action figure Gary Busey. At 40, however, Todd and his unit are declared obsolete by an effete, vaguely European major who orders in their replacements: eugenics experiments stronger and deadlier than regular G.I. Joes—and without pesky brains.

Presumed dead after an exhibition match with one of the new breed, Todd is dumped on a garbage planet, where he joins a struggling band of colonists (including, remarkably, not one but two bit-player nurses from ER). Among them is the regulation-issue beautiful blond woman who awakens strange new emotions in our hero.

Despite the joyless, rote recitation of pulp chestnuts in Soldier, there’s something compulsively watchable about Kurt Russell. He was obviously cast for this part because the writer, David Webb Peoples, conceived Todd as an uptight version of Snake Plisskin, Russell’s dark-humored ruffian from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and Escape From L.A. Todd is what Snake would be if his cynicism were surgically removed: a humorless drone forced to function without the protective mantel of patriotism and command hierarchy.

Watching for an emotion to flicker into Russell’s unblinking stare is almost enough to get a patient viewer through Soldier—that, and the many opportunities to ridicule the sets, dialogue, and story concepts. Start with the desert sandstorm scenes (which resemble a mime master class practicing “walking against the wind”), toss in a crack at the colonists’ creative use of CDs as kinetic art, and you’re on your way.

But the jokes may ring hollow during the extended, ear-splitting battle sequences, which revel in their homages to Reagan-era testosterone fests like Rambo. (In one overt tribute, Russell rises from underwater with automatic cannons spitting death in slow motion.) There’s nothing funny or cool about this jackbooted wet dream, unlike last year’s fascist fantasy Starship Troopers. Instead, it’s sad to see Russell lend his cult cachet to this tired mayhem commercial, and it’s worse to see the lithe, charismatic Jason Scott Lee reemerge as a steroid-pumped villain. This crap shouldn’t even play on cable, unless robots are making fun of it.

—Donna Bowman

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Nazis, the most reliable of 20th-century bugbears, are being trundled out once more as enemies in the movies. Thanks to increased ethnic sensitivities—or more accurately, increased awareness of lucrative foreign markets—clear-cut villains are in short supply these days. It’s hard to get worked up over the pathetic Russian Mafia or fill-in-the-blank “extremists.” But Nazis—they never go out of fashion. So evil. So easy to define. So unlike us. So here they come again in Apt Pupil, an unforgivably shallow programmer that uses an all-too-human horror as substitute satanism.

Based on a Stephen King novella, Apt Pupil opens with a high-school lecture series on the Holocaust, which apparently makes a big impression on honor student Todd Bowman (Brad Renfro). He immerses himself in historical photos and documents, and after a bit of stalking he turns up at the home of an elderly neighbor, Dussander (Ian McKellen). It seems Dussander is actually a war criminal who carried out mass murders at several Nazi concentration camps. Before long, using blackmail, Todd coerces the reluctant fugitive into filling in the ugly details that the classroom course left out. As it turns out, the eager student gets to learn firsthand.

The premise has the makings of an effective, if heavy-handed, examination of the shaping of a young fascist. But there’s never any insight into why fascism holds such appeal for Todd. (You certainly don’t get it from Renfro, who doesn’t show a trace of moral conflict in the role; his closed-off, self-satisfied performance torpedoes the movie.) The young student’s growing fascination with the Holocaust is handled as if he were demonically possessed—which is essentially how the movie views Nazism.

In Brandon Boyd’s overwrought, underdeveloped script, there’s never any suggestion that Nazism arose out of a combination of socioeconomic, nationalistic, and militaristic impulses. Instead, it’s treated as some inscrutable, ancient force of darkness. None of that banality-of-evil jazz for director Bryan Singer: When he isn’t staging torture scenes to Wagner, he pours on the thunderstorms and the shock cuts. The movie invokes the Nazis as if they were Candyman: faceless bogeymen summoned out of some vague mythological past.

It’s the mythological part that pisses me off most. Singer uses Nazi uniforms and swastikas for shock value, as if they were terrible amulets. By turning Nazism into ritualized evil, however, and ignoring the lasting particulars of bigotry and racial hatred, the movie sidesteps its only reason for being: to show it can happen again, and it can happen here. Todd’s such a blank rotter and Dussander’s such a one-dimensional villain that they don’t provoke even a shiver of recognition.

Perhaps, however, the filmmakers sensed they weren’t exactly in a position to make moral judgments. When Dussander attempts to toss a cat into a gas oven, the kitty scampers away unharmed; however, a homeless gay hustler (Elias Koteas) is butchered and beaten in agonizing detail. The movie’s message: Audiences won’t stand for seeing a pet killed on camera, but gay men are a different story. Was Apt Pupil made about Nazis, or by them?

—Jim Ridley

Two foreign films in town for brief stays deserve special mention. In the crackerjack thriller Insomnia, directed with icy flair by Erik Skjoldbjaerg, Stellan Skarsgard plays a scandal-ridden cop named Engstrom, who’s sent to investigate a girl’s bizarre murder in a northern Norwegian town. After a clever twist that’s too good to give away, Engstrom himself becomes a suspect in a different murder case, and the movie follows him in cold fascination as he tries to sabotage the other investigation while pursuing his own. He’s also suffering from a lack of sleep in the fabled land of the midnight sun, and the persistence of light only adds to the movie’s unblinking chill. The plotting is crisp and tightly wound, and Skarsgard, playing a cross between Lee Marvin’s emotionless thug in Point Blank and Harvey Keitel’s bad lieutenant, makes a coolly amoral hero.

The movie closes Thursday night at the Watkins Belcourt, where it’s being replaced by Manuel Poirier’s sunny Western. A comic French road movie with a disarming reliance on the whims of chance, Western sends a Catalonian shoe salesman (Sergi Lopez) and a Russian drifter (Sacha Bourdo) on a journey through the French countryside, killing the three-week period the salesman’s new lover needs to make a commitment. To pass the time, the two bicker, pose as pollsters to query pretty girls, and philosophize about love and fate. Lopez and Bourdo are a swell comic team, and the frizzy-haired, excitable Bourdo, who looks like the young Bob Dylan as Ratso Rizzo, is a real find. Western closes next Thursday; don’t let this relaxed little charmer slip away.

—Jim Ridley