Paul W.S. Anderson gave us Mortal Kombat—a movie that proved you could turn an arcade game into a theater-filling spectacle—and then followed it up with Event Horizon, which is basically Hellraiser in outer space. So when it was announced he was teaming up with Kurt Russell and Blade Runner scribe David Webb Peoples for an old-school sci-fi actioner? You bet your ass I was first in line.

Soldier is a movie that got absolutely buried at the box office because people expected Star Wars, but what they actually got was a beautiful, hyper-violent cross between Shane and a Cannon Films action exploitation flick.

Kurt Russell plays Sergeant Todd 3465. He doesn’t say much—in fact, he only has 104 words — the whole two-hour running time, which is pure cinematic economy. He’s a veteran warrior raised from birth to freeze his emotions and kill anything in front of him. But progress marches on, and the delightfully slimy Jason Isaacs shows up as Colonel Mekum, introducing a new batch of genetically engineered super-soldiers led by Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee). Todd gets his clock cleaned by the new model, gets pronounced dead and is dumped with the trash on a waste planet called Arcadia 234.

Except Todd isn’t dead. He gets taken in by a group of interstellar refugees, learns how to do crazy things like “smile” and “not murder people,” and then has to go full action star on his old unit when they show up to use the planet for target practice.

Peoples has explicitly stated that this takes place in the same universe as Blade Runner. Look closely at the junk piles on Arcadia 234 and you’ll see a spinner vehicle. Look at Todd’s military record on the computer screens—he fought at the Shoulder of Orion and the Tannhäuser Gate! However, it was not intended as a sequel. Peoples told author Danny Stewart in the book Soldier: From Script to Screen, “No, I never had any thoughts about that… I wrote Soldier in 1984. Very quickly on my own. I wrote it because I saw the first Terminator in the theater, stunned. And it was such a wonderful movie. I’d always wanted to write a movie in which there was a tough guy who would be seemingly unsympathetic in the lead, and I felt that The Terminator was almost there. Later in the sequel, it was determined he was the hero, but at the time, he was sort of a villain. But the fact is, he was so great. I went off, and I decided to write about this soldier.“

Plus, you get Gary Busey as old-school commander Captain Church; Connie Nielsen as Sandra, the woman who teaches our hero how to be human and Michael Chiklis as Jimmy Pig.

I love how this ends, as 3465 and his old men end up rescuing the planet and adventuring out into deep space. This has always been a movie that deserved a much bigger audience than it got.

The Arrow Video release of this film features a brand-new 4K restoration approved by director Paul W.S. Anderson. Extras include an archival audio commentary by director Paul W.S. Anderson, co-producer Jeremy Bolt and actor Jason Isaacs; interviews with James Black, assistant director Dennis Maguire, associate producer Fred Fontana and production designer David L. Snyder; VFX Before and After, a brand new behind-the-scenes look at how the film’s special effects were created with visual effects supervisor Craig Barron; Weapons of Mass Creation, interviews with visual effects supervisors Craig Barron and Van Ling and miniature supervisor Michael Joyce; A Soldier’s Journey, a brand new interview with Danny Stewart, author of Soldier: From Script to Screen; We Don’t Need Another Hero, a brand new retrospective on the film with film historian Heath Holland; an electronic press kit; on-set interviews with cast and crew; trailers; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Orlando Arocena and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by film critic Priscilla Page. You can get it from MVD.