![]() ![]() The hero of Dante’s film is Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith), a troubled teen who accidentally acquires a set of state-of-the-art playthings developed by Heartland Toy Company, a new division of defence contractor GloboTech. What if an often-overlooked children’s movie is actually one of the great American anti-war films? But perhaps the argument made two decades ago is worthy of revisiting. ![]() Though Spielberg’s film is generally considered to be the superior and more serious of the two, Rosenbaum preferred the latter, praising Dante’s criticism of “not just culture and violence but also everyday cultural violence.”īoth films are now 20 years old, but history sided against Rosenbaum: Saving Private Ryan is considered one of the great modern war epics while Small Soldiers has been largely forgotten, except perhaps as an object of nostalgia. One is a prestigious and patriotic war picture that took home five Oscars, the other is a silly movie for kids. In 1998, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum compared two new releases by two filmmakers of roughly the same generation: Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers. ![]()
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